http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/26/a...sic/26CONF.html

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March 26, 2003
A Music Conference? No. Mostly Parties.
By KELEFA SANNEH


MIAMI BEACH, March 23 — Call it the Winter Music Conference, although the name is triply misleading.

It took place in Miami Beach last week, as a hot, muggy winter was giving way to a hot, muggy spring. The week's focus wasn't music, broadly speaking, but dance music, with a focus on three kinds: house, trance and techno.

And although the week was organized as a conference, the main attraction was the nightlife. It was easy to go the entire time without attending any official events and without meeting anyone who had. Who wants to spend an afternoon hearing about copyrights, co-writes and performing rights, when you could be belly-up on the beach, recovering from another party?

The week was dominated by dance music's most successful D.J.'s, a group that changes little from year to year: Paul Oakenfold, Sasha and Digweed, Paul van Dyk, Tiesto. They took turns spinning marathon sets at a huge nightclub called Space. And on Saturday the big names converged at Bayfront Park in downtown Miami for the week's biggest event, an all-day party called the Ultra Music Festival, which attracted about 40,000 revelers.

To walk through the park was to tour a strange world that bore a striking similarity to Europe: for fourteen hours in downtown Miami, Mr. van Dyk, a German D.J., was a bona fide celebrity. There were hardly any songs or lyrics, but the listeners didn't seem to mind. They were eager, instead, to concentrate on beats and sounds.

Sasha, from Britain, who performed with his partner, John Digweed, avoided obvious melodies, topping his steady, thumping beats with complicated electronic patterns that