Once upon a time, a little wooden liar named Pinocchio took a trip to Pleasure Island with a pig-nosed, red-headed punk. “They say it’s a swell joint. No school. No cops,” the punk told Pinocchio. “You can tear the joint apart. And nobody says a word.” Sounds a little like…

When false rumors about the closure of Mamushka’s Midtown spread throughout the Miami scene like some kinda nasty, textually transmitted disease, Sirens and Sealions singer-songwriter and Mute Miami booking boss Johanna Viscaino got a little skittish, shifting Au Revoir Simone’s Miami gig to another venue. “I moved the show because…

It’s been approximately 32 months since self-described Brooklyn “keyboard band” Au Revoir Simone released the dark and dreamy 2009 album, Still Night, Still Light, and its sparklingly spooky single “Shadows.” Understandably, plenty of music geeks with a fetish for moody twee melodies (e.g. Crossfade, our current makeout partners, and you)…

Invented in the late ’80s by electronics wizard Roger Linn, the Music Production Center is a pimped-out drum machine on steroids, usually equipped with eight to 16 pressure- and velocity-sensitive pads, multiple MIDI inputs and outputs, a superpowered sequencer, advanced sampling systems, and an entire universe of highly evolved effects…

It’s been five full years since Time Magazine named Daddy Yankee to its list of the 100 most influential people on the planet. And using the mag’s metaphor, the recording industry’s registers were ringing like mad over reggaeton in 2006. “Yankee has sold 2 million copies of his album Barrio…

UPDATE Au Revoir Simone’s Miami show will now be totally free! Even though shocked status updates, email blasts, and half-drunk texts might’ve pushed the rumors of Mamushka’s demise into overdrive for a period of about 12 hours, there hasn’t been any major fallout in the wake of that premature closing…

Ever since Sean Michael Anderson snatched up a mike and spit some rhymes, this 23-year-old rapper from Detroit has seemed to be dropping hints about the enormity of his future plans. He began by adopting the not-so-humble stage name Big Sean. He coaxed notorious egomaniac Kanye West into giving him…