Laurent Garnier

This weekend famed house artiste Laurent Garnier appears at Shine for his first gig in Miami in more than a decade. The star DJ, one of the prime cogs in the late-Eighties Madchester scene, boasts his share of storied appearances. There was the time he stood in for Guns N’ Roses at the last minute at the Torought Werchter festival in Belgium; there was the gig in Vietnam; there have been all those world tours. But it’s his deep interest in music and its creators that separates him from the guys whose goals are simpler (when there are actual goals past getting chicks and surviving all-nighters).

Garnier set up PBB (www.pedrobroadcast.com), his own Web radio station, as a radical response to French radio’s conservative approach to music. The outlet allows him to share treasures from his record collection and give exposure to artists that the Top 40 will have no part of. Garnier has also worked with a variety of diverse artists from all over the world. Norwegian jazz pianist Bugge Wesseltoft joined him onstage at the Montreux Jazz Festival, and Dhafer Youssef, a Tunisian singer, answered in the affirmative when he was invited to lay down some tracks in Garnier’s studio, The Kub.