WMC 2006

Me with DJ/dance music innovator John Digweed [Biography]

Well, what can I say? WMC 2006, my first WMC ever, was a total blast. For those that don’t know, WMC stands for Winter Music Conference, and it’s the biggest annual electronic music conference in the world, held in Miami every March. Though the conference officially ran last Friday through today, events were taking place far before that; Davin and I were in Miami from Wednesday night until Saturday evening, so we took in a subset of the festivities. I have to say, I’m not sure how it’d be possible to do a whole week of it. There’s so much to do.

It’s been a few days so events are starting to blur, but here’s the high-level outline:

Wed: Got to South Beach around 11:30pm; went to the Frisky Radio Get Frisky party with the hope of seeing Kevin Shiu play but unfortunately he’d already been on. Davin got us both a vodka-RedBull. That’ll be $32, please. 16 Bit Lolitas tore up the main room. John Digweed stopped by to hang out, along with Hernan Cattaneo. After meeting some pretty influential people thanks to Davin’s connections, head to Cafeteria (a 24hr restaurant/club) around 2, with hopes of catching Chloe spin. Turns out she’s already played, but instead we get to see John Graham, a.k.a Quivver spin. He drops a remix of Prodigy’s “The Way It Is” that blows my mind. We wander about Lincoln Ave, take a few photos, and walk back to our hotel at 5:30am, exhausted.

Thu: Go for breakfast at 2pm. Stop by the Remix Hotel, sponsored by Beatport and Microsoft. Check out all the cool poolside tech demos, including one of Logic being put on by Apple. Back to the hotel to get ready for the Proton Radio meet-and-greet. Get there around 7pm, meet a few more important dance music figures. Pizza for a snack; later we end up at the same sushi restaurant as Danny Howells and James Zabiela invite us out for sushi. Crazy. Back to the Proton Party; there are some fears it will rain on the patio; finally it’s decided the weather will hold up, and they set up the tables. Dance on the rooftop for an hour or so; music is then suddenly turned off. Apparently Proton was lied to by the building owner about having a permit to play music on the roof, and faced up to a $25k fine if it wasn’t shut off. Needless to say it was turned off in a hurry and everyone went back inside (where there was a decent enough sound system). Around 1am: head to a downtown Miami club, the Pawn Shop, where we hear Digweed will be spinning until 4. The Pawn Shop is set up to look exactly like a real pawn shop. Yellow paint, steel garage door, big black block letters, “will take guns for cash”. In fact, Davin and I both thought we had the wrong place when we got out of cab. Needless to say the line outside the door for the guestlist put our fears to rest. We weren’t on the guestlist, so we paid our $30 and waltzed right in. The inside of this place is the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen in a club. Immediately after you walk in, you see a full sized school bus in front of you. All sorts of “pawned” items… chandeliers, a scoreboard and various mounted animal heads (one wearing a construction helmet) were hanging from the wall. Giant spheres vibrated from where they attached to the ceiling. And walking out onto the dancefloor, John Digweed was spinning from the cab of a Mack truck. Just totally crazy. John’s set was of course great.

It was, as Davin calls it, one of his classic “canopener” sets, building minimally through the first hour or two, then tearing the roof off in the last. True to form, at exactly 3am he picked up the pace. Except what we didn’t realize is that he would play another hour, until 5am. 🙂 Bonus! Took a cab back to South Beach around 5:20; walked back to the Proton Party, which was supposed to run until noon, only to discover that it had been busted for noise violations. We walked back to the hotel, exhausted.

Friday we took it easy, slept in until 2pm; we wandered down to the beach and met up with Jason, Blake, Jeff and Faisal for breakfast. Options were slim for events that night; apparently there was a party Sasha was playing at that night, but it was most likely sold out and it was unlikely we were on the guestlist. Found out that apparently James Holden was playing a free set at a local hotel, but when we walked by, the line was too long, so we went back to the Remix hotel instead, where we saw none other than progressive house dj/producer Satoshi Tomiie spinning poolside.

That was a blast. Satoshi was laying down some funky stuff! From there we split from the group and went shopping for clothes on Lincoln Ave; I picked up a couple of shirts and Davin picked up several pairs of jeans and shirts to go with them. We stopped by the Sony Music store too, where I picked up two Timo Maas CDs and a Grande Mocha from the in-store Starbucks to go with them. 🙂 From there we walked about 20 blocks or so to South Pointe (the southernmost point of Miami Beach) in order to see the city; of course we snapped some photos along the way.

Davin took a great one of a palm tree silhouetted against a building; I hope he posts it 🙂 [Update, 8:32am: Oops, he already did] We took a cab back to our hotel room, watched the Ali G movie “Indahouse” (which wasn’t so great the second time), and called it a night around 1, because frankly, we had a big day ahead of us.

