Flyer of the Week: Get Low with UltraBlack at the Vagabond December 17

​If you thought Phoenix dubstep duo UltraBlack’s minimal moniker was some kind of warning scream against the sleek and opulent evils of future technology, you were wrong. Truth is, Bryan Marek and Nick Suddarth make dark party tracks that, perversely, seem to revel in the debauched potentialities of a not-so-distant dystopia…

Miami Music Festival and MP3: “Yellow Man” by Arboles Libres, Playing this Saturday

​It’s inevitable … Sometime this Saturday-night-slash-Sunday-morning your half-drunk ass will find itself wandering, like a partied-out zombie, through the near-abandoned labyrinth of weird, winding roads that buffer Transit and those temporary Miami Music Festival tents from the banker-bustle of Brickell. But wait, before you pass out and puke on that…

Three Days, 25 Stages, 600 Hours of Music

Unlike most massive weekend-long smorgasbords of tuneage, the three-day Miami Music Festival is almost entirely focused on the local scene. With the exception of a few bands, such as Greenpoint and New York’s Big Suga, the festival will present 600 performances by South Florida artists repping every permutation of music…

Flyer of the Week: Panic Bomber at White Room December 12

​In a digitally distorted blaze of electro-house glitch, local party starter Panic Bomber, a.k.a. Richard Haig, has spent the last year going supernova. First came his six-track EP effort, Calling in Threats, a December 2008 release loaded with crunchy club killers like “Miami Stunnaz” and “Disillusionment.” (Cop it at PanicBomber.com…

The Hard Richards

As a rule, beware of bands euphemistically named for boners. In the case of the Hard Richards, though, we’ll grant a pass, because these old-school Boynton Beach boys bash out straight-ahead ska punk without any wink-wink wanksterism. That doesn’t mean, however, that the Richards aren’t lewd, crude, and loud. It’s…

Big Poppa E and the E Band

After a three-decade career providing percussion and other background sounds for iconic artists like Ike and Tina Turner, Bill Withers, and John Prine, Big Poppa E felt a change coming. Thus, in 2000, he switched tracks, returning to his roots in the blues with the release of his second album,…

Belt Buckle Death Sentence

With a cryptic, vaguely menacing moniker like Belt Buckle Death Sentence, it’s almost inevitable that this Loxahatchee-bred hardcore crew’s origin story would involve illegal liquor and near-fratricide. Here’s the way ax man Todd Batchelder tells it: “One night, our drummer, Bryan Marshall, and his brother Matt were both drunk on…

The Sixth-Annual Organic Hip-Hop Artist Showcase

Every year, the Organic Hip-Hop Conference rallies conscious troops from all over the continent and beyond for a weekend of fighting for better communities through activism, vegetarianism, and music. Sponsored by Difference Makers Non-Profit Organization and Urban America Newspaper, the 2009 edition will kick off Friday with a keynote address…

More Dubstep Madness at Shake on Thursday with Joker and MC Nomad

Straight out of Bristol, Joker is a 20-year-old wunderkind whose hybrid club experiments may be the next big step in the ongoing evolution of dubstep. Just don’t tell him that — like many stridently independent studio jockeys, he hates genre tags. (Joker prefers to describe his tunes, cryptically, as “purple.”)…

Flyer of the Week: Steve Aoki at Mansion November 25

​Why does aging Cali club kid Steve Aoki always seem to be everywhere all the time? He’s like some kind of superhuman funhouse mirror, multiplying his slick indie-slouch image a million and one times throughout the mediated universe. It’s kinda creepy … Wherever I look (music mags, dark alleys, The…

Flyer of the Week: Yacht at Electric Pickle November 14

​According to the Yacht Manifesto #1: “Yacht is a Band, Belief System, and Business conducted by Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans of Marfa, Texas and Portland, Oregon, USA.” Also, Yacht “seeks to explore frontiers and to expand awareness of extraterrestrial Intelligence” and “believes in an Afterlife,” but “does not…

Flyer of the Week: BFGF Resurrect Halloween Eve at White Room Tonight

​By the time you reach a non-trick-or-treating age (i.e., whenever the candy-giving adults start asking for your cell number) it’s easy to get all jaded about Satan’s birthday. And why not? As a grown-up, your Halloween future sucks. No more free candy, no more shitty-awesome psycho slasher costumes, and no…

Flyer of the Week: Pay Your Final Respects to PS14 October 28

​Maybe it’s bad taste to get on some kind of eulogy bender before the corpse is even cold, but the diagnosis is terminal and it’s only a matter of time … Your favorite hipster bar, PS14, is dying. So say goodbye, Miami, and make amends for all the wrongs you’ve…

MP3 of the Day: “Dancer” by Woodhands, Playing the Vagabond This Saturday

Photo by Aigin Larki​Ever wondered what screamo-lectro dudes do to unwind after a particularly strenuous hipster bikini dance party? Well, apparently, if the dudes in question are Daniel Werb and Paul Banwatt of Toronto synth-and-drum duo Woodhands, then it’s all about a nice, relaxing, man-on-man bubble bath. Why the bubbles?…

The Art of the Pimpossible

Created via word merging, the term pimpossible is a mashup defined, according to Chi-Town comedian DeRay Davis, as “anything above and beyond regular pimpin’.” It’s the core concept behind a kind of street-based supercapitalism designed to breed Benjamins by whatever means available, from hawking hubcaps to selling hos. And DeRay…