Take 'In The City', shrink it to a fifth of the size, let Huw Stephens pick the bill, add Scrabble and zines, and you're going to have the best weekend in Cardiff it's possible to have without contracting anything.

I was curious to find out what Huw thinks is a good line-up for a festival, so in advance of Swn Fest I went to the Swn night at ITC (ITC also have a night at Swn, in a cute wife-swap sort of way). I caught Envy and Islets in Manchester, and was terrified by both, particularly the latter who may have been having a seizure while we all just watched.

Getting to Cardiff, the first act I caught at Clwb Ifor Bach (took longer to tell the taxi driver where I was going than it took to get there) was Unicorn Kid, again, for the third time in a week - so far so good. Then came Drums Of Death, and the terror returned. Beyond that, though, was a steady flow of quirky and watchable stuff over a dozen venues, not the information overload of ITC but the laid-back discovery of new music tucked away in tiny rooms above bars and below street level, mainly along a narrow street near Cardiff Castle. The punters were almost entirely Welsh, so at the moment it seems Swn is still quite a local affair, but that's part of its charm so I'm sort of loathe to encourage you to visit... but you absolutely definitely should.

Here are a few musical highlights from that YouTube, in the interests of not boring you to death, but if you're in a self-harming mood there'll be an extended holiday slideshow version on Tin Can.

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The criticism most often levelled at In The City is that it's nothing more than an industry jolly - a three-day holiday for A&Rs, to a place where their expense accounts stretch twice as far as they would back home.

That may have been true once - but in 2009, post-recession, there's obviously far less cash being splashed around.

Once the purse strings get tighter than Russell Brand's leggings, and MP3s are easier for just about everyone to get hold of for free than what's IN Russell Brand's leggings, wasteful trips to the North on music industry expenses are simply not an option. This is why ITC 2009 was the best one I've been to so far, and the fact that it even happened at all is an encouraging sign that there is still support for new and unsigned artists, and an industry still willing to put their hands in their pockets, even if their pockets have holes in.

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