View article on URB here or just read it down below :)
Posted Tuesday, December 18, 2007 @ 03:56 in
Events by
Melanie Gapany
- Presented by Music Loves Fashion, theCompany, Jeff Duke & Adam Frankel Productions and Going.com -
Miami is a strange and beautiful city. The people are unique, the buildings are deco, and there is a certain "je ne sais quoi" that lingers in the air at all times. Downtown, with the recent birth of its newest addition, The Center for Performing Art, is changing slowly but surely. The angles keep getting sharper, the buildings grow taller and taller, and the houses become more expensive. Still in the face of all this change, is a lone yellow building on 13th Street. The pawn shop, at first glance seems an unlikely place to be a lounge. It looks, in fact, exactly like a pawn shop...dilapidated, yellow paint, and metal roll down doors. Once inside, though, everything changes.
The night started early with local DJ, Johnny The Boy, who pumped the crowd, led by a very animated group of Chicago dancers and attentive bartenders, into a frenzy of dance and sweat on a dancefloor surrounded by odd, old items that you would expect to find in a pawn shop; an old scoreboard, bikes, an airblower, even a school bus?
Aptly named Los Angeles locals, LA Riots (www.myspace.com/lariotsofficial) then took over inside the DJ booth, which was uniquely constructed inside the cab of a flatbed semi truck that also served a dual purpose as a VIP area. The crowd immediately tripled, responding faster than teeny-boppers at a Timberlake concert. Even with the minor audio glitch, which temporarily forced LA Riots to perform with minimal bass, the DJ duo (Daniel Le Disko and JOB) had hopped into their drivers' seats to rev the engine of that monster truck. Before they were through, everything in the room was in third gear.
And then MSTRKFT (http://www.mstrkrft.com) was there to guide us all into a sweaty utopia, a feat that was accomplished with relative ease by the pair of Canadians. DJs AL-P and JFK gave Miami exactly what is was asking for: enough bass to start a pacemaker, hip-possessing beats, sounds that would put even the sorest of feet into a dance frenzy, and the style to keep it going well into Miami's famously warm night, where the only thing white that covers the ground in winter are the napkins on the dance floor.
Check out pics from the show, shot by Kevin Collier, exclusively at http://www.urb.com/media/images/art_basel2
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