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 4: the last gasp
People love to say that electronic music represents a new evolutionary phase, but our Miami experience often seemed to be all about devolution: wet-nap baths, filthy clothing, pilfering wi-fi, lost and found laptops… The list of indignities could go on. We found the soundtrack to such a primal state at Made Event's Sunday School for Degenerates party, a 14-hour marathon of regressive house music.
We arrived to the Pawn Shop at five in the morning, just as the previous party's deep-house types were shuffling out and a motley crew of troublemakers was amassing at the door. Bill Patrick, of New York's We Are Robots party, was absolutely on fire in the back room, weaving a dense, filigreed web of some of the stickiest, trickiest minimal techno we've heard in eons. (Extra points for pulling out Ricardo Villalobos' remix of Shackleton's dubstep masterpiece "Blood on Our Hands," surely the darkest cut in dance music this year.) He was accompanied, for almost the entirety of his set, by a blissed-out Lil' Jon look-alike getting crunk behind him, hands in the air like it was a dancehall show and flashing a silvery grill; his day-glo pajama-print hoodie was the icing on the cake.
By the time we wandered outside in search of fresh air — no day party belongs inside — Jesse Rose was rocking the patio, tossing off bright melodic phrases and deep, UK-style sub-bass. His "You're All Over My Head," with its stuttering breakdown, was the highlight of his set: its chorus, a glorious psychedelic rock sample skipping like a broken record, had every pair of hands in the place held aloft.
After Rose, it's hard to say who exactly was playing, but it hardly mattered: the music was top-notch, and the vibe jubilant. There were no ins or outs at the party, so clubbers had come prepared with packed lunches and Vitamin Water; with the wind whipping around the palms in the courtyard, it felt as much like a school picnic as a party. We hung on long enough to catch Mobilee's Anja Schneider and suffer a wee patch of sunburn. Somewhere around noon, though, we realized that our chariot had turned into a pumpkin (and our brain to pumpkin soup). A few hasty farewells to new friends and trusted accomplices, and we were out the door, diploma for degenerates in hand.
March 26, 2007, 03:12 PM
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