In the Scandinavian fairy tale popularized by Hans Christian Andersen called The Snow Queen, a brother and sister begin seeing everything in horrorvision after demons bearing an ugliness-reflecting mirror from Hell shatter the looking glass, sending splinters of blight into the eyes and hearts of the children. Based in Stockholm,…
Despite deeming themselves progressive, the members of AGHORA appeal to those of the death-metal old school, those who like their guitar dirges irony- and humor-free. Lead vocalist Diana Serra very seriously suggested the staff at this newspaper wasn’t heavy enough to fathom AGHORA, saying, “Perhaps you should send someone from…
When he lived in Miami, he was known as Mario Lavandeira, a self-described “z-lister” who attended Belen Jesuit Preparatory School. “I was the big, gay, fat kid in an all-boy Jesuit school, so my friends were all the ones in, like, the drama club … they weren’t even all in…
On a recent Wednesday, The Bitch checked out an event called the Lo McXimo de la Música concert series preview at Studio A. Why? Because she wanted to see Natalie and Nicole Albino, the teen identical twin sisters from Queens who sing under the name Nina Sky. In summer 2004…
When The Bitch heard that employees of three prominent CocoWalk eateries had been busted for running informal pharmacological operations, she got on the case; the touristy shopping zone may not contain a Nordstrom, but, hey, it’s within trotting distance. Robert Loupo, cochairman of the All-Grove Crime Watch group, sends out…
By 1985, New Wave music was on the decline. With the rise of jangle-pop and hair metal, teenagers who once proudly waved the New Romantic flag were driven back to the pale shelter of their Hello Kitty-theme bedrooms, where they could listen to synthpop in peace. Then, suddenly, across the…
The Bitch was executing a Tokyo Drift-style parking-lot maneuver this past Wednesday night, which caused the Wire album embedded in the Bitchmobile’s CD player to become dislodged and fly out the window, thereby becoming the property of Walgreens. The consequence of this sequence of events was positive, though. The FM…
Not long after noon on June 11 at the Playwright Irish Pub in South Beach, the predominantly pro-American crowd was silent. It had nothing to root for in this opening round of World Cup action. A flat-footed Team USA was unraveling against the Czech Republic, down two-zip entering the second…
The insistent bomp of crunk meets a disco beat and is tempered by techno’s distanced cool. Green Velvet shares the anthemic tendencies of label mates Tiefschwarz, but this stylistic smashup, though still dance-floor suited, has just enough burr and blur to be reminiscent of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s fuzz-out…
Though the Knife’s forthcoming Silent Shout will soon overtake Sissy’s All Under in the interesting-and-weird-girl-fronted-electronica sweepstakes, this duo from Toronto, Canada, is deserving of its own prize for meritorious experimentalism. Johanne Williams and David Trusz use old-school Moogs, Oberheims, tape-delay machines, and band-pass filters as anti-digital calling cards, yet Trusz’s…
Lip augmentation, probably the most common cosmetic procedure performed in South Florida, is trickier than the proliferation of Paris pouts here might suggest. Too little filler and you’ve got a kisser full of needle pricks; too much and you look like the owner of a South Beach modeling agency. The…
Like thoroughbred horses, industrial music has only a handful of forebears, so when the Big Three — Skinny Puppy, Ministry, and Front Line Assembly — seemed to be calling it quits or, at the very least, falling off around 1995, the future looked even darker than normal for the genre’s…
The words epic and classic — favorite Bitch exclamations for happenings with high and very low extremes of social entertainment value — can barely be applied to this past Saturday night’s iteration of the Wynwood Art/Design District gallery walk. It was appropriately held under a full moon amid intermittent interludes…
This electronic-music pioneer from Philadelphia has remained a strongly blinking blip on the ever-shifting sonar screen of big-room dance-sound enthusiasts, from his emergence as a live-recording college favorite in the early Nineties to his more recent minimalist house tracks. Wink’s latest album, Profound Sounds: Volume 3, dropped this past May…
This intended side project of the legendary instrumentalist-experimentalist collective began as the soundtrack for a real film these hallucinatory and rapacious Belgian-Californian sound collectors are making based on Brion Gysin’s novel about the Paris hotel where Gysin and William Burroughs pioneered their cut-up/fold-in nonlinear writing techniques. But listeners new to…
The Taste of Andalucia food festival began auspiciously enough this past Monday evening. Guests streaming through the foyer of the InterContinental Miami Hotel’s ballroom were greeted with bouquets of red carnations handed out by mantilla-clad women. David Maldonaldo, a venenciador from Cadiz, drew small but potent sherry glasses of fino…
The first annual Memorial Fest began as an awesome day of music and fun in the blazing heat. Lady Saw’s performance was as wonderfully explicit as The Bitch had anticipated — filled with advice for females who want to beautify and “bling out” their nether regions. Cocoa Tea was absolutely…
This past Saturday night, while many concerned themselves with extrapolation of The Da Vinci Code, The Bitch immersed herself in another canon from Rome similarly disparaged by the Vatican: Vogue Italia. A thorough decryption of the impressive June tome was made possible in the comfortable environment of D’Vino, a relatively…
As any one of the several hundred insanely lucky converts who were on hand to hear Osunlade spin in Miami Beach this past February will attest, his sets are exhaustive, transforming, uplifting experiences that transcend the auditory, engaging all the senses and, Osunlade hopes, the soul. “I like to call…
On this single, the cousins from Decatur show as much love for Gene Wilder’s portrayal of Willie Wonka as they did for Jennifer Holliday’s Dreamgirls hook earlier this year. Sho Nuff cites e.e. cummings as an influence in his rhyming, while Big Marc attends to a stripped-down rhythm track. The…
There is little The Bitch loves more than the languid days of summer, when there is nothing but lawn darts, Parcheesi, backgammon, shuffleboard, and Wiffle ball to occupy twilight game-time. But one sport captures a canine’s heart like no other: catch-and-release bunny-chasing. So the intrepid hound’s ears pricked up at…
The showcase of hip-hop overachievers seems at first offing to be an effort toward creating one of the most dour concerts of the year, given “conscious” rap’s reputation for PBS-correct depictions of urban dwelling. The Roots, however, have become more interesting and more verbally aggro, following the failure of 1999’s…
