Miami New Times

Phillip Pessar Photographs Miami’s Rapidly Changing Landscape

Miami New Times

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Phillip Pessar‘s Flickr stream reads like a love letter to Miami. In roughly 9,600 photos, it tells the story of South Florida’s ever-changing architectural landscape.

The photos are simple — many of them head-on shots of old department stores, abandoned burger joints, historic hotels, and bulldozed office buildings. There are no fancy editing tricks or filters, just straightforward photography. Every day, almost without fail, new pictures are added. And all consist of the same thing: images of Miami and South Florida architecture in various stages of decay, disarray, remodeling, or rebuilding.

His photos are regularly used in articles and on news blogs. They’re in the Huffington Post, Forbes, USA Today, and theMiami Herald, to name just a few. They’re also featured in cookbooks, travel guides, insurance advertisements, and real-estate blog posts. But in the ten years Pessar has been taking photos, he hasn’t seen a dime. His work is available under Flickr’s Creative Commons and can be used by anyone as long as they give him credit.

Though Pessar’s photographs might be unremarkable, he has found a niche cataloging the mundane and quotidian: a bankrupt Radio Shack location, a Wet Seal store going out of business, an Airstream trailer outfitted into a food truck. (Click here to read more)

Twiggy Rasta Masta, aka La Goony Chonga, Is Keeping Hip-Hop “Based”

Broward-Palm Beach New Times

MASTA3IT’S SPRINGTIME IN HOLLYWOOD. The sky is cloudless and blue. Tourists bake in the sun and the Hollywood sign winks from the hills. A low-flying plane poops smoke trails overhead. On the rooftop of a 1920s apartment building, two girls are smoking a joint and listening to music from a cell phone.

“Genius, right?” says the girl with the blue hair, who goes by the name Twiggy Rasta Masta. She has gold-encased teeth and a slight Spanish accent. Brown liner is stenciled around her lips and a gold chain hangs from her neck. The inside of her left wrist reads, “Yeah!”

“So good,” agrees her friend, Bootychaaain. She has short hair, like a boy’s — curly on top, buzzed on the sides. Her nails are teal and over three-inches long, perfect for holding stubby joints.

Busted out the womb, is the Young Daughter, sings the third member of their crew. Heard your ass was thirsty/Need some fuckin’ water. Her voice is wan and she sounds bored.  (Click here to read more)

Chromeo’s Dave 1 Talks “White Women” and the “Kanye School” of Music

Miami New Times

Chromeo_Interview_2015David Macklovitch is almost naked during our interview. Unfortunately, it’s over the phone.

“Yeah, I’m walking around in my underpants, trying to figure out what jeans I’m going to wear,” says the 36-year-old musician, also known as Dave 1, who makes up half of the band Chromeo. “I’m pacing around. I’ve got my socks on, my underpants on, and I’m like half groomed and half not.”

He’s on his way to the studio and he’d probably be listening to Chief Keef or Nicki Minaj’s “Truffle Butter” if we weren’t talking right now. “I listen to the same shit as everybody else,” he says. “I also drink water and sleep.”

The fact that Macklovitch listens to hip-hop is both surprising and not. For more than a decade, he and his Chromeo partner, Patrick Gemayel, have been making ultra-funk dance jams that are heavily saturated with synthesizers and reminiscent of the ’80s. And yet, when the duo first started making music in the early ’90s, hip-hop was what they listened to — so hip-hop was what they made. “I grew up with hip-hop,” says Macklovitch, who met Gemayel at a private school in Montreal. “Hip-hop was really a vehicle for us to discover music.” (Click here to read more)

Metro Zu’s Lofty305 Plunges Head First Into the Art World with Miami Showing

The Miami New Times

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Lofty305 woke up at 9:40 a.m. in his Midtown Manhattan apartment. It was a Monday. He brushed his teeth with non-fluoride toothpaste and rinsed his XS afro with coconut oil. He ate two Butterfingers, worked out at the building’s gym, and snacked on hummus. Then he started painting.

He painted a pink portal with two mounds (“ladies boobs”) coming out of it. He painted long tubular tentacles — one wrapped around the body of a naked lady (“healing her”), another squeezing the life out of a blue shark. He painted jet skies and he painted lamps. He painted a “little shepherd dragon” and a ridge of mountains that looked like watermelon slices. (Click here to read more)

Miami’s Lil Champ FWAY Is Focused On The Music

Miami New Times

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On Sunday, Carol City rapper, Lil Champ FWAY, headed to the stinky and smoky trade show known as Cannabis Cup in Denver, Colorado, to usher in the unofficial stoner holiday, 4/20. Before surrendering himself to the hazy interiors of Denver Mart, he took some time to talk with New Times about his latest EP, Pray 4 FWAY; what’s next on his agenda; and what he’s doing in Atlanta. 

