COWBOYS AND INDIES

Mary Karlzen is struggling to be noticed. In a meeting room at the Austin Convention Center, the Florida-based folk-rocker is performing on a makeshift stage, but many of the record-company execs, music critics, and hangers-on in the audience are more interested in the free Tex-Mex food and beer in back. Faced with one of her toughest-and most important-gigs, Karlzen tries to empathize with the overstimulated crowd. ''I'm not Jill (Sobule), and I'm not Jewel,'' she says with a laugh, distinguishing herself from the other distaff performers at this Atlantic Records bash. ''I know we all start to blend together after a while.'' They certainly did. Karlzen was among the more than 550 artists performing at the South by Southwest Music Conference, where, from March 15 to 19, the Lone Star State was anything but lonely. In its ninth year, the conference has evolved from a fun-in-the-sun music-industry spring break into a mandatory event for 4,700 record-company suits, song publishers, journalists, booking agents, attorneys, and managers. One major-label executive checked into his hotel only to be handed a huge sack of unsolicited tapes along with his room key. The festival's most anticipated event was a show by Soul Asylum, whose rise from loud, unrepentant garage bashers to platinum, folkier pop stars mirrors the erosion of the lines between alternative and mainstream. The biggest buzz, though, went to two bands who could be on the same runaway train to success. Elastica, England's next Next Big Thing, reenergized the decade-old new-wave sound, while Dayton, Ohio's Guided by Voices spurned the low-fi ambience of its albums for a magnificent rock show, complete with Daltrey-esque microphone swinging. It being Austin, there was plenty of earnestly de-livered roots music from the likes of the Mavericks, conjunto accordionist Flaco Jimenez, soul siren Irma Thomas, and revered country-folkie Lucinda Williams. There was also no shortage of the sound du jour-pop punk-from local next-in-lines Noodle to the more hardcore Compulsion, legitimate heirs to the Sex Pistols. As for actual work, the 56 panels ranged from the lively ''Is Style Dead in Rock & Roll?'' (''What's so f -- -ing cool about looking like a lumberjack?'' cracked one antigrunge panelist) to ''Koresh and the Waco Disaster: What Really Happened at Mt. Carmel?'' (''I know that David will be raised,'' said a survivor, solemnly.) SXSW is also a world where Matthew Sweet's 1991 album Girlfriend is considered such a modern masterpiece that an entire panel was devoted to it. During his keynote address, Sugar's Bob Mould repeatedly asked the audience why they had come to SXSW, but the answers-to party, hand out business cards, and hear a few good unsigned bands in between-were fairly obvious. Others came to make it, but on their own terms. ''The only reason I want to sign a record deal,'' cracked New York-based alterna-folkie Ani DiFranco to a packed house at the University of Texas Ballroom, ''is so I can have some beautiful, bronzed, half-naked, oiled boy hand me a tuned guitar after every song.'' No matter the style, some things truly never change.