The excitement of talking with Ralf Hütter, the man behind legendary krautrock crew Kraftwerk, proved overwhelming. An interview seemed like a long shot, especially considering the fact that the last thorough press clip I could find was a June 2009 chat with The Guardian’s John Harris. And my over-sharing on…
Before Steve Aoki was voted DJ Most Likely to Waste Champagne, he already had a pretty sweet reputation as the head of Dim Mak records. When he started the label back in 1996, he focused mainly on signing massive indie rock acts like Battles, Bloc Party and The Von Bondies…
To the three producers who make up Swedish House Mafia — Axwell, Steve Angello, and Sebastian Ingrosso — operating on a massive scale is no big deal, pun intended. From the beginning of the trio’s rise to international prominence, they’ve seemed to always operate at a sweeping level, beginning with…
Even after 27 years, four albums, and a few line-up changes, Jane’s Addiction is holding on strong. In fact, Perry Farrell and company’s latest album, The Great Escape Artist, made it to the third spot on Billboard rock chart. So rather than kick the habit in 2012, these ’90s alt-rock…
See the full 42-photo Nine Mile Music Festival slideshow. Nine Mile Music Festival 2012 With Stephen, Damian, and Julian Marley, alongside Capleton, Burning Spear, and others Virginia Key Beach Park Saturday, March 3, 2012 Musicians come and go. But their music becomes immortal. Bob Marley transcended racial barriers in the…
Rising Swedish star Avicii is one of the hottest DJ-producers in contemporary house music. His massive hit “Levels,” which samples recently deceased Etta James’s “Something’s Got a Hold on Me,” gets so much play that it’s almost become obnoxious. But before you start hating on the guy for no reason…
As the world’s most comprehensive electronic party extravaganza, Ultra Music Festival is dominated by the sonic phenomenon known as the drop. Simultaneously present in seemingly unrelated genres — such as the soulful vocal crescendos of house, the interlocking pulses of techno, or the bombastic bass-wobble breakdowns of dubstep — the…
In terms of bleep-bloop music, few do it better than the French. Over the past decade, Pedro Winter’s Paris-based Ed Banger Records has dropped some of house music’s dopest seven- and twelve-inches, CDs and MP3s. Celebrated as one of electronic music’s most prominent labels, the Ed Banger family of artists…
Hank III might be Satan’s favorite grandson. His daddy was a cactus, his mama was a bear trap, and he was born with his boots on in a river full of moonshine. At age 11, he ripped out his own throat and cooked it over a forest fire. The next…
Art and politics can make strange, confusing bedfellows. German playwright and all-around commie Bertolt Brecht would say: Unless your work directly protests the global capitalist hegemony by alienating the bourgeois theatergoing audience, it amounts to little but titillation for the ruling classes. On the other end of the spectrum, though,…
Though obviously rooted in the beat matching and live mixing of the disc jockey, the mashup, as we know it today, is a distinctly ’00s phenomenon that revealed itself at the very beginning of the decade. And the modern blueprint for expertly splicing together two songs (often from mind-blowingly disparate…
No genre has been more ripped off, watered down, and straight-up bastardized than techno. To the layperson, say a classic-rock aficionado or maybe a jazz head, the mere mention of this Detroit-bred electronic music genre (and really, less a conventional genre than an unwieldy collection of variants, everything from minimal…
Over the past 17 years, Romeo Santos and bachata boy band Aventura have won the overflowing adoration of prepubescent girls, their mothers, and 35-year-old guys in white pants who love to dance. In the process, Santos and sidekicks scored a surplus of American Music Awards, Premio Lo Nuestro statues, and…
When French musician Anthony Gonzalez started recording as M83, his deeply dreamy signature sound was a total anomaly. The year was 2001, and the electronic music world was still deep in the throes of proggy four-four beats. Meanwhile, the cool-kid rock scene was about to get warmed up by a…
You don’t need a passport, green card, or visa to experience some of the best music in the world. You just need to hit the North Beach Bandshell on April 13 and 14 for the tenth annual Heineken Transatlantic Festival. Seun Kuti, the prince of Afrobeat, and his band the…
Flying Lotus isn’t like most acts you’ll encounter at Ultra Music Festival. The Los Angeles native, born Steven Ellison and known as “FlyLo” to his fans, doesn’t make dance music — at least not in the traditional sense. The acclaimed knob fiddler (Pitchfork named his Cosmogramma the 14th best album…
See the full 28-photo Radiohead at the American Airlines Arena slideshow.Radiohead American Airlines Arena Monday, February 27, 2012 Better Than: Doing whatever one does on Spotify, with Radiohead. Leading up to Radiohead’s kickoff concert for their first U.S. tour in four years, we explored a theory that Thom Yorke and…
Now that NBC’s decided to keep Community on the air, we’re encouraging Donald Glover to spend that network money on Drake’s 3,800-square-foot, $1.9 million “fuck pad” at “Downtown Miami’s newest, most elevated address,” Marquis Residences at 1100 Biscayne Boulevard. After all, homeboy spends a lot of time in the 305…
For a few years there, Made Event’s Sunday School made up a big slice of the underground house and techno pie during WMC week, especially with heavyweights like Richie Hawtin, Luciano and Seth Troxler aboard their whopping 36-hour marathon lineup. But alas, Sunday School is no more. The party went…
Maritime travel has been uncharacteristically sketchy in 2012. First, the inaugural Holy Ship electro-cruise ran aground in the Bahamas on January 7. It took five tugboats nearly 15 hours to dislodge the MSC Poesia from land, putting a serious damper on Steve Aoki’s poker tournament. Less than a week after…
A few years ago, David Guetta was just another house music DJ who was huge in Europe and not nearly as well known here in the United States. Then came 2009, the year that the Parisian (one of France’s top DJs since at least the late ’80s) released his fourth…
When speaking of French electronic dance music, the first name that comes to mind is David Guetta, right? Yeah, that’s if you get your EDM spoonfed by Top 40 radio, you square. Because the underground house and techno cognoscenti of the world have been moving to the beats from a…
