"Warm-up is a smorgasbord of musical genresGlobal Gathering at Bicentennial Park Saturday offered music ranging from house to breakbeat to horror rock.
BY MICHAEL HAMERSLYmhamersly@MiamiHerald.com
Music lovers gathered by the thousands Saturday to worship the sun, dance beats and hard-rock bands at Global Gathering, sprawled across downtown Miami's Bicentennial Park.
It was the perfect warm-up for Winter Music Conference, a week of dancing, DJs and debauchery that kicks off Wednesday, though the partying has already started at many clubs.
The daytime beats, led by world-renowned DJ acts such as The Crystal Method and Deep Dish, kept the crowd grooving as they wandered between five stages. But as the sun went down, the music got even hotter.
The different areas of the park provided a smorgasbord of cutting-edge sounds. Roger Sanchez rocked the Biscayne Tent with lively vocal house, including a sizzling remix of Marky Mark's '90s dance classic Good Vibrations, paired with powerful, artistic visuals on the video screens flanking the stage. Meanwhile, Jimmy Van M, a protégé of progressive house duo Sasha & John Digweed, offered a more experimental sound at the Downtown Stage.
The Global Beats Tent offered raging breakbeat, with Evil Nine mixing up Led Zeppelin's howling Immigrant Song with images of dancing space men surrounding the DJ duo.
MUSICAL JOURNEY
Over at the B-Live Beach Stage, the band Coheed & Cambria, whose lead singer channels Rush's Geddy Lee, forged epic mini-journeys into artistic prog-rock.
As the darkness descended, the music got even more intense. Sasha & Digweed followed Jimmy Van M on the Downtown Stage and showed why the pair has been idolized by electronic music fans for a decade with a two-hour trip through the best in tech-house, while visually pulsing retro images flashed on either side.
And then the fireworks started, exploding above the adjacent AmericanAirlines Arena and inciting wild cheering. Sasha & Digweed matched the sky show during its finale with visual fireworks of their own.
Horror-rock god Rob Zombie made his intro at the B-Live Beach Stage to Dr. Hook's trailer-trash, hippie-sounding hit Cover of the Rolling Stone, sending up his image as a cross between hillbilly and satanic ax murderer. Images of Charles Manson on the video screen gave Zombie's hits, including More Human Than Human and the new Foxy Foxy, an even more sinister edge.
GENRES COLLIDE
Before tearing into Living Dead Girl, Zombie ridiculed the dance beats echoing across the park, asking, ''Anyone slit their wrists over there yet?'' and adding, ``All that disco's killing me.''
All that ''disco'' was creating a frenzy in the Biscayne Tent, where local stars Cedric Gervais and Ralph Falcon tag-teamed behind the decks, at one point churning out a manic version of Queen's Another One Bites the Dust, while Dutch superstar Armin Van Buuren was trancing out the crowd on the Downtown Stage.
After a long wait, rock fans finally got what they came for when headliner Nine Inch Nails, led by the nihilistic, acid-throated Trent Reznor, ripped into Mr. Self Destruct, the opening track on 1994's The Downward Spiral, before turning to You Know What You Are? from its latest album With Teeth.
Reznor and company tore through new and old hits including Sin and Terrible Lie from the groundbreaking debut album Pretty Hate Machine, plus crowd favorites Closer and The Hand That Feeds, all songs whose scorching guitars are anchored by industrial dance beats. The band embodies the spirit of Global Gathering,
