What We're About
The WMC '07 Miami Guide gives an insider's peek at this year's Winter Music Conference, serving up daily event previews, DJ profiles, insider reports, and audio/video clips.
WMC Day 2: crashing the party
We don't know if it's tinnitus, some fault of our central nervous system, or a combination of the two, but we've got this ringing in our ears that sounds exactly like a cell phone. (Maybe it's just because our phones haven't stopped ringing?) In any case, the low brrrt-brrrt is on us like a plague of digital locusts. "Is that the phone?" Then it rings. Ah yes, that's the phone.
We finally looked up from our laptops — working, a cardinal sin at WMC — and realized it was way past time to go out. A 20 minute walk later, wending our way through a sea of unbuttoned shirts, ball caps, catcalls, and the hankie-sized dresses that inspired them, we made it to our first party of the night, Turntable Lab's throwdown at Shore. It felt very New York, appropriately enough: patterned hoodies, covetable kicks, big ol' facial hair, and that whole mix of preppy/hip-hop/rocker/candy-raver excess that characterizes downtown style these days. Roxy Cottontail teetered on the steps of the DJ platform, offering a running commentary so abstract and random it might have been made of haiku fragments. Old-school electro, freestyle, and B'more sounds dominated the set, with nods to classic house, including Josh Wink's "Don't Laugh," that absolute banger made of nothing more than 909s, an acid bass line, and a loop of deranged laughter.
As we may have mentioned, the distractions at WMC never end. In this case, distraction came in the form of a driver running the red light directly in front of our car; the driver hit the brakes, but we still slammed right into the side of his vehicle. There were no injuries, so after the exchange of insurance info and phone numbers, we cutting our losses and headed to the M_NUS party at the Pawn Shop, just a few blocks away. Now, finally — at four o'clock in the morning — our night was getting started. Richie Hawtin was on the decks, commanding and controlling from the cab of a semi truck that served as the DJ booth. Behind him, the VIP section (or putative VIP section, as everybody was getting in, in a rare and refreshing flouting of nightclub snobbery) was thronged and heaving. The rest of the M_NUS crew — we spotted Matthew Dear, Troy Pierce, and Clark Warner — were letting down their hair; other jocks that had come to cavort included Damian Lazarus, Mathew Jonson, and a slightly worse-for-the-wear looking pair of Tiefschwarz brothers. Heidi made the trek from the Get Physical party to hear her longtime idol Hawtin, who schooled her in the fine art of techno while she was growing up in Windsor. "I hear the Get Physical people all the time," she said, almost apologetically. "I never miss a chance to see Richie." She enthused a little more and was gone, headed straight for the thick of things, bent on losing herself in the dance.
As for the music, it wasn't anything you haven't heard before. It was Richie, playing deep and relatively (for him, anyway) housey, and with his eye on the long view, peaks and valleys rolling in a long, upward arc. Which, at six in the morning, after a long night of mishaps and near-misses, was all you really needed.
March 23, 2007, 11:09 AM
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