New Times: Last time we talked to you was a few years ago when you were in LA. Are you in Miami now?
Lil Champ FWAY: I’m in Atlanta right now, but I have shows in Miami in June, so I’ll be there in June.

What brought you to Atlanta?
I got cousins that stay up here. And I had come up here for A3C, and I linked up with Coach K from Quality Control — he’s the CEO of the label the Migos are on. I’ve just been up here trying to work with artists. You know, I linked up with Playboi Carti from Awful Records. Really, I’m just up here working. That’s really it. (Click here to read more)

Carol City Rapper N3ll Raps About “The Life of a Kid From a City That Doesn’t Understand Him”

Miami New Times

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If you follow internet rap, then chances are you’ve heard something from Miami’s latest underground phonk rapper, N3ll. Though he’s been making music since 2008, word has only started getting out about the young MC these past few years.

His 2014 mixtape, Boyz N the Hood, was a SoundCloud sensation, with featured songs by Miami’s current golden boy, Denzel Curry. Last week, he dropped his newest mixtape, The Screw Tape, a hazy, ’90s mashup with features by Amber London and Twelve’len.

Crossfade got a chance to interview the burgeoning artist about his musical origins and future plans. Who is N3ll? we wondered. Where did he come from? How did he get into into rap, and where is he going with it? Read the interview to find out.

New Times: What is your real name?

N3ll: Darnell.

How old are you?
I’m 20. I’m about to be 21 at the end of this month.

Where did you grow up?
I grew up in the heart of Miami, Carol City, where everything goes down. I’ve actually been in this area since I was born. You know, I’ve never been anywhere other than Miami unless I was traveling for music or something. This is where I’ve lived my whole life. (Click here to read more)

Wynwood’s Danilo Gonzalez To Name Mural Contest Winner: “I Want a Landmark”

The Miami New Times

In the bowels of Craigslist, buried in the catacombs of ‘Community’ is an ad with a plaintive plea. “WE NEED A MURAL!” its title reads in all caps. “SHOW US WHAT YOU CAN DO!” It’s a pithy post, no longer than one sentence, with a photo of a long, single-story warehouse. From its base to its asbestos shingled roof, the building is coated in the same drab grey hue. One half of its awning (also grey) reads, “Warehouse Project;” the other half, “Men’s Corner.” It definitely needs a makeover.

wynwoodwarehousemuraledited“It’s pretty ugly,” says artist and gallery owner Danilo Gonzalez, who commissioned the ad. The building, a former apparel storage facility, had been abandoned for over five years when Gonzalez signed the lease back in 2012. The surrounding neighborhood was a ghost town and the only nearby business was the Light Box at Goldman Warehouse. But Gonzalez had a hunch that things would change. Development in Wynwood, he believed, was to going move west, towards the freeway, not east towards Miami Avenue. “People thought I was crazy.”

(Click here to read more)

Life in Color Festival 2014: “By the Time the Show Is Over, You’re a Piece of Art”

Miami New Times

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Sometimes, it takes a disaster to instigate change. In this case, it was undelivered packages.

By 2009, Life in Color (then called Dayglow) was picking up momentum. What had started two years earlier as a paint-throwing EDM party for college students in Tallahassee was now touring all over Florida.

More than a thousand people attended each event and upwards of 600 bottles of paint were used every night. Fans in other states clamored for a national tour; some, an international tour.

Business was so good that some of the party’s co-founders dropped out of college during their senior year to pursue the project as a full-time job.

A new movement had begun. Getting squirted, shot, and soaked with paint was what the people wanted and LIC was there to give it to them.

But on one particular day, a few hours before a Gainesville show, the party throwers encountered a problem: they had no paint. The packages containing their order were late. They were screwed. (Click here to read more)

Kat Dahlia Talks Debut Album, My Garden

Miami New Times

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It’s been a tumultuous three years for singer-songwriter Kat Dahlia.

In 2012, the fledgling recording artist and former waitress signed a recording contract with Epic Records. A year later, she released her first single, the piano-laced hit “Gangsta,” which ranked 47th on Billboard‘s Hop R&B Songs of 2013 list and has garnered more than 15 million views on YouTube so far.

Two summers ago, Dahlia got pulled over for a DUI, but that hardly affected her career. In 2014, Complex ranked her debut album as the year’s 46th most anticipated album while she made plans for her first national tour.

But then things went south. She couldn’t hit her notes. Something was wrong with her voice. She had a cyst on her vocal chord, it turned out, and her singing career, she learned, was in jeopardy. Her tour was cancelled. Her album was put on hold. For 10 days straight, she couldn’t speak a word. She stopped socializing and became a hermit. She even changed her phone number. It took six months for her to fully recover, but by the end of 2014, she was back in the studio. She wrote some new songs. She went on tour. And most importantly, she finally finished her album. (Click here to read more)