The Tony-award winning Broadway musical, Fela! is in Miami this week. The production is based on the complex life-- and music-- of late Nigerian activist, musician and singer Fela Kuti.
Kuti is known worldwide for founding the musical genre afro-beat. But in Nigeria, he’s known for using his music to protest the country’s military government through the 70s and 80s.
Local Band Cayos is an experimental ambient-electronica group. Under the Sun on WLRN had the chance to speak with band members Daniel Laburu and Nick Reyes about what inspires their music.
Both are Miami natives who moved away. Laburu is an architect living in New York. Reyes is a soldier stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas.
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.
