As much as I love my blog, I was far too consumed with the insanity that is Miami Music Week to keep you guys updated live - so from whatever memory I have left I'll report of my journeys.
4:30am - Wait for cab to leave apartment in Bronx for LGA. Check bags, board plane, arrive in MIA around 10am.
1130am - arrive at hotel (Congress South Beach - Ocean between 10 and 11 - highly recommended for those of you trying to do this next year - check-in, shop for some essentials, make drinks, head to beach.
2pm - commence drinking and head to rooftop pool to drink until it's time to get ready for our first event - Super You and Me with Laidback Luke and friends.
Somewhere around 10pm - head to The Fontainebleau Hotel in full super hero gear, as the show was at the club Liv which is actually in the hotel.
Picture this, a friend and I a little more intoxicated than we should have been, in the lobby of the prestigious fontainebleau, in full super-hero garb, an hour early, during the hotel's FORMAL COCKTAIL HOUR.....everyone else was in evening gowns and suits....
Aside from all of the obstacles...we successfully make it into LIV for Super You and Me
First, my thoughts on LIV - absolutely AWESOME - one of my personal top 5 nightclubs in the WORLD...multiple levels of mezzanines surround a large dance floor with wide staircases, tons of bathrooms, and plenty of random out coves with bench seating to get out of the crowd if it gets too much. Just a few VIP tables down on the dance floor, which leads up the club to a large DJ booth, lined on either side with Cinderella-style staircases to the highest balcony area above and behind the DJ booth.
The sound system was very good, booming on the dance floor but toned down around the bar, but the unique part about this nightclub structurally was the ceiling - the dome-eqsue ceiling is regularly studded entirely with LED lighting which are synced to the music, giving helicopter and raining effects during build-ups and climaxing of the music.
View a short video demo of the ceiling here. Nothing I've seen comes close to this in NYC except the wall effects in Cielo.
So as you can see in the flyer for this party, the lineup was diverse and AWESOME. Sandro Silva played first and killed it staying true to his style and reaching far back in his repertoire to pull out HIS remix one of my old time favorites "Resurrection" Congorock slaughtered it playing an awesome array of tracks, but flaring them up with their identifiable "new school electro benassi" sound. Sidney Samson kept it pretty clean in comparison to how dirty his set was last WMC at Cameo, but I believe this is because he had numerous sets still left in him for the week and didn't want to get too insane - he did manage to drop the Riverside TC Remix, which is enough to split your skull if you haven't heard it, along with his own remix of Ferry Corsten's Punk (which I may add was easily one of the anthems of Ultra). While Skrillex is not exactly an act I would ever chose to go see if he were playing solo, he played a really fun set - throwing in metallic and hip hop beats - my only real complaint was that he played for almost two hours and we were anxious to see the headliner. Finally, a little after 3am Lil Jon jumped on the turntables, threw hundreds of large foam hands in the shape of the letter "L" into the crowd, and introduced and MCeed for Luke. To my knowledge, Wynter Gordon did NOT show up, as while I did not stay for all of Luke's set, I was there for dirtytalk. Luke was absolutely flying thru tracks, but did it perfectly and with grace. He even dropped his bootleg of darude's classic sandstorm (bootleg sample here) which is a delightfully more aggressive version of the original which brings current house heads back to our younger years of 103.5 wKTU, and teen nights on the NJ Shore. Luke has been really favoring the Guetta's FMIF remix of Calvin's Flashback along with his own remix of Calvin's You Used To Hold Me and it works perfectly. Additionally he dropped pretty much everyone of his own tracks including smashing Blau into in My G.O.D., probably marking the point in the evening where I lost my voice.
Luke killed it, probably one of my favorite sets of the entire week (Ultra included - I'll rank them all later). Luke continues to be underrated and is EASILY one of the most talented DJs in the industry - I'd say top 3 in house DJ's for a few main reasons:
1. he plays always plays all his own hits
2. he has no beef with any other djs/groups of djs, and enough collaborations that he is free to literally play any track weather it s by a trance DJ, dubstep DJ, SHM, Mixmash, dirty dutch, afrikanism....does not matter - he has no beef and hence free game
3. he favors the classics - you have a 50/50% of hearing anything from Rhythm is a Dancer to Sandstorm when you see him
4. As predictable as he is, he is actually the most UNPREDICTABLE when compared to his competition.
Not to mention, he permeates happiness and fun with the SY&M party, has awesome remixes of already popular tracks, and as warm and easy to watch because of the way he works the crowd.
A final note on the night - I sat at a table next to Afrojack, saw Axwell who was about 20 ft away, and my friend fist-bumped Tiesto....the coolest thing about Miami Music Week is casually seeing the other big-names in the clubs. I only stayed until around 430, because at this point i was reaching the "awake for 24-hour" mark and I was only on day 1.
For more info on the SY&M Party at LIV during MMW, refer to this pretty solid article from DancingRobot here . Also you can kind of see me looking down texting in my red Flash costume in the pic with Lil Jon lol.
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