Last Night: Bass Sessions at Nocturnal

Tracy Block Craze ripped a sick never-ending set at Nocturnal Wednesday, March 26 which had beat lovers gettin’ their groove on from the window to the wall. Last Night: Bass Sessions at Nocturnal Better Than: The best ‘90s booty mix you ever bought Downtown Miami’s Nocturnal night club certainly had…

VIP Badge Grants Access to Best Chill Spot

Today: The Armani Exchange Music Lounge at the Hotel Raleigh Penthouse Better than: Last night’s hangover from WMC kickoff gigs and jet lag combined VIP constitutes access to a slew of stellar events, but during WMC, being “Very Important” grants you access to one of the choicest chill spots on…

Witch Board Blues

The legend is such: Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, six-string slinger and otherworldly composer for The Mars Volta, was one day rummaging around a junk shop in Jerusalem when he stumbled upon a Ouija board. Never one to pass up a chance at cosmic fate, he bought the thing and then brought it…

Twilight Zone

Soulja Boy might know how to “Crank Dat,” but Detroit’s DJ Godfather still had to crank the kid up several notches — and maybe Superman that ho — for his unofficial remix. Not a problem; really, it was all in a day’s work for the head of longtime ghettotech label…

Acceptable in the ’00s

Some critics just don’t get it. Or maybe they just don’t get it enough. ‘Cause if they did, they wouldn’t get miffed about Calvin Harris’s sexy two-step. Sure, the cat swings with more than a little LCD Soundsystem; yes, his debt to fellow Scotsman Mylo is self-evident; and he’d undoubtedly…

dirtybird records

Though an official label for only three years, dirtybird records and its quad crew of freq-y producer/DJs are no fledglings. San Francisco-based Claude VonStroke, Justin Martin, Christian Martin, and Worthy have been flapping their wings since around 2000. They first built a Yay Area reputation pushing air as support DJs…

Gui Boratto

At a time when São Paulo, Brazil, gets a whole lot of ink in the hipster press for its street-hewn favela beats, city resident Guilherme Boratto is focused on an entirely different sound altogether. In fact it’s one that often has him mistaken for a native of a whole different…

Daz-I-Kue

The Dirty South has a fascinating new musical addition, with Londoner Daz-I-Kue now dividing his time between the UK and Atlanta. This should open up a world of possibilities for a fellow already known across the pond for creating complex yet insanely grooving records. They soar past other so-called black…

Damian Lazarus

Before settling into his current and hopefully permanent role as a producer and DJ, Damian Lazarus wore a few different hats in the music and media businesses. In the early Nineties, he was an editor for London style mag Dazed and Confused, and followed that journey with a sidestep into…

Amp Fiddler

Hailing from Detroit, this singer and keyboard player is more like a man with a mission. Amp Fiddler travels in a multitude of directions, challenging the listener as he switches among soul, funk, and dance, keeping a keen eye on the present and future of music while still paying homage…

Night of the Weirds

Inspired by a subculture that has taken years to coalesce into a shared identity, the free monthly Night of the Weirds was first mounted at Churchill’s in August 2007. Planned for the first Tuesday of every month, the event was created by Jeff Rollason of www.nartworld.com and has since been…

Señor Flavio

Argentina’s Flavio Mandinga, one of the founding members of Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, has crafted a solo project that explores various sonic textures and defies genre classification. Simply listen to “Ministra,” a rocksteady-tempo track seemingly inspired by early UB40 with a touch of psychedelics. Later comes “Polaroid 66,” which draws from…

Fuck Buttons

Despite the eyebrow-raising moniker’s aggressive overtones, the Bristol, England duo of Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power wants little more than to give your cerebellum a therapeutic, thoroughly intense sound massage. With Street Horrrsing, these Fuck Buttons engineer a sort of reverse, photonegative, canary-in-a-coal-mine scenario, threading strands of coruscating and…

Jamshied Sharifi

Your stomach grumbles as the office clock ticks slowly toward lunch hour. A co-worker is oblivious to the racket made by her speakerphone, and her fave totally-Eighties radio station has played Madonna so many times you feel your mind will go straight over the borderline. At your wit’s end, you…

Frightened Rabbit

Basic human behavior dictates you walk backward for one of two reasons: You’re either arguing with someone or acting like a dunderhead. In “My Backwards Walk,” Frightened Rabbit vocalist Scott Hutchison is squabbling, all right, over personal shortcomings and relationship gaffes. Problem is, at any moment you expect the Glasgow…

Sound Advice

The real joy of a music festival is discovery, and the 10th edition of Ultra offers plenty of opportunities for it, whether through presenting familiar favorites in a new way or introducing emerging artists and DJs. And although we’d never dream of imposing on that wonderful feeling of figuring it…

Kickin’ It Old-School

Old-school, for people in their twenties to forties, is all about memories of growing up, from block parties and your uncle’s Soul Train moves to Miami Vice-sytle silk shirts and Rev Run’s Adidas Superstars. But old-school doesn’t fit into a genre or on a shelf at the record store —…

Calvin Harris loves Rick Ross and T-Pain

If Scottish singing sensation Calvin Harris is not the hardest working man in electro-land, by the end of this weekend he will be, because the cat’s got three – count ‘em – shows coming up in two days. New Times took a quick phoner from the man before he crossed…

Last Night: The Moody Blues at Hard Rock Live

The Moody Blues Tuesday, March 25 Hard Rock Live The Moody Blues created an indelible imprint in the annals of classic rock, having gained a generation’s eternal affection. After their initial incarnation as a blues band – and an early hit called “Go Now”– they morphed into the leading purveyors…

WMC Preview: Interview with M.A.N.D.Y.!

M.A.N.D.Y. and Booka Shade’s hit 2005 track “Body Language” M.A.N.D.Y., hailing from Berlin, isn’t female — nor is it even one person. Rather, it’s the purposefully ambiguous moniker of the DJ/producer duo of Patrick Bodmer and Philipp Jung. Longtime pals since boyhood, over the years they moved from throwing warehouse…

WMC Preview: Q&A with Anja Schneider

In this week’s Winter Music Conference guide, we summarized why you should check out the white-hot techno DJ, and now label impresario, Anja Schneider. Click here to read the article. Of course, there were a bunch of interview outtakes, so here’s the full Q&A for the super fans. Scroll to…