Flashback to the mid-Nineties — when daresay, Depeche Mode and the Cure were regularly getting commercial airplay. A sea of black-clad Gothic clubgoers swept about the dance floor to the slow, morose sounds of Morrissey’s “Suedehead” or picked it up with the harder industrial beats of Front 242’s “Headhunter.” Any…
Like Godzilla and Mothra, Bogdan Raczynski was transformed in Tokyo. The Polish-American expat/sonic terrorist had no intention of overturning the world of electronica while a foreign-exchange student in Nagoya, Japan, skipping classes to make music. “It was just a bit of fun,” Raczynski shrugs. “It was kind of a joke…
Never has electronic music sounded warmer or more human than Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. Owen Ashworth uses equipment that could be considered antique (SK-1 or MT-100 models of Casio keyboards) to provide a humming, squeaking, buzzing backdrop for his tales of pained love. When he opens for the Scottish,…
Don’t say anything about the sophomore curse to Colombian singer-songwriter Juanes. Don’t even mention the followup jinx to Panamanian power trio Rabanes. Each act put out disc numero dos this month, and from the sound of the new material, neither one would have any idea what you were talking about…
Peering at a shiny object through a shop window. In the late 1930s, a teenaged Jean Baptiste Thielemans found himself doing that one day during a school field trip in his native Belgium. And that’s how it all began. A couple of francs lighter, he was the proud owner of…
Miranda July is trapped onstage. The Portland performance artist is stuck up on a catwalk, sandwiched between two video screens like a specimen pinned to glass, her every move choreographed to the live score composed by DJ and microbiologist Zac Love. Her trademark puff of platinum hair, an apt hybrid…
When the black-clad members of Cadillac Blindside walk onstage and light enough candelabras to stock a horror movie set, it’s clear this is no run-of-the-mill emo-punk band. By the time the band’s frenetic antics and sonic boom blow enough wind to snuff the candles, the skin of the exhausted backpack…
Forget about Spider-Man and his hots for his high school honey. And if you’re looking to Star Wars for love interest, well, look again. For truly otherworldly passion among superhumans turn to the Patakin, the stories of the dalliances and daredevil antics of the orishas, the deities of the once-powerful…
The Lincoln Theatre is intimate enough that everyone in the audience can watch artistic director Michael Tilson Thomas’s expressions — they tell the story. His enthusiasm and excitement about music are written all over his face, as when he introduced an evening of works by Soviet-era composers, part of the…
It seems shortsighted to begrudge the rain in a year following such a serious drought, but if the rain had to fall so infrequently, why did it always seem to pour on the Rhythm Foundation’s outdoor summer concerts? Colombia’s vallenato king, accordionist Alvaro Meza, was completely washed out of the…
She first dazzled the world, or at least her fifth-grade class, with her rendition of “Be a Lion” in an elementary school production of The Wiz. That might explain her courage. After scoring as a dance diva with “Miracle” in 1998, Henry has opted for a much more challenging career…
The Lincoln Theatre is best known as the home of the New World Symphony (NWS), Michael Tilson Thomas’s “training” outfit, who regularly blow their older Philharmonic peers out of the water. But as anyone knows who’s caught a concert here when musicians of the NWS have hung their strings up…
Guitarist Josh Sonntag and singer-songwriter Catty Tasso make for the perfect rock-and-roll marriage — literally. When Tasso advertised for an axe man on a Guitar Center bulletin board in 1999, Sonntag offered her not only a pair of the best plucking hands in town but also his hand in matrimony…
Spend enough time on the Beach and it can seem as if every sound system marches in lockstep. In 1999 it appeared that the music police were practically forcing every restaurant in town to play the Gipsy Kings — and nothing else. Meanwhile the clubs were filled with trance’s aural…
What better source for the ethereal strains of orchestral music than an institution of higher learning? And with the recent death of the commercial classical format at the former WTMI-FM (93.1), but for the grace of University of Miami administrators there went any classical music on the Miami-Dade dial. Now…
In a pop world where satisfaction is measured by how long a song sticks in listeners’ brains, nothing is stickier than a Shufly hook. That’s due to the songwriting duo of Scott Smith, whose short, sharp lyrics always seem truthful without every word being troublingly profound, and lead guitarist Mike…
People sometimes wonder just how New Times selects “Best of Miami” winners. It is a highly scientific process devised long ago by a select committee of experts and requires the participation of more than 100 judges from around the world who take up residence in the Magic City for the…
Think of sound as a galaxy, a shimmering play of lights. Think of guitars, horns, and keyboards as so many sparkling arrows, so many zodiac signs, pointing to the glowing nebula of Rocky Ordoñez’s and Erica Boynton’s angelic voices. That is how you would see the sound that Christopher Moll,…
Heartily pounding out the rousing “St. Louis Blues” or gently improvising on the tranquil bossa nova melodies of Antonio Carlos Jobim, eminent pianist Eddie Higgins always puts his indelible stamp on the keys. The Massachusetts-born and raised musician gravitated to Chicago to study at Northwestern University and stayed twenty years…
Okay, so it’s not an album, it’s a three-song EP, but then, as they say, it’s not the length that matters, it’s what you do with it. And this little disc is more an act of protest than a digital artifact. Dismayed by the faux-phenomenon surrounding Brit crit darlings the…
Most of Miami’s rap hopefuls dream of the day their big break arrives in the form of a major-label record contract. Once they’ve signed on the dotted line, so their thinking goes, everything else is automatic: fame and fortune, groupies and gold teeth. Right? Not always. Take local emcee X-Con,…
You’ll have to provide your own sweat, smoke, and spilled mojitos, but this live document of the Allstars residency at Hoy Como Ayer’s Fuácata party (edited and spliced together in dizzying Miles Davis Bitches Brew fashion) is still one of the slinkiest set of grooves around. DJ Le Spam (that’s…
