Check the Credits

He boasts production credits for everyone from Lil Wayne, Fat Joe, and Juelz Santana to Smitty and even Junior Reid. He almost strictly uses samples, plus the heaviest percussion sounds this side of ?uestlove and Travis Barker. And he’s only 26 years old, born and raised in South Florida. Yep,…

Del the Funky Homosapien

Del the Funky Homosapien is an outer-space hip-hop trailblazer, helping to pioneer a weird-for-its-own-sake rap style by focusing on absurdist rhymes and sci-fi storytelling. Though a cousin of Ice Cube’s and a onetime member of the Da Lench Mob, the Bay Area-based Del abandoned his mentors’ gangster tropes but maintained…

Gary Louris

Golden Smog and Jayhawks alum Gary Louris has a knack for crafting heartbreaking yet inspiring pop songs. At his best, on Jayhawks tunes like “Save It for a Rainy Day,” “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” and “It’s Up to You” — plus all the incredible tracks he wrote with…

Kronos Quartet and Wu Man

San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet is globally renowned for championing the works of contemporary classical composers. Though Terry Riley’s profile isn’t as high as that of colleagues Philip Glass and Steve Reich, he is one of the key 1960s innovators of minimalism, that classical genre based upon variations on repetition. (In…

Thrash Tales

If you Google Louisville hardcore punk band Coliseum, you’ll find several dozen reviewers tripping over themselves to compare the power trio’s overtly political, vitriolic, venomous speed rock to British thrash pioneers Motörhead and hardcore stalwarts Discharge. And as the saying goes, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. “Those are probably the…

Rachel Brown

Contemporary R&B quite often seems like it’s become a victim of its own name. So it’s good to see a fresh face adding something different to the sound; the fact that she’s local makes it that much more enjoyable. Singer/songwriter Rachel Brown is keeping things grown-up and respectfully sexy on…

The Kingston Kid

Why is Janice Turner grinning so widely? It’s just after 7 p.m., 10 days before Christmas 2007, and she’s backstage at the Y-100 Jingle Ball show at the BankAtlantic Center. There’s a bunch of performances due to kick off in about a half-hour, but right now, folks are squeezed into…

Since Today’s a Voting Day

…And folks in Ohio, Texas,Vermont, and Rhode Island are headed to the polls, it only makes since to play some election music. Here’s some Obama love from the Lone Star state. — Jonathan Cunningham…

Concert Review: 15th Annual Caribbean Festival at Bayfront Park

Ky-mani Marley rocking in front of thousands of fans. 15th Annual Caribbean Festival AKA The Bob Marley Festival Saturday, March 1, 2008 Bayfront Park Amphitheater Better than: Staying home and listening to Exodus on repeat. Over the weekend, one of Miami’s most treasured music festivals returned to the city for…

Jacob Jeffries Band to Play SXSW

Austin’s mega music festival, South By Southwest (SXSW) is almost here and there’s a bunch of great bands from around the world that should be headed to Texas for it next week. Last year was a special treat as the Good, the Bad, and the Queen seemed to descend on…

Monday Afternoon Music Fix

By ANDY VIHSTADT Casino King For those of you holding out for the follow-up to LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver, Stereogum’s got something to hold you over. The song, “Big Ideas,” will appear in 21, the film adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House. The O.S.T. hits stores March…

Gipsy Kings Tonight at Mizner Park

The Gipsy Kings didn’t set out to redefine world music. They didn’t intend to scandalize the world of traditional Flamenco music through their inclusion of pop instrumentation and rock song structures. They just wanted to make pretty girls dance, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The history of the…

Mudhoney presale tickets now available

Chalk another victory up for the super-cool promoter folks at New Art School. Their latest coup? The legendary Mudhoney!! I don’t want to use the “g” word (ok, grunge) here, but they were one of the first rad bands to come out of Seattle in the late Eighties/early Nineties. And…

The U.S. Military Torture Mix Tape

(Via Idolator). Liberal mag Mother Jones did us all the favor of putting together an imeem streaming play list of songs used during military prison interrogations, according to various leaked documents. And I have to say — I, too, would crack pretty quickly if forced to listen to “Babylon” by…

Why Bother With Real-Life Singers…

…when you can use VOCALOID, a totally fascinating, vaguely unsettling singing synthesizer program from – where else? – Japan. It doesn’t just do the robot voice box or vocoder sounds – this one actually sings, mainly through the reedy female voice of a fictional character, Miku Hatsune (based, however, on…

José González at the Manuel Artime

José González is happy to headline a world beat concert for Miami’s Rhythm Foundation and Poplife, but the Swedish-Argentine folk rocker is not so content to discuss the intricacies of his “Hiscandic” heritage. It is what it is, he implies, and only a minimal reflection of how he chooses to…

The Prodigal Piano Man

“When Liza found out that I could sing and dance, she pulled me off the piano,” Johnny Rodgers recalls. “Now I play one of the Williams Brothers in her show based on Kay Thompson.” The Miami native, taking a quick break from working on his latest album, is speaking with…

More than Semi-Pro

You’d think that, after having won six Grammys, Andre “3000” Benjamin, of hip-hop superduo OutKast, would take a break and relax a bit, but the rub is, of course, you don’t win a half-dozen Grammys without forgetting what a vacation means. Lately he’s been moonlighting as an actor with a…

Ghost Stroke

With only a handful of live performances to date, local act Ghost Stroke is already making waves. The quartet comes fully equipped with a seasoned vocalist, a Berklee alum guitarist, a Warner Bros. veteran as a bassist, and a drummer with a Ringo Starr style. Influenced by artists like Tom…