Ever since I met the founders of Clio at South by Southwest, I’ve been eagerly anticipating their product’s impact on the music scene. Their idea automates and expands the Pandora music-matching process, making music discovery both more agile and more far-reaching. Their goal is every piece of music ever written, at your fingertips. I am so behind this idea.

Since SXSW, they’ve been making strides. Their first partner, music production library APM, was announced today. Filmmakers will be able to find music for their scores much easier, thanks to Clio’s advanced matching system, which takes into account everything from tempo, instrumentation and melody to seemingly intangible elements like “the groove.”

Greg Wilder and Alison Conard (the idea people behind Clio) are meeting with bigwigs of the consumer-facing music discovery products soon, hopefully bringing their technology to the masses, albeit invisibly. If Clio works properly, no one really knows it’s there – listeners just somehow feel that the service they’re using today is a ton better than it was yesterday at figuring out what they actually want to listen to.

I was sent some exclusive demos of the product that have me pretty stoked. The first demo used APM’s music catalog; while it was really cool to hear rock seamlessly morph into bossa nova in just a few short steps, it was mainly a geek-out thing. I’m that guy who makes sure the beginning and endings of songs fade into each other on mixes, so matching internal rhythm to internal rhythm through genre is immensely appealing to me. The software recognizes so much information that you can make almost perfect-transition mixes, in addition to mixes that don’t change moods one single inch.

The second set of demos was even more revealing, as it was a set of clips made by Clio that showed various popular songs being discovered via other pop songs. The set that started with Green Day’s “When I Come Around” wasn’t eye-popping on the surface (how hard is it to match up Blink-182 and Green Day?), but have you ever noticed how closely the guitar tone of “Always” resembles “When I Come Around”? Or of “Short Brown Hair” by Everclear? Then it’s straight into “Favours for Favours” by The Futureheads, which I probably wouldn’t have included in this list, but fits in perfectly, sound-wise and rhythm-wise.

That’s the great thing about Clio: It doesn’t care about demographics. Sure, Blink and Green Day sound similar and are in the same scene. But Futureheads are in a completely different scene, but sound similar. A teenage pop-punker could get turned on to indie rock via this list and connections across time and “scene.”

Other playlists do the same for other genres, but here’s the skinny: Clio works. Once a major player or two representing true independents (Bandcamp? Please please please please?) is funneled into Clio, there’s literally nothing stopping U2 fans from hearing your music if your band sounds like U2. That is a major boon for independent bands and music lovers.

Stay tuned for more info from the Clio guys; it will be big stuff. Clio will change the way people discover music, and you may not even know that it’s doing so.

The local arts and entertainment-supporting initiative Buffalo Lounge will graze around Oklahoma City this week, for two separate events. 

The Lounge, which debuted at this year’s South by Southwest and has appeared at Norman Music Festival, deadCENTER Film Festival and the Tulsa International Film Festival, will be on site at tomorrow’s grand opening of Whole Foods Market at 6001 N. Western and at Saturday’s grand reopening of Myriad Gardens. A bevy of local musicians are scheduled to play all day long at both events. Each lineup is listed below.

Check out more information about the Buffalo Lounge at oklahomafilm.org, or the Lounge’s Facebook and Twitter profiles.

Whole Foods Market
• Ryan Lawson, 8 a.m.
• Daniel Walcher, 10 a.m.
• Matt Stansberry, 12 p.m.
• Ben Kilgore, 2 p.m.
• Sherree Chamberlain, 4 p.m.
• Camille Harp, 6 p.m.

Myriad Gardens
• Sugar Free Allstars, 11 a.m.
• Steelwind, 12 p.m.
• Susan Herndon, 1 p.m.
• Defining Times, 2 p.m.
• Mark Gibson Band, 3 p.m.
• The Wurly Birds, 4 p.m.
• Green Corn Revival, 5 p.m.

Congratulations are in order for a handful of local bands named to the official South by Southwest festival schedule this week! They are:

• Jacob Abello
• The Boom Bang
• Defining Times
• Junebug Spade
• The Non (guitarist Zach Zeller pictured)
• Horse Thief

Looking forward to seeing and hearing you guys represent the north side of the Red River well! Feel free to check out the rest of the bands listed at the SXSW site.

Former OKSee skipper Stephen Carradini and I will in Austin, Texas, next month (next month, you guys!), possibly with regular Gazette contributor Joshua Boydston, whose press credentials we’re waiting to receive. We’ll be crawling all over town to bring you recaps and photos from these and other bands’ sets, so be sure to check back with OKSee and follow us on Twitter, too.

