Although most people will arrive on Tuesday, I made it to South Beach on Monday morning - ready to attack the city. Julian Marsh kindly drove me up from Ft Lauderdale and we met Cortney Callanan from Star 69 for a festive lunch at a mediterranean lunch on Lincoln Avenue. Cortney caught me up on all the latest Star 69 news including new singles ( Offer Nissim "Happy People" and Andrew Mendez featuring Alan T "Shaked",) the Peter Rauhofer/Tracy Young tag team on Sunday morning and news that Peter is remixing Madonna's new single "4 Minutes." So much to come from Star 69.
Since tomorrow would be the start of complete madness, I used today as a relaxing day of shopping - hitting Bal Harbor (love Custo Barcelona) and the shops on Collins (AX, Benetton, Urban Outfitters, Zara, etc.). Lots of fun and the stores are less crowded before the WMC explosion.
For dinner, Dewight Barkeley and I met up with Cortney who introduced us to enchanting Sydney Blue. Sydney is a producer/DJ signed to Deadmau5's label who currently has a top selling single on Beatport with "Give It Up For Me." She is absolutely enchanting and I look forward to interviewing her for the site.. watch out for it in the near future.
We headed to Mokai for the launch of the Next Best Thing - a new sponsor driven VIP set of events to hit Miami this year. Mokai was the perfect starting place - a beautiful upscale lounge with gorgeous decoration, incredible table service and a bumping sound system (clean, clear and full without being overpowering.) Lee Kalt was spinning a mix of commercial house and underground vocals as I ran into Stephania Yanachkov. Formerly of Yoshitoshi, she was celebrating the one year anniversary of her booking agency Blushtonic who handled the dj bookings of the night. Always the vivacious host, she graciously worked the room making everyone feel welcome.
It was about this time that I looked at my watch and realized it was 11pm and I had not eaten anything since lunch. We headed to Rock Sushi on Collins and enjoyed the perfect soundtrack of 90s dance music as we enjoyed some great food. After dinner, we met up with Nick Terranova (Starkillers) and VJ Michael Toast. Michael and I talked geek for a while about videomixing, codecs, hardware and various other geeky things that 99% of the population could care less about. This, to me, is always one of the highlights of WMC - meeting people who do similar things and sharing war stories and solutions on how to over come issues as they pop up.
We headed back to Mokai just as Ivano Bellini was starting his set. This arrival was perfectly timed as we caught Oakenfold working the room along with various other industry VIPs. I got the chance to hang out with up and coming French producer/DJ David Vendetta and basically gushed over how much I love his new version of the OT Quartet classic "Hold That Sucker Down." The effervescent Sir Ivan chatted with us about his new single "For What It's Worth" with a variety of club mixes which is set for a speedy release. Another highlight was meeting Rui da Silva who would grace us with a rocking set later in the evening.
The convergence of fashion and music was present as representatives for Hugo Boss and Rock Band were working the crowd. One of the big lessons we can all learn is that is really all about the lifestyle - dance music fuels fashion as well as many other venues of lifestyle - videogames, commercials, movies, etc. Finding unique ways to expose our music to the mainstream culture will benefit everyone.
Incredible Song heard out:
Jamie Lewis "Be Thankful" - hot spiritual/gospel vocalhouse record either sung by Barbara Tucker or a fantastic Barbara Tucker impersonator. I will have to ask her about this at Let the Artist be Heard tomorrow night.
