The Medic Droid’s Hector Bagnod and one of his fans. You can’t spell “fanatic” without “fan.” As I detailed wrote in this week’s cover story in the Phoenix New Times, local electro power-pop group The Medic Droid has built a considerable teenaged and twentysomething (not to mention overly-enthusiastic) fanbase across…
One of the grooviest things about the Valley’s EDM scene is that DJ/dance events seemingly spring up in the unlikeliest of places. An all-night rave can take place in the middle of the forested mountains up near Camp Verde, for instance. Or some local turntablism collective will put on a…
Zach Daniell is wiped out. It’s the night before Thanksgiving and the 18-year-old New Yorker has just flat-out sprinted through lower Manhattan with his 16-year-old girlfriend Kiki Fausel, his sister, and some friends. Bounding and pounding, they make the frenzied one-mile dash from Washington Square Park to a concert at…
FutureKind is scheduled to perform at The Lost Leaf.It’s probably gonna be a chilly one tonight, so be sure to bring a jacket or hoodie when you’re out traipsing along Roosevelt Row and Grand Avenue in search of art during tonight’s First Friday. Besides heading to Tammie Coe’s or Conspire…
The HoodRide treehouse. The intersection of Fifth and Roosevelt Streets has become one of the hotspots for the downtown Phoenix arts district. And one of the coolest parts of this cluster of galleries, boutiques, and coffee places was the HoodRide treehouse. Built into an olive tree in front of the…
DJ Deadmau5 is scheduled to spin tonight at Myst in Scottsdale. While we’re sure most of you are gonna be heading out west to the Cricket Pavillion to check out tonight’s mega-sized Phooson shindig, there’s more than just that concert going on this weekend. Here’s our weekly rundown of the…
The holiday season is all about getting together with your friends and family. So it’s kinda groovy that local EDM fanatics are gonna get the chance to reunite with Joe DiPadova this weekend. The 29-year-old mixmaster, who rocked the house at many a PHX nightspot for years before relocating to…
By Benjamin Leatherman Treasure Mammal’s Abe Gil in action. If we had to put together our top 10 favorite local bands to see live, Treasure Mammal would undoubtedly be somewhere on said list. It’s because Abelardo Gil III, the hyperactive dynamo behind the one-man spazz-tronica outfit, always puts on an…
Normally, we’d never urge anyone to mimic George W. Bush (except in jest, of course), but we’re making a one-time exception: Ape the soon-to-be-ex-President’s annual tradition of pardoning a turkey by refraining from ripping through the usual 10-pound Butterball on Thanksgiving Day. Instead, give your karma a major boost by…
When it comes to goth nights here in the Valley, people seem to think that Club Palazzo’s Friday-night freak fest Tranzylvania is the only ghoulish game in town. Turns out they’re dead wrong, as popular GLBT hangout Velocity 2303, at 2303 East Indian School Road, has been putting on a…
The turbo-charged V-6 on your ultra-cherry ’83 Buick Grand National is purring like a 180-horsepower kitten. Now you need somewhere to show how it can fly down the road. With those new-fangled cameras lining Valley freeways, a high-speed jaunt on the Loop 101 ain’t reccomended. Instead, take your pride and…
Okay, we admit we’re being a tad goofy and over-dramatic with the headline for this post, but it’s nowhere near as goofy as the video we captured in the heart of Tempe near ASU yesterday afternoon. It’s definately a “WTF!?!” kind of deal: Check it out (with an explanation after…
Suicidal Tendencies, Yeasayer, Deerhunter, Dash Berlin, Mushroomhead, Times New Viking, Thanksgiving
By Benjamin Leatherman A spectacular view of the crystal blue Caribbean Sea from Tulum on the Yucatan Peninsula (photo by Jenna Leatherman). Despite having an ultra-hectic schedule these days, I was fortunate enough to be able to slip off to Cancun with friends and family a few weeks ago for…
Thought Crime’s Michael 23 under wraps. By Benjamin Leatherman Über-eccentric local artist Michael 23 and the Thought Crime collective have created some pretty whacked out spectacles over the past decade or so. There’s the 20-foot inflatable “UFO” he and other artists constructed out of trash bags on the ASU campus…
By Benjamin Leatherman Young Buck is scheduled to perform on Saturday at Martini Ranch in Scottsdale…
Here’s a recipe for a seriously stellar night of entertainment: Take a half-dozen of Arizona’s most imaginative visual artists, VJs, and filmmakers, and mix them liberally with eight or nine of the Valley’s DJs, turntablists, and “audio navigators.” The result? An all-night extravaganza titled Illumination v2.0, which goes down on…
By Benjamin Leatherman Music editor Martin Cizmar totally digs the Flaming Lips funky new CD/DVD Christmas on Mars, and apparently so do the customers at Zia Record Exchange (105 West University Drive in Tempe). Here’s the rest of the top 10 best sellers for the week of Nov. 10-Nov. 16…
By Benjamin Leatherman The best falafel I’ve ever tasted. No seriously, this time I mean it…really. Last month I sang the praises of Phoenicia Cafe in Tempe, particularly about the joint’s falafel. After supping on its version of the Middle Eastern favorite of gound chickpeas and eggplant fashioned into silver…
By Benjamin Leatherman sBACH is scheduled to perform on Saturday at Modified Arts. The Valley’s concert venues will be stacked with superstar musicians this weekend. For instance, a Cursive Memory do their indie rock thing tonight at the PHiX in downtown Phoenix, while the Wu-Tang Clan’s Method Man and Redman…
Face it, Q-Tip has had a life way more fly than yours, fool. Before he reached the tender age of 25, the Harlem-born MC co-founded the influential hip-hop outfit A Tribe Called Quest, shared the silver screen with Janet Jackson in Poetic Justice, earned a Grammy nomination, and collaborated with…
The hip-hop scene in the PHX is bigger than ever. Homegrown homeboy Willy Northpole made an appearance at the BET Hip Hop Awards last month, rhyme-spitting MCs are doing their thing on the mic at nights like The Blunt Club and Raising Arizona, and a new old-school station started broadcasting…
