Music

How quickly some stars have ascended in the EDM boom. Just a few years ago, in 2009, Toronto-based producer Deadmau5 could be found at Ultra Music Festival on the live stage, essentially opening up for Simian Mobile Disco. Last night, though, trying to get the main stage to witness his…

Major Lazer shows are unlike anything else you’ll see at an EDM fest. The Diplo-led crew’s performances are an enthralling orgy of confetti-spraying machine guns, hyper-sexual dancing, and human-sized hamster balls, all set to a peculiar mixture of dancehall, dubstep, pop, and every other genre the always-restless Diplo feels like…

One of the great but frustrating things about Ultra Music Festival is it continually books interesting rising acts for its live stage while scheduling them in its earliest slots. This meant that yesterday, the second day of the second weekend, one-man electro-pop band Robert Delong and house revivalists Azari &…

With the rise of the ubiquitous Internet, street fashion trends rolled in, heavy and dark like a storm cloud, over the style world. Instead of dressing sorta like supermodels on the catwalk, we had to start wearing exactly whatever some fashion editor in Italy was sporting. There’s something so liberating…

With Lil Wayne just out of the hospital after a series of seizures and a Codeine relapse, no one’s fronting about the role drugs play in the world of rap. The EDM scene is also deep into intoxicants, and no one’s going to tell us otherwise. We spoke with rapper…

Sure, Ultra ends at midnight. And by the last day of the two-weekend fest, you may be tired and feel like sleeping in. Well, don’t. ‘Cause then you will miss all the killer daytime sets. And a ton of other awesome stuff. Like Crossfade’s 13 best reasons to wake up…

What are the odds of electro-mechanical machines (manufactured in France) descending upon Ultra Music Festival 2013 to enslave the EDM generation? We’d say the chances of a sudden and unsuspected robot invasion at UMF probably hover around 13 percent. Oh … You mean the likelihood of notoriously secretive and borderline…

Ultra Music Festival is a zoo. From land sharks to killer whales, pink flamingos to African zebras, UMF 2013 is starting to feel a lot like a World Wildlife Foundation fundraiser, complete with endangered species and cuddly critters. Sure, they’re inflatable. But try explaining that to someone rolling face. After…

We knew we were in for something special after speaking with Swedish progressive house DJ-producer Eric Prydz about Ultra Music Festival 2013. Shit, just having the aerophobic house master on this side of the pond is enough an occasion to plant your ass at UMF’s main stage at 7:50 p.m…

No, normie. Your water bottle didn’t get secretly dosed with lysergic acid diethylamide. This is Ultra Music Festival, a trippy-ass EDM encampment in downtown Miami that’s just overflowing with robot ravers and (almost) naked beat freaks of both sexes — not to mention wacky party props like inflatable animals and…

Kaskade and Tiësto, two undeniable titans of the current electronic dance music landscape, took to the decks on two different stages toward the end of Ultra Music Festival 2013 last night. They could have easily shared time on the same stage, though. Kaskade has certainly grown in stature enough for…

SpaceGhostPurrp can be a prickly dude. He’s so young, smart, and deep. And all that online attitude. You can’t help but envy him his complexity and talent and resent what sometimes comes off as a sense of entitlement. But when we met up with the Carol City rapper at Ultra…

A check of the weather: Sunshine and a ten-percent chance of rain. Which means we’re rocking nothing but underpants and furry boots for weekend two of Ultra Music Festival, just like the “Top Ten (Almost) Naked Raver Bros” we met last week. But girls just want to have fun too…

Things that are cool in one context are often not cool in others. For instance, if you arrived at the Pitchfork Music Festival in your kandi best, you would certainly not be the belle of the ball. You’d be a lame-o freak in neon, crying over a box of doughnuts…

A really great party is like science. If things go well, you’ve got to repeat the experiment. Hard’s Gary Richards (AKA Destructo) knows this to be true. So he’s brought three editions of his HARD Miami shindigs for Winter Music Conference and Miami Music Week 2013. And last night, Destructo…

For belonging to a popular music genre — progressive rock — often derided as pretentious, violinist and keyboardist Eddie Jobson seems humble about where he and his music have ended up: on a cruise ship. “I can’t believe my career has gone down to playing cruise ships,” the English musician…

Punks and skinheads, get your boots up! Inspecter 7 have been playing ska out of New Jersey since 1992. Later, they broke up and transformed into Hub City Stompers. But now they’re back. They have a new album called Escapes and Illusions. And they are barreling down I-95 in a…

In Miami to announce SFX Entertainment’s near $100 million acquisition of the producer of TomorrowLand and Sensation White, ID&T Worldwide, Robert F.X. Sillerman held court Thursday afternoon in the shade of a cabana at the Delano Hotel. So we here at Crossfade sat down with Sillerman to discuss what drives…

Jamaica is one of the world’s greatest contributors to DJ culture. The original mobile sound systems found in the trenches of Kingston in the 1960s packed megawatt speaker stacks in the back of moving trucks, parked them at various party locations, and battled other crews doing the same to see…

Last night, all of Miami went hard as fuck. But only Grand Central was goin’ Hard Miami, shakin’ our rumps till early morning. And the beat freaks at this bass-filled, trap-moombah-dub night didn’t give a damn if the floor was dirty, they were gonna make their asses touch the ground…