Matias Aguayo is not your garden variety EDM artist. Not by a long stretch. In many ways, the Chilean-born producer is Latin America’s answer to UK sonic mad scientist Matthew Herbert, approaching the formulaic house and techno genres with an irreverent spirit of experimentation and unconventional studio techniques. Mirroring Herbert’s…
Ketchy Shuby might be a lot of things, but a flash in the pan is definitely not one of them. Even in an arid Miami indie music scene that doesn’t offer its artists a hell of a lot of opportunity, the band has stuck it out together for over six…
If electronic music can be called music’s final frontier — the veritable cutting edge of sonic innovation — then it’s artists like Move D (AKA David Moufang) who are its true trailblazers. If the German production veteran is still relatively obscure (as far as mainstream EDM hype goes), it’s only…
Despite being a sly sarcastic joke, the band name Miami Horror nonetheless evokes our city’s essential duality — a glitzy, neon-soaked tropical paradise on the surface, with a dark, seedy criminal underbelly, as mythologized by Miami Vice and Scarface. “I liked the contrast of the two words — colorful and…
Miami doesn’t have the strongest of indie music scenes. So it’s nowhere near often enough we see promising local underground artists erupt with new, promising work. Now if these artists also happen to be pushing the envelope and breaking ground with their music, it’s a very special thing indeed. With…
DJ-producer M A N I K (AKA Chris Manik) might be best known as an uhntz-uhntz purveyor on the global party circuit. But from the beginning, he also set himself apart as a serious musician — a classically trained production wunderkind with a knack for arrangement and melodic hooks, not…
Being the electronic music geeks that we are here at Crossfade, we’ve been following the “post-dubstep” confluence of house and bass music in the UK with major interest for some time now. Influences from jungle, drum ‘n’ bass, UK garage, and other styles are seeping into house’s four-on-the-floor mold, injecting…
If London is the Mecca of the global electronic dance music scene, then surely Fabric could be considered the Kaaba. At least one pilgrimage to the monolithic nightclub is a requisite for international house and techno heads. But even for those who have never made the trip, the beloved Fabric…
The Black Madonna (AKA Marea Vierge-Noire) has a bone to pick with the current state of dance music, particularly online digital distribution and the decline of analog audio formats like vinyl and tape. After all, she came up during the golden age of rave, before corporate “EDM” co-opted electronic dance…
Even with the sweeping sonic palette of synthesizers, mainstream electronic music has hit a certain threshold. It has to do with so many producers these days using the same store-bought music production software, virtual instruments, and sample packs. One producer who is certainly not guilty of adding to the derivative…
If London is the mecca of the global electronic dance music scene, then surely Fabric could be considered the Kaaba. At least one pilgrimage to the monolithic nightclub is a requisite for international house and techno heads during their lifetime. But even for those who have never made the trip,…
When Brooklyn DJ-production duo Wolf + Lamb launched their eponymous label in the late noughties, bringing like-minded artists such as Soul Clap, No Regular Play and Nicolas Jaar into the fold, they planted the seed of what would eventually blossom into the Crew Love collective. The Crew now includes up-and-coming…
What makes a DJ legendary? Well in the case of West Coast house music legend Doc Martin, it’s a whopping three decades of destroying international dancefloors with his masterclass underground record selections. Having came up during the late ’80s to early ’90s dance era, when novel sounds like house, hip-hop,…
Back in 2012, we here at Crossfade had a chat with international boogie meisters Soul Clap about their newly launched eponymous label and some of the artists they handpicked to represent their “artsy, cool, and funky” vision for the catalog. Among them was San Francisco DJ-production wunderkind Nick Monaco. With…
Up until just a couple years ago, the international electronic dance music radar wasn’t picking up much more than crickets across the border in Mexico. But now our neighbors to the south are all over the dance music charts and global party circuit. Sensational newcomers like Balcazar & Sordo, Miguel…
Ask the underground electronic dance music heads who frequent downtown Miami and Wynwood hot spots why they avoid South Beach nightlife, and they’ll invariably say it’s at least in part because of the VIP culture and the way bottle-service customers dictate musical programming at SoBe clubs. The most controversial examples…
Ask the underground electronic dance music heads who frequent downtown Miami and Wynwood hotpots why they avoid South Beach nightlife, and they’ll invariably say it’s at least in part because of VIP culture and the way bottle-service customers dictate musical programming at SoBe nightclubs. The most controversial examples in recent…
How the hell do you pronounce oOoOO? Well, we here at Crossfade can’t advise you there, because we totally forgot to ask Chris Dexter, the man behind the moniker, when we spoke to him this week. What we can tell you is that he’s not exactly thrilled about you calling…
Electronic dance music has always been an urban phenomenon. Look at the underground roots of Chicago house, Detroit techno, or U.K. jungle and drum ‘n’ bass. All were spawned within the confines of the city and broke out in abandoned warehouses, parking garages, and lofts — a futuristic soundtrack to…
Tampa may be a small town compared to Miami. But thanks to local resident DJ Three, his longstanding Snatch club night, and his esteemed Hallucination Limited label, T-Town definitely holds its own when it comes to underground electronic dance music. One of the talented acts to come up under the…
Techno may have been born in late-’80s Detroit, but its seeds sprouted all over the planet. In Spain, techno took hold of a young Paco Osuna, who would go on to become one of his country’s foremost ambassadors. It helps that by his early 20s, Osuna was already a resident…
Most of the club rats getting down to electro and booty bass these days are too young to remember the scene’s old-school pioneers like Egyptian Lover, AKA Greg Broussard. After all, most of us were still learning how to crawl (or hadn’t even been born yet) when Broussard was already…
