Paolo Mojo

Assuming the position, following “that cute DJ” Desyn Masiello’s turn, as mixmaster for the Balance CD series (it’s up to number nine) is Paolo Mojo, a British turntablist who has been around since the early Nineties and has flirted often with ignition but failed to quite catch — until now,…

Rihanna

Avant-garde New Waver, auteur, and mastermind producer behind (heh heh) Coil’s epically experimental Scatology, Marc Almond has likely been yearning lo these 25 years to become disassociated from the instantly recognizable snyth sample in 1981’s fluke Soft Cell hit “Tainted Love.” Rihanna, Jay-Z’s teen prodigy from Barbados, grants Almond’s wish…

Luxury Lounge

On a recent episode of The Sopranos, coke-snorting Christopher Moltisanti pestered Sir Ben Kingsley. The beleaguered mobster tried in vain to persuade the knighted actor’s character to help him snag some swag from the Chateau Marmont’s “Luxury Lounge.” Free shopping sprees available only to celebrities are part of perk lore,…

Baby Anne and Jen Lasher

Though vintage-conscious trance snobs will forever deride breakbeat as the Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill of the electronic music vineyard, diehard fans of Orlando-based DJ Baby Anne and her compatriot de deck Jen Lasher are happy to chug away the night and morning immersed in the duo’s traded-off trap-kit-beats and acid…

You’re the Man Now, Dog

Jonathan Riesco, the stalwart of the small Westchester neighborhood (The Bitch always mentally prefaces with so-called) known as the Bird Road Art District launched another successful show this past Saturday evening in his studio at 4552 SW 71st Ave. Riesco, a jovial redhead who often sports a papi chulo-meets-ska getup…

Just Be

When the Chemical Brothers ridiculed the term superstar DJ on their 1999 single “Hey Boy Hey Girl,” the duo was undoubtedly referencing (along with Paul Oakenfold and Moby) Dutch turntablist Tiësto. Like Linda Evangelista, most well-known nightclub-and-rave performers of the late Nineties wouldn’t even get out of bed (at 5:00…

Dance, Dance Evolution

People talk about Conference — no modifier — as if it is a holiday on par with, say, Christmas or Halloween. Indeed the event, now in its 21st year, is just that monolithic in the minds of electronic music aficionados and the DJs, nightclub owners, liquor purveyors, electronics providers, and…

Rape and Honey

It just doesn’t seem … possible … that Ministry is nominated for a Grammy (Best Metal Performance on “The Great Satan” from 2005’s compilation disc Rantology). Surely if Alain Jourgensen were already in the grave he has spent so many years spooning the dirt for, he’d be spinning in it,…

Live to Tell

The following two events are connected: Now, right now, Madonna has a single on the pop charts — “Hung Up” — an eminently danceable throwback to her Eighties heyday. And, in 2000, after foibles as stone-faced global moralists and the humbling horrors of “Lemon” and “Discothque,” U2 enjoyed a late-career…

Lend Me Some Sugar

For its fourth incarnation — as with the first three — Art Basel presents one of a few acceptable opportunities each year for locals to behave like tourists, plodding down sidewalks while following “points of interest” maps, craning necks to glimpse celebrities, not being — or at least not acting…

Frayed Around the Edges

While figurative ka-chings are the aural hallmark of Art Basel days, the clinking of champagne glasses dominates the evening-to-dawn hours of the art festival. The shark fins moving through the social waters are silent, but rivalries between artists, dealers, collectors, and entourages — this year’s must-have accessory — add a…

Bang! Music Festival

With more than 60 bands and DJs spread over thirteen hours and six stages on Bicentennial Park’s waterfront site, Bang! is the largest show to hit South Florida in some time. Taking a cue from recent festivals such as Coachella and Los Angeles’s Nocturnal Wonderland, the Bang! lineup includes a…

Dead Again

Springtime and desert glare aren’t the ideal conditions for resurrecting the undead. Yet it was in April of this year, at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, that the original four members of Bauhaus found themselves back in black for the first time since 1998. Eldritch…

Scenes From Hurricane Wilma’s Destruction in Miami

She came from the West, a demure Category One, letting us think she was steady, docile, and relatively harmless. But when Hurricane Wilma blew ashore and crossed Florida in a flash, she was a bitch. She toppled a multistory dry dock in Sunny Isles Beach, launched a 30-foot sailboat and…

Nine Inch Nails

Trent Reznor has tantrummed his way back to the charts with “The Hand That Feeds,” the fiercely in-form single from Nine Inch Nails’ five-year-plan album, With Teeth. But the NIN experience — fostered equally by Reznor’s obsessive attention to visual detail and a rapaciously devoted online fan base — is…

Free Bird?

He was a quiet man, taciturn and difficult to read beyond what any language barriers would account for. He worked two jobs, washing dishes and mowing lawns; sometimes he drank, sometimes he fought with his wife. But mostly the Cuban immigrant struggled to support his family — wife Caridad and…

Behind the Curtain

In the seven years since the Ultra Music Festival began as a neat little block party starring Florida’s own Rabbit in the Moon on a fenced-off section of sand behind the Outback Steakhouse on Collins Avenue, some of its most outspoken critics have been those people you’d expect to have…

Autobahn and On

Visitors logging on to Kraftwerk’s Website are greeted by Unicode green text announcing the band’s name and a line drawing of a frequency-emitting radio tower, à la the old RKO Pictures logo. Another click generates a menu of some of Kraftwerk’s best-known works, including “Boing Boom Tschak” and “Radioactivity,” which…

See You

5, 4, 3 … Applause! Keep it going!” a production assistant commands the 200 or so teenyboppers assembled in the newly created park behind American Airlines Arena for a special Video Music Awards episode of TRL. The show hasn’t even begun taping yet, but the kids, mostly girls in bikini…

Magnetic Fields

i, the long-awaited followup to the Magnetic Fields’ acclaimed tour de force, 69 Love Songs, finds genius founder Stephin Merritt doing everything to fend off the threat of stardom that 1999 triple-disc set augured. Eschewing the giddy layers of guitar and dense, synthesizer-laden arrangements that yielded such genre-bending jump-ups as…