The Subtropics festival's events, which span across two weeks, will feature improvisation, custom electronic instruments, or unusual acoustic techniques. 'The music functions as a way to help you understand how sound speaks about what’s around you, help you connect with your environment, in ways that we don’t when we’re simply being intellectual or visual,' said Gustavo Matamoros, festival director. 'The ear is our gate towards connecting with things.'
Since its launch in 1989, the Subtropics festival has offered South Florida a multi-day event focused squarely on experimental music and sound art. This year the two-week Miami Beach festival starts with a symposium on sound and architecture, then relaxes into a series of concerts.
If you are percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani, you take ten gongs, make your own bows, truck them around the country, and assemble an ad-hoc ensemble in each city to magnify that experience into something acoustically mind-blowing.
A gong hangs suspended from its stand, light dancing across its bronzed surface, each hammered dent hinting at some mysterious overtone waiting to be released. If you grab the right mallet and strike it, that light turns into sound, the complex interplay of indentations drives the air, caresses your eardrums, and vibrates your body. The sound swells, fills the room, and gradually dissipates.
The Miami-Dade Public Library System now allows card holders to download up to three free songs a week, and keep them indefinitely.
The music service, Freegal, features a collection of about 285,000 artists and 3 million songs. It tracks each user’s downloads and resets every Monday.
When Miami native Aaron Lebos was a kid, his parents told him to choose between violin and piano. "I chose piano," he says, "obviously." But his big brother played electric guitar, and he wanted to too. He thought it was "cooler." Eventually, he got his hands on a guitar of his own and made his way through jazz studies programs at Miami Dade College, University of Miami and FIU.
In 1973, future Miami Herald music critic Howard Cohen burst into the Spec's Music store on South Dixie Highway in Coral Gables with of all the energy of a 10-year-old about to begin a 40-year habit.
That's because he was.
He and his mother had piled into their 1971 yellow Ford Pinto for the express purpose of taking home Helen Reddy. At least in the form of her hit single, "Leave Me Alone (Ruby Red Dress)."
The Overtown section of Miami was the heart and soul of music during the early to mid-1960’s.
It developed as Southern and Bahamian blacks relocated to Miami area to work on Henry Flagler’s railroad.
As they prospered, so did the club and performing arts scene.
Other venues included the Rockland, Palace, the Harlem Square Club, the Cotton Club, the Ritz Theater, the Mary Elizabeth Hotel and the Sir John, to name a few.
After a failed career at home in the U.S., the Chinese-American rapper Jin found an unexpected second chance at stardom on the other side of the world.
Credit Louis Trinh / Courtesy of artist
After a failed career in the U.S., the Chinese-American rapper Jin got an unexpected second chance at stardom — in Hong Kong.
Hear Femi Kuti's songs 'Can't Buy Me,' 'Dem Bobo,' and 'Oyimbo' as well as Fela Kuti's 'Zombie.'
This Sunday, Nigerian Afro-beat artist Femi Kuti will be performing in Miami. Femi is known for using music to protest against the Nigerian government -- a legacy he inherited from his father, the legendary Afro-beat pioneer Fela Kuti.
