UPDATE: Medical examiner report showed that Adonis Peña Escoto passed away due to “acute alpha-Pyrrolidinopentiophenone (alpha-PVP) toxicity.” Alpha-PVP is a type of synthetic bath salt sometimes sold as “gravel.” A young Ultra attendee has died under mysterious circumstances. Adonis Escoto, 21, passed away in a car parked near the music…
Hey, Ravers … Arrested? Apprehended? Busted? Collared? Pinched? Just call the Law Offices of Chad Piotrowski. He’s a former state prosecutor and he’s giving away legal help to party people in need. “Did you get in trouble at Ultra? Do you need a criminal attorney?” he asks in a Vine…
Two days after a horrifying trampling incident that has city officials, including Mayor Tomás Regalado, calling for an end to Miami as host city of Ultra, the massive EDM festival carried on like, well, a massive EDM festival. Throughout Sunday afternoon, thousands of revelers — many in colorful body or…
Beat freaks dreaming about Ultra tix are usually shit outta luck for months before the fest even swings opens its kandi-covered gates. In 2011, UMF ran out of tickets with a full 34 days left until the festival was scheduled to get goin’. And the next year, Ultra passes disappeared…
The 305 helped invent modern dance music. In the late 1970s, Henry Stone’s TK Records, headquartered in Hialeah, pumped out disco hit after disco hit from KC and the Sunshine Band, even introducing the word booty into the pop lexicon. Today, Miami party music is still making asses shake. And…
No matter what you tell yourself, there is absolutely no way to catch every act you want to see at Ultra Music Festival. Our advice: Find a stage (or two) with lineups that you like and hang ’round till you’re ready to call it a night. Another piece of advice:…
Go, raver. Go, raver. Go. Chug a Red Bull. Down a vial of Five-Hour elixir. Pop a packet of Jelly Belly energy beans. The Winter Music Conference and Miami Music Week marathon starts now. And it doesn’t end till next month. Here are the 20 best parties during WMC and…
With the mayhem of Ultra Music Festival and the endless parties at local nightclubs, it’s easy to forget that none of Miami’s March EDM madness would be happening if weren’t for Winter Music Conference. This year, the WMC list of events includes a Q&A with Hardwell, a panel on the…
You don’t have to be an EDM junkie to know that Ultra Music Festival brings some of the best DJs on the planet to the Magic City every year. (Eric Prydz, Carl Cox, and David Guetta sound familiar?) But one thing that’s got us beyond ecstatic about the 2014 fest…
Hey, you party people. Yeah, you. It’s time for Ultra Music Festival again. And guess who’s back to blow our minds. It’s our favorite Aussies, Empire of the Sun’s Luke Steele and Nick Littlemore. They dazzled the Ultra crowd in 2011, playing tracks off their debut album, Walking on a…
As the esteemed host of BBC Radio 1’s Essential Mix and Essential Selection, Pete Tong has kept a finger pressed on the pulse of global dance music for the better part of two decades. Though broadcasting from Europe, where electronic dance music dominates the mainstream airwaves, Tong has seen his…
Ever wondered why Winter Music Conference and Miami Music Week is held every March in the Magic City? Well, because it’s warm and sunny in the MIA while the rest of the country is digging out from under yet another late-winter snowfall. As we shake sand out of our pockets…
Meet your new sifu. His name is Laidback Luke. And though he may be most famous as an EDM megastar, this friendly Dutch dude also happens to be a kick-ass kung fu fighter. At last year’s “Olympics of kung fu,” as Luke describes the world championships in Hong Kong, he…
Sure, you could spend your entire Winter Music Conference and Miami Music Week in landlocked clubs. But why not don a kandi mask, a “Keep Calm and Rave On” muscle tee, and an LED lifesaver in the middle of beat-freaking Biscayne Bay! All aboard the party boat! Found at Sea…
For true 305ers, Winter Music Conference and Miami Music Week can seem like tourist hour. Oh, so you wanna come to South Beach, watch a bunch of national acts, and then go home to the shitty snow and talk about how much you “love Miami”? But if you’re lookin’ for…
When you hear “family reunion,” you might imagine a barbecue in a park attended by dozens of screaming children and an uncle who drinks too much. Some crappy boombox blasts radio tunes, piercing the boredom like a plastic spork through mac ‘n’ cheese. But what if we took away the…
Ten years into Crosstown Rebels’ run, there’s no denying the indelible mark that Damian Lazarus’ label has made on electronic dance music. In a way, a spot on the label’s roster has become a rite of passage on the underground house and techno scene, with the label having broken international…
Trippy visuals and live music go together like drugs and rock ‘n’ roll — or bpm and EDM. In the beginning (the ’60s, when else?), there were Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests, featuring San Francisco’s Grateful Dead and full-on psychedelic film projections splashed across the walls like shamanistic flower-power visions. Meanwhile,…
If you still need proof that Miami has grown an underground electronic dance music scene to rival those of international meccas like London and Berlin, look no further than the success of Underground Story. Five years ago, it was practically inconceivable for promoters to pull off an underground house and…
If there was one party during last year’s Winter Music Conference and Miami Music Week that everyone kept shouting out on social media, it had to be the Red Bull Guest House. In its inaugural edition, the event proved to be no joke, offering four days of rooftop pool parties…
While uhntz-uhntz junkies across the Magic City are all pumped up and ready to rock their kandi masks at the 282 parties going down during Miami Music Week, Massive Ideas’ founder Anders Scherberger is hyped up for a different kind of bash: the grand opening of The Nest. Popping up…
Miami is the new Las Vegas. That’s something strip club magnate Dennis DeGori, a man who’s made a fortune in Sin City nightlife, recently told us. And though his new local venture, E11even Miami, doesn’t appear on Nightclub & Bar Media Group’s Top 100 2014 list (probably because it didn’t…
