It's eight o'clock in the evening. A three hour, once a week workshop just let out at Florida Atlantic University. The students spill out of the classrooms and disappear. Suddenly, the central nervous system of FAU becomes a cricket littered vacuum. In the video game corridor, at any moment, it seems zombies or yetis could scuttle through. And just when all senses are on heightened alert, the urge to dance suddenly takes over.
"That's us," admits Jay Lara, one half of Deep Therapy and co-founder of Therapy Session along with Dan Polimeni, a radio show that airs on Florida Atlantic University's Owl Radio. "Chances are, if you've found yourself on the breezeway late at night, and you're hearing dance music, that's us."
Lara has been regularly broadcasting from Owl Radio for the past six years, inviting guests from the depths of electronic music like Basstian, Matt Otashi, and featuring Diego Martinelli this Saturday, but Therapy Sessions isn't where it ends for Lara.
His investment in the genre reaches far beyond the confines of station walls as he partners with Shayne Pilpel and twenty other names in South Florida's experimental and electronic dance music scene to provide Soundbox, a free of charge, twelve hour marathon celebration of the best track dealers in the area. Lara though isn't comfortable with that geographical limitation.
"It's unfair to say 'the best DJs in south Florida' because really these are some of the best guys out there. Period," Lara says referring to acts like Ed Whitty, German Garcia, and Renato Lopez.
Soundbox is no ordinary event, though a bit more ordinary if you consider the odd hours most EDM (Lara doesn't like that term either) events take place. Scheduled to take place this Sunday at Il Bacio in Delray Beach, Soundbox defies what's come of the industry. "It's unheard of these days to have an event like this free of charge. Promoters these days are asking for upwards of two hundred dollars for some event like this, but this is our community coming together to combat politics like this."
The politics Lara refers to are the same politics any good natured DJ would put on blast, given the opportunity, "The guys playing are asking for a lot of money and the guys promoting are making sure what's played is what's going to make that money. The guys that follow that formula are the guys that you'll see continuously on the flyers."
Prideful that the event won't be catering to the regular partygoer, Lara emphasizes that the goal of the event, in its fifth incarnation, is to mimic the feel of the radio show, "Just a collection of musicians and DJs plugging away every week to play some really great underground sounds."
Working together with veterans of events like Ultra Music Festival and Day Glo, Soundbox will not only stand apart from every other event this weekend in sound and scene, but surely leave those attending in a "sunshine state of mind."
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