Tulsa bluegrass-folk-indie duo Desi and Cody swung by the FOX 23 studio in Tulsa last week for an appearance on Great Day Green Country. The song’s called “Fable,” and it’s a nice showcase of Desirae Roses’ singing ability.

Also, please excuse the morning show host’s mispronunciation of Bruce Springsteen’s last name. Check Desi and Cody out at South by Southwest at Friends Bar (208 E. Sixth) at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, or at The Side Bar (602 E. Seventh) at 3:15 p.m. Friday.

For a more comprehensive guide to Okie performances at SXSW 2012, hit up our listing.

There’s little I can say to add to the conversation about our reigning Best in Rock band (though that’ll change when next week’s <i>Gazette</i> hits the racks), except that the last two years, while being low-key in terms of activity, have definitely preserved their live skill as players. 

The Non are experimental and progressive, sure, but you can count on them being consistent in that progression, wherever and whenever they play. I still have yet to see them play show that’s anything less than thrilling.

But yeah, they did their usual instrumental ping-pong in space thing we all love so much. It was Zach Zeller’s (pictured) second show of the night, and bassist Tom Bishop and guitarist Wil Norton flew in from Norman (Bishop’s a certified pilot) and out in the same night, just to play. Gotta admire that determination.

Opening with a new song? Bold move, Ryan Lindsey.

Not sure what it’s called but, the Norman/Tulsa punkers opened up with something that had “gotta get — gotta get it” in the chorus, and it was catchy as hell, but in a bouncy, rhythmic way. Very different from “Try Me Out Sometime”’s melodic catchiness.

Nonetheless, Broncho remain catchy, grungy, unserious in demeanor (there’s something kind of unsettling about watching three late-twenties/thirty-something dudes all droning in unison into their respective microphones, their eyes fixed upon something seemingly hours away), and hella loud. The crowd for their set was bigger than any in the Buffalo Lounge yet, and we’ll see if anybody on tonight’s bill (which includes Fiawna Forte, Green Corn Revival, Jacob Abello, Junebug Spade, JD McPherson, and OK Sweetheart) can step up and draw more.

So Cameron Neal (my latest local-rock man-crush) and his band of teenaged ACM@UCO students (drummer Preston Greer was the only Horse Thief-er whose hands lacked big, smeary X’s inside Friends Bar last night) sounded even larger, more looming and fierce than their Sooner Soundwave show in Norman last weekend, which was my first experience hearing them in person. With all the pressure and anticipation of the festival, I feel like they really raised the bar on local performances at SXSW. 

First off, Mr. Neal has this awesome old man authoritative rock voice that he adopts for narrative purposes on songs like “The Magician.” Most of Horse Thief’s topicality is mystical nonsense wrapped around nuggets of wisdom, so it’s a useful persona, and it gets really entertaining when he starts dumping sweat and shaking it all out in his impressive beard.

But yeah, it was really nice to see — after The Boom Bang’s raucous mess and The Non’s cerebral movements — a throwback-style band that earnestly wants to rock, while also trying to innovate a bit (they’ve got a keyboard that generates an organ sound which distinguishes them from most any other local band I know of). Cody Fowler looks up into the sky when the song calls for his bass notes to wobble all over the place and Greer makes an O-face when he gets to punish the snares. And Danny Rose looks about as happy shredding his guitar apart as Kevin Durant looks when he hits a 24-foot-stepack three.

Also, it should be noted that two members of The Boom Bang got kicked out of Friends for being rowdy at some point during Horse Thief's set which is impressive, because there was only The Non's in between them.

Photo by Doug Schwarz

They may not be aiming, high, but The Boom Bang are sure realistic.

Singer James Smith announced to The Buffalo Lounge earlier this evening that the garage-housed four-piece were “probably the worst band to play here all night.” He was kinda right, but that didn’t make their set any less fun. 

Smith mumbled his way through their usual schtick: noisy, propulsive rock styled after The Ramones’ sonic blitz and Andrew W.K.’s intentionally stupid revelry. It was a tie-loosening; a rowdy break in between two much headier bands — The Defining Times and The Non — that brokered the evening’s bill of rock acts nicely.

The show ended with a brief episode involving the sound guy, who chased a fan off the stage when the latter yelled “Fuck you!” into a microphone, shortly after McKenzie and drummer Brian Whetstone traded places for a final, scuzzy jam. If ever there was a better end to a Boom Bang show, I wasn’t there for it.