If you’re not into music, and there are some of you for whom there’s no functioning difference between the noise a washing machine makes and what’s coming through your iPod, then none of this will makes sense.

That is: 10,000 people descending on Austin, Texas for four or five days of South By Southwest (SXSW) to hear music, make music, watch film, and talk multimedia.

While that might make sense if it were happening in the city where you lived, the part that beggars rationality is if it happened 22 hours away by car. Well, yeah, it barely makes sense to me either but for the last seven years I’ve climbed into a 1985 Ford Van and made the drive that people who still maintain some sort of belief in the transformative powers of chaos make just to participate.

And while I’m not going to start regaling you with tales of drunken excess, not now at least, I am going to note the increasingly amusing appearance of our most-loved technology in places you least expect to find it. At this point, if you even know a little about music, you’d not be surprised to find PowerBook G4s all over the stages of hip hop, electronica, trance, IDM, glitch core, and house bands. This music would not even exist in live venues without the huge amounts of processing power and ease of use that Apple’s offered the music’d masses. So, yes, these places you expect to find laptops.

But onstage at arguably the heavy metal event of the festival: the JESU show?

Jesu, formerly Godflesh, formerly Head of David, formerly Napalm Death? Oh yeah. There it was: bass, drums, guitars, and a PowerBook G4. Tended to by roadies along with out-of-tune guitars, SM54s that needed to be adjusted, and drum pedals that need to be re-nailed down, their Mac which, I’m guessing, was running atmospheric loops that throbbed through their ambient metal soundscapes.

But that was the simple part. The harder part? Figuring out what programs were doing what when. And maneuvering through screaming crowds of upward of 500 fist-pumping fans I notice that I’m not the only one crab walking and neck craning to see what the hell that laptop was doing. There are three or four of us, through the throng, who were on the Need To Know plan (was it GarageBand? Audacity? Or one of the super-sophisticated programs meant only for serious production junkies?) and when spotted by a gimlet-eyed handler I notice that he shifts the laptop both back toward stage rear and away from our prying eyes.

This is not new either. Guitar players jealously guard their equipment chain, lying about what effects they use and how, which guitars and why, but the laptop player (and yeah, what do we call this person? A laptopist?) is concerned we’re going to steal his ju ju?

Obviously.

Which means, under the auspices of this being what journalist's do, that we gots to know and we won't be stopped trying to find out. So, stay tuned to the Mac|Life mag because I’m aiming to do exactly that: steal Jesu’s ju ju. Off an almost-ancient PowerBook (by our hothouse Valley standards). Hot damn.