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…
Anything goes in the wild. Especially when beer is involved. An unlimited supply of more than 100 domestic, international, and microbrew beers, to be exact. And live appearances by Miami’s own booty pioneer and a Grammy-winning hip-hop group. At least that is what will go down in the wild of…
Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas Tour James L. Knight Center, Miami Wednesday, March 20, 2013 Now 78, Leonard Cohen almost certainly wouldn’t be pounding the tour trail, if his finances were still flush. Circa 2004, though, fate intervened. (Or rather, a personal manager did, ripping him off to the tune of…
Where is TomorrowWorld? Last night at the Mondrian South Beach, European electronic dance music promotions power ID&T answered that riddle, revealing that the inaugural American edition of Belgium’s TomorrowLand will be held in Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia. See Also: -Why the Corporate Takeover of EDM Was Inevitable: The Straight Bros are…
Michale Graves got his big break after nailing an audition for the role of Not Glenn Danzig in Jerry Only’s 1995 re-boot of campy pop-punk rock crew the Misfits. And ever since, his musical career has been on a singular and vertiginous path that makes his story one of the…
BBC Radio 1 DJ and chief global EDM tastemaker Pete Tong’s All Gone: Miami compilation series has become a definite staple of WMC and Miami Music Week. The double-disc mix album, with a disc each mixed by Tong and a guest artist, serves as a yearly snapshot of the international…
The ravin’ and ragin’ life isn’t all epicness. Sometimes, stuff sucks. Like “free water!!!” and “free Wi-Fi!!!” Or Yeasayer’s Chris Keating talking all kinds of mad shit about Ultra Music Festival 2013’s happy, half-naked, supernice party people. We here at Crossfade just enumerated the five best moments from weekend one…
It seems only fitting that the rising kingpin of electronic dance music, Robert F.X. Sillerman, is using Winter Music Conference and Miami Music Week as a platform to make some still-secret announcement regarding his recent acquisition of ID&T North America, the U.S division of the Netherlands-based company that produces the…
Welcome to Ultra land. The weather is perfect. The kids are nice. There are “No Guns Allowed.” But famous lady rapper side-boob is plentiful. So are the naked dancing dudes. And even 70-year-old ravers feel totally at home. Quite honestly, Ultra Music Festival is paradise, if you’re into fist-pumping and…
Sure, Ultra Music Festival is happening this weekend. But why party with everyone else, when you can party with the electronic dance music VIPs? The Motorola Music Lounge, presented by Sol Republic and hosted by Sirius XM, will return to an undisclosed location for the fourth consecutive year to serve…