Saturday we checked out of our hotel room at 9am; after some detours we made it to Bicentennial Park, where the 8th annual, 1-day long Ultra Music Festival was taking place as part of WMC. Basically this was a who’s who of dance music; all the big electronic names were there: The Prodigy, Paul van Dyk, Paul Oakenfold, BT, Danny Howells, Bad Boy Bill, and Richie Hawtin were there, as well as local favorite Baby Anne. There were even some non-electronic acts there, e.g. The Killers and Victoria’s own Hot Hot Heat. Seem strange that there were rock bands there? Yeah, it did to me too — USA Today explains that it’s a due to a couple of things, that it helps break up the “sameness” of 13 hours of techno and house as the Prodigy’s Liam Howlett explains. That makes sense, given his band is a change from the norm. Paul van Dyk explains it’s a testament to the progressive nature of dance music, which is an interesting point of view I hadn’t really thought of before.

To be honest, I figured rock musicians were at Ultra because in this post-9/11 world, the dance music industry was hurting. I read somewhere that pop music, more than any other type of music, is a reflection of society at the moment. If the economy is doing well, you’ll hear a lot of love songs in the top spots on the charts; if it’s doing poorly, you’ll hear more sad ones. I think that dance music is probably linked into this trends in some way, even if it’s not explicitly pop. So what do you get, in a society where fear-mongering rules? A bunch of music nobody wants to dance to. Think of the most boring beat possible, and that’s what the scene was like a couple years ago, especially with progressive house (in my opinion; I know others may think differently). That’s changed a fair bit recently, and actually attending WMC and Ultra this year opened my eyes a fair bit; it turns out there is a lot of interesting stuff going on after all. Nothing quite like drinking from The WMC Firehose to restore your faith 🙂

Ultra itself was crazy. There were so many things to see at all times. We waited an hour in a moderately well-paced line to get our tickets, and another 45 minutes or so in another well-moving line to get in past security. Note to self: although cameras and backpacks weren’t officially allowed in, many people made it past the gates with both. We were on the grounds by about 12:20pm; we caught the tail end of DJ Joey of Ft. Lauderdale (who I had met on Thur night)’s set; he was playing ridiculously hard techno that I could only take for a few minutes; we wandered a bit, picked up shirts, and wandered over to the “Carl Cox and Friends” tent, where Danny Howells inspired me to purchase a $10 disposable camera for both Davin and I. It was ridiculous — Danny had the whole place jumping at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. The energy was amazing; it reminded me of the “Cream Bedrock” Sasha/Digweed party in the Memorial Arena in Victoria, in 1998. Smiles everywhere. From there we wandered to many places, including the breakbeat tents, where we took in a great Live PA set from Burufunk (he dropped his own remix of “Feel Good Inc” by Gorillaz) and a breaks set by Baby Anne in the adjacent tent (who also dropped a different remix of the same track a few minutes later). From here we wandered around, getting food and searching for earplugs (unbelievably no-one was selling them; I would have bought a pair for $5!); we got some food and checked out Kevens and Hot Hot Heat on the live stage; from here Davin checked out Paul Oakenfold on the main stage while I checked out Misstress Barbara at the techno tent; I first saw her in 1998 at the World Electronic Music Festival in Toronto, which took place on a island in the middle of Georgian Bay. Well, she was great then and she’s only gotten better since; I want to find one of her mix CDs. There’s a great energy to everything she plays. I text-messaged Davin and we met up on the hill; from here we found our way into the crowd to watch what we could of the Prodigy play at 9pm; it was pretty hard to see the stage because of the many tall people in front of us. The Prodigy played a great set — it was a lot of fun jumping around to their songs. My favorites were probably their renditions “No Good” from Music for the Jilted Generation and “Breathe” from Fat of the Land — so much fun to hear the whole crowd singing along with you to a techno song! 🙂 Paul van Dyk was onstage next, and we managed to get a little closer, but a bit more crushed at the same time; the place was packed. After a grand introduction for Paul van Dyk as the “world’s best dj”, there were technical difficulties getting the sound to work. Ah, but it wouldn’t be a live show without a problem or two, right? 🙂 They got things sorted out quickly, and PvD let loose a barrage of subtle beats that grew into a monster in about 10 minutes. It was quite something, actually — I remember a distinct moment where I suddenly realized the music had me. That is, it had me, until about half an hour later, when Davin and I had had enough of getting crushed by fellow party goers and walked back towards the breaks stage where BT was destroying the place with giant breaks and crazy samples. I really wish I had my camera to record some of the stuff he was doing, it was seriously mindblowing. It probably didn’t hurt that he was playing on what was probably the best sounding stage in the whole park.

From here we wandered over to the live tent again, to see Infusion play live, but to be honest it was underwhelming after just seeing BT. We were both tired, and from here, it was decided it would be best to get a jump on our trip home. Four hours later, around 3:30, we walked through my front door. Needless to say we were exhausted, but it didn’t keep me from staying awake until 5am (I think the cappucino we stopped for on the way back probably had something to do with that).

Did I say high-level outline? Oops?