Major Lazer with Skerrit Bwoy at Jelly's Carniville

Our resident ninja photog Rebecca Smeyne spent her time at South By Southwest exploring the festival's badgeless margins--the shows anybody with a little creativity and a lot of patience could attend. From the party for Death + Taxes Magazine where No Age and Japandroids played, to the Cinders Gallery installation at OK Mountain to a random show on a random porch, she managed to catch things even the rest of us who were there didn't experience. Her photos from Austin, which aren't quite like anything else we've seen from the festival, are below.

New video for the Very Best's "Warm Heart of Africa"--one of many jams on last year's excellent record of the same name. A lot of things working against Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig here, none of them really his fault. But you are going to lose the dance-off to the Very Best's Esau Mwamwaya every time, it's just a fact. Plus you know how band guys get when you take away their guitars and make 'em stand up there anyway. Not a fair fight. [mtvU, via Stereogum]

Last year, Malawian pop singer Esau Mwamwaya and the production duo Radioclit linked up for Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit Are the Very Best, a marvel of a mixtape that ran through versions of everything from Vampire Weekend's "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" to M.I.A.'s "Boyz." The tape reflected a deep familiarity with the various strains of kwaito and kuduro that Vampire Weekend et al were pillaging, plus a global-pop savvy that made them ideal collaborators for M.I.A., whose technique was pretty similar: running global megapop a la Michael Jackson or hip-hop through the musical filter of all the non-Western countries in which that music has large and faithful audiences. And the Very Best didn't do it from an apartment in Williamsburg but from a whole raft of countries ("Lilongwe - Malawi to London via France & Sweden, United Kingdom," says MySpace), all of which kicked something unexpected and exhilarating into the remixes and originals that made Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit Are the Very Best such a unexpected hit last December.