Just got back from Miami (South Beach actually) and the M3 Summit (Miami Music Multimedia). My partners and I were down for the entire weekend to see the fruits of our labors (over the last four months we did two websites, a couple dozen html emails, all the show signage, entry badges, banners, flyers, and a few hundred other pieces of schwag).
Sunset Sessions
The 3 days of shows were a mix of headliners and scrappy upstarts. Coldcut, Jamie Lidell, Lady Sovereign, Hotchip, She Wants Revenge and The National Trust were just a few of the bigger names, but there were two that really blew me away. Killa Kella, the MC for all three nights did a fantastic job keeping the tempo of the evenings going (especially with all the delays between acts), but it was his beat boxing that really blew me away. Being able to replicate the mouth-as-turntable abilities of Rahzel and Scratch would’ve been impressive enough, but Killa also happened to be a pretty good singer, which let him actually create something of a mix in his set; going from pitch perfect scratching then dropping in vocals from Curtis Mayfield and others. Taking beatboxing far beyond the beats and robot noises, he managed to create an entire DJ set with just the mic (good thing too, because the delays in setting up equipment for half a dozen acts in a couple hours threatened to kill the crowd).
There were also some good seminars and demos and discussions (Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, among others), but somebody decided to schedule them before 3pm, so I was unable to scrape myself out of bed in time for any of them.
Randolph Street Represent
I was happiest though, to see the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. Coming down from Chicago, where I remember seeing them playing downtown on the sidewalk of Randolph St., these guys killed all three days, horns a blazing.
What I Was Really There For
I managed to get in a lot of wandering time and have almost a dozen rolls of film to process. South Beach is an absolute nuthouse. If you weren’t dizzy from the fumes of a thousand lifted blinging El Caminos crusing at a half a mile an hour down Ocean Blvd, then you’d get it from the whiplash of turning your head to take in all the insanely hot women in completely ridiculous outfits. Including one not-so-insanely-hot girl that couldn’t be bothered to realize her right tit was hanging out, until her mom told her so.
Best thing all weekend; A conversation between a random girl hanging out the back window of a car, yelling back to some guys in a truck:
Wasted girl: “Heyyyy, where y’all going?”
Dude: “Huh bitch?”
Wasted girl: “Where are you going?”
Dude: “What?”
Wasted girl: “I SAID WHAT’RE YOU DOING?!”
Dude: “I don’t know, get in the truck.”