Hyper Miami Presents Umru Summer at The Boombox

Underground organizers and DJs are stepping up to reshape Miami's music landscape by embracing experimental sounds that locals rarely hear. For the Hyper Miami collective, 2025 is poised to be their breakout year. They have been hosting meticulously planned monthly raves since January, featuring artists like GRRL, Petal Supply, and Girl_IRL. Their next event is headlined by Estonian-American pop and EDM stalwart Umru, a boundary-breaking artist known for contributing to the discographies of Charli xcx, Slayyyter, and Underscores.These talents champion genres like hyperpop, electro, and hard drum.

In Miami's world-class electronic music scene, tech house and reggaeton dominate. Hyper Miami shifts that balance by platforming unconventional electronic sounds. They curate immersive, audio-visual experiences that reflect hyperpop's maximalist abundance.

Over coffee in Downtown Miami, Hyper Miami's founder Violet Forest explains the collective's origins and goals to New Times.

Forest started throwing parties as a teenager. Originally from Miami, she moved to Illinois to pursue an MFA in Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. There, she was exposed to DIY culture. "When I was in Chicago, basically, I got super influenced," she remembers.

She co-founded art collective Cybertwee in 2014, finding collaborators equally committed to creative experimentation. "We wouldn't just throw shows. We also had an art and technology angle," she mentions.

Forest immersed herself in Chicago's demoscene, a subculture centered around audiovisual experiments. "You have a party or gathering where everyone brings their prototypes and tries them out." She learned to value sound and visuals equally.


Parties thrown by video jockeys became another source of inspiration."The visuals, VR in the corner. It was on that immersive level. And that's the direction I'm trying to take Hyper Miami in," Forest explains.

Hyper Miami rave's feature painstaking attention to detail. Lighting, carefully mapped projections, and LCDs transform venues into full-spectrum sensory spaces. Forest and her team autonomously build visuals to align with each DJ's set and persona, demonstrating a high level of trust in the collective.

Forest's visual approach was informed by working with creative agencies and art galleries, like Chicago's Someoddpilot. "I took it from a curatorial perspective, like how can I put this person in a solo show that's almost retrospective?," and she continues "At our HyPeR.EXE show in January, it was super foggy. It was a huge problem. I love when the colors pop. By the time we got to GRRL, it was so visually striking because we knew what to do at this point. We knew, don't use fog because the pictures come out dark and muddy. We want crisp, vivid purple colors," Forest says, referencing GRRL's Miami Music Week debut.

"Forest's Berlin stint also became deeply formative. "It's such an old city, and the buildings are so crazy. The idea of raving in an industrial space with two floors and five rooms is just something that Miami does not have."

She recalls Aphex Twin's 2017 Day for Night performance in a two-story post office. "The artists were outside, but inside, there was amazing immersive art. The kind you see at Superblue, but not at a rave."

These experiences shaped Forest's guiding principle to build something new. "You know, there's also the aspect of selling tickets and all that shit, that's the business side of it. But the reason why I do it is for my art. For the love of it," she says.


Though she leads the collective, Forest depends on her team. "I can't do it without the other people because they encourage me, and they push me, and they say, 'hey, no, that's not as good as you think it is.'"

To promote Umru's upcoming show, Forest designed a landing page for Hyper Miami's Instagram. It features a rotating holographic card under an embedded Soundcloud player, styled like an employee ID with Umru's passport photo. A clock countdown ticks away at the bottom, atop the Shotgun ticket link. "I'm trying to bring back that web component," she says, referencing her influential net art forays, and some help from her boyfriend.

Forest connected with the owner of newly resurrected the Boombox, Ricardo "Mango" Cano, and it became the perfect venue for Umru Summer. It's where she's headed after the interview to sort out the rave's visual components. "I think we're gonna start to get a little more experimental with the real show," Forest reveals. She hopes to integrate Raspberry Pi-powered interactive installations, more sophisticated lighting, and more advanced projections.

Forrest also wants to embrace happy hardcore and gabber, high-BPM genres featuring the same unrelenting intensity found in hyperpop.

Hyper Miami reflects Miami's potential to reinvent itself as an electronic music capital, embracing the cutting edge while hosting respected originators. The collective ventures outside the scope of a typical Miami party series. As a result, a fresh blueprint for Miami's musical identity emerges.

Hyper Miami Presents Umru Summer. WithTweetpea, Nezerat, and Mango. 10 p.m. Saturday, August 2, at the Boombox, 4447 SW 75th Ave, Miami; Tickets start at $35 via shotgun.live.