Ready, Aim, Fuego

How many times has it happened? You set the radio to scan the FM dial and — BAM — you catch a snatch of some really wild music. Something so raw and so out there that for one split second you take back everything you ever thought about Latin radio…

New Day Rising

It was an event that ended on a high note, with a third of Soho Lounge’s capacity crowd inspired to break dance on mats in the center of the club. At the end of the concert, legendary Bronx DJ Afrika Bambaataa, who was headlining that night, said it best: “That’s…

Rock Candy

You know you’d like to say something special to your sweetie, but you just can’t find the right words or the right tone to tickle her ears. This year why not let one of the masters whisper sweet nothings for you, as Valentine’s Day weekend brings not one but two…

The Clubbed Show

It happens to all of us at one time or another. An overwhelming feeling comes over us that suggests we are living inside elaborate theatrical productions that we mistake for being real life. Granted, everything about our nighttime rites of passage seems more dreamlike when caught up in high-speed alcohol…

Arabian Exchange

This Thursday, the Mid-Eastern Dance Exchange (MEDE) is hosting its seventh annual Orientalia festival, a yearly event that draws hundreds of people to see belly-dance performances and participate in workshops with the featured dancers. But this year Orientalia comes with a twist. The event will also kick off a nationwide…

Original Nuttahs

Drum and bass doesn’t leave much white space for the listener. It fills the air without pause: drum fills layered on top of one another, breakbeats at a breakneck frequency, and a splatter of chest-pumping bass that can stop someone from breathing. This is drum and bass around the world,…

George Acosta

Miami DJ George Acosta is a soldier who plays straight-up, balls-to-the-wall trance and nothing else. His latest mix compilation Touched is a two-CD cannon ready to bombard stereo systems everywhere with catchy, club-worthy tracks that flow easily yet roll with just enough edge to avoid becoming watered-down radio fodder. The…

Delgados

Glasgow’s Delgados write songs like Grimm Brothers fairy tales. From first album Domestiques onward, band co-founders Emma Pollock and Alun Woodward have played the innocents abroad, their sweet vocal melodies a bread-crumb trail through Sonic Youth-inspired guitar pyrotechnics and, beginning with 2000’s The Great Eastern, an enchanted forest of shimmering…

Molotov

Contrary to popular belief, the Spanish word puto doesn’t mean “fag.” Only a homosexual who also happens to be an asshole is a puto. But puto is anything that’s bad, wrong. For example if you accused Molotov of homophobia for its 1997 hit “Puto” (which repeated a “Puuuuuto-Puuuuuto” chorus dozens…

DJ Cam

As a white French hip-hop producer, DJ Cam’s recordings have been alternately categorized by beat heads as trip-hop and downtempo, or acid jazz, anything other than the music to which he frequently and unashamedly pays homage. In fact his mid-Nineties albums like Mad Blunted Jazz mostly consisted of breaks already…

The Rhythm Got Clarence

As one of the most prominent members of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, Clarence Clemons blows his sax with all the low-down power of waves crashing upon the Jersey shore, even though he moved to West Palm Beach several years ago. No matter, says the sax man, “I bring Asbury…

Lost Sounds

With a setting Sun, a dead King, a reformed Killer, and empty Stax, Memphis has spent the past few decades coasting on the fumes of its musical reputation. After making the world suffer through countless garage bands rehashing the same old, same old, Memphis has come up with Lost Sounds:…

Anti-aging Treatment

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING EDITORIAL MAY CONTAIN MATERIAL THAT IS OFFENSIVE TO READERS WHO TAKE THIS COLUMN WAY TOO SERIOUSLY. With your existence edging closer and closer toward that elephant’s graveyard in clubland, a place somewhere between early-evening tea parties and Saturday visits to the movies with your fortysomething women friends,…

Further Education

The last half of 2000 was a bittersweet purgatory for “Big” Chad Neptune. The year-in-the-making full-length debut, The Moon Is Down, of his band, Further Seems Forever, was finally completed. To celebrate, the Pompano Beach outfit took a month-long jaunt through the Midwest and Southeast to preview the material. But…

Bed Heads

It’s high noon in the historic district of Delray Beach. Two members of the Yoko Theory, Nathan Farnham and Henri Lemaire, haven’t been awake for long, so they’re a little punchy. But after a brief exchange about wearing panties onstage and whether New Times can print the word “fuck,” the…

Oscar G & Ralph Falcon

Whether they’re working as MURK, Funky Green Dogs, or simply themselves, Miami DJ/producers Oscar Gaetan and Ralph Falcon have had a significant impact on dance music, winning over fans around the world with their signature dark house sound. Their latest mix compilation, Bangin’ Progressive Beats, finds them staying with the…

DJ Spinna

Hip-hop’s history — a dialectic forged by battling, boasting, and street-corner heroics — is a long-raging tug of war between MCs and producers. Throughout much of the late Nineties, the lyricists had the upper hand, prompting the British label BBE (short for “Barely Breaking Even”) to launch The Beat Generation,…

D-Styles

In an age when albums by hip-hop DJs seem to downplay turntablist techniques in favor of a mash-up mix-tape aesthetic, D-Styles takes a bold dive into uncharted waters with his debut album, Phantazmagorea. The former Invisibl Skratch Pikl (and current Beat Junkie) cultivates a dark, esoteric vibe with both his…

Ry Cooder & Manuel Galbán

Ry Cooder almost didn’t get to make Mambo Sinuendo. Partly to blame, because of its megasuccess, was his Buena Vista Social Club LP, the best-selling album in world-music history. Indeed Cooder was this close to being denied his latest experimental excursion into Cuban music. Produced in Havana in 1996, Buena…

Sand Song

The thump of rolling bodies and whoosh of sand poured over a dancer’s head form part of the soundtrack to the entrancing one-hour piece Figninto, performed by the Salia ni Seydou dance company. Two musicians accompany the bare-torsoed movements of the troupe from Burkina Faso. Sitting before the three male…

Manic Mondays

Funny thing about Mondays in Partyville — when the rest of the world is working up the strength to recover from a weekend of wild woolliness, things here are just starting to heat up all over again. Career partiers just keep on going and going and going and … True…

Good Shit

“We play in Miami all the time, we’ve even toured Europe, but we’ve never played in Fort Lauderdale,” says Juan Rozas, 28, singer and guitarist for the Argentine-born, long-time Miami-based alt-rock outfit Tereso, a name with a history of its own. Maybe as a reflection of the members’ attitude toward…