Stumbling straight off the hot, hard streets of the Bay Area’s grittier easterly half, Oakland’s Bare Wires is a group of three guys — Matthew, Nathan, and Brian — who look like pretty ’70s stoners and make a sound they describe as slop pop. If the threesome’s new-ish song “Don’t…
Where will you be this evening at approximately 8:15 p.m.? Well, if you’ve got a ticket (and even if you don’t), make plans to go stand at the foot of Ultra Music Festival’s Live Stage. It’s definitely where you’ll find Crossfade, because synth-y Norwegian duo Röyksopp will be prepping its…
Ultra Week, or Miami Music Week, or the Week Formerly Known as Winter Music Conference, is amazing in that on any given night, there are a number of world-class lineups from which to choose. That can be a bad thing too, though, because with so many competing events, some deserving…
WTF! The 2011 edition of Ultra Music Festival hasn’t even started but the festival’s organizers have already announced dates for next year’s date. Mark it down, because the three-day electronic music gathering will return to Miami on March 23 to 25, 2012.Early artwork also indicate the week during the festival…
Tomorrow’s the day! And finally, Ultra Music Festival’s organizers have released the entire list of set times for the massive three-day gathering.It really helps a lot knowing beforehand what to expect when attending a festival the size of Ultra. You are going to have to possible make some tough choices,…
Recent years have marked the resurgence of the broken beat in electronic dance music. (Not that breaks ever went away, but they did stay on the fringe for a good decade.) Now, with the rise of dubstep and ’90s UK garage/two-step nostalgia, producers across the international scene are breaking the…
Ultra Music Festival! It’s the final countdown. Listen .. Can you hear it? Uhhntz, uhhntz, uhhntz . . . It’s almost showtime. Yet many people don’t have tickets. What do you do? Should you hit up Stubhub or Craigslist and pay over four hundred dollars? Is it time to sell…
Yeah, it’s easy to feel like a freaking superhero when you’re rolling fast, hard, and free. You might even look pretty awesome. But just wait till the next morning. Last night, Dutch DJ and crazy rave-y ringmaster Laidback Luke brought his Super You & Me party to LIV — not…
He combed his hair, bought a week’s supply of Binaca, rented a tux, scored a corsage, and blew up a giant freaking balloon. And now dapper DJ, experimental electronic producer, and avowed Sunday Schooler Frivolous (AKA Daniel Gardner) would like to celebrate Ultra week and the release of his new…
After this initially funny article in the New York Times, parties continue to roll on in South Beach at World’s Fanciest Parking Garage — i.e. the Herzog & de Meuron-designed 1111 building at the corner of Lincoln and Alton Roads. To be fair, for a parking garage, it’s pretty beautiful.Yesterday…
Amid the deep woofs of Miami bass and the resonating pitch of piercing house, one New York duo plans to make sweet love to the sound systems at Ultra Music Festival’s Live Stage. Meet Holy Ghost!, the pair responsible for your favorite slow-dance disco track, “Hold On.” And this Friday,…
It’s been only about three months since beloved local quirk-pop queen Rachel Goodrich left you, me, and the Magic City for the big, bright floodlights of La La Land. And already we miss her so much. We watched helplessly as Rachel picked out her favorite records, stuffed her suitcase, and…
This weekend, Bicentennial Park will be flooded by an international wave of beatmakers and pookie heads for Ultra Music Festival. But just a half-mile west of downtown’s loudest outdoor fiesta, Shit Robot will pop his Miami cherry Friday at the Vagabond, two days before hitting Ultra’s Heineken Dome. Marcus Lambkin,…
Miami Chum Bucket grand opening March 26
Peter Murphy is the pale, skeletal baritone whose career fronting Bauhaus in the late ’70s and early ’80s jump-started a movement toward darkness and beautiful pain in rock music. Bauhaus’s hit single “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” is the template for much modern goth, while the band’s cameo in the 1983 vampire…
Critical condemnation and popular adulation go alarmingly hand-in-hand in the world of rock music. Often, the same qualities lead those opposing camps to their positions, and such is certainly the case for ’70s and ’80s progressive rock stalwart Rush. Fond of science fiction and Ayn Rand, the group often worked…
You’ve slept. You’ve showered. You’ve done a little bit of pre-drinking while dancing naked around your apartment. You’ve finally slipped into some clean clothes. And now you’re starting to feel like the time is right to strip down again and sacrifice your Ultra week virginity. So why not head to…
Last night at Mansion, Italian electro-house DJ Benny Benassi warmed up his turntables — and our town — for his performance at the Ultra Music Festival. The world-renowned musician, maybe still best known for his 2002 hit “Satisfaction,” counts British singer Gary Go and the infamous Chris Brown among his…
Once upon a time, Chicago-bred, L.A.-based DJ/producer Johnny Love was best known on underground dance floors as half of Guns and Bombs. That project, as the name implies, was all about going hard and going big, full of searing chainsaw basslines and “subtlety” turned into a four-letter word. At the…
Let’s be prepared, beat freaks. There is absolutely no reason to wait till we’re trapped at the bottom of a 1000-foot k-hole to start planning our Ultra Music Festival itinerary. So before digging out our dosage, stripping down to our rubber underwear, and temporarily leaving behind these human husks we…
Giacomo Gates is undoubtedly one the most exciting and articulate male jazz vocalists on the scene right now. He is a cool cat who embodies the eternal swagger of jazz. However, for the first forty years of his life, Giacomo Gates couldn’t have been farther from hep life. As a…
Earlier this week, we previewed the upcoming Visionquest label showcase at the Shelborne this Friday. The label/production quartet of illustrious Detroit DJ-masterminds Ryan Crosson, Lee Curtiss, Shaun Reeves, and Seth Troxler owns the international hot tip right now, having put out Benoit & Sergio’s chart-topping Where The Freaks Have No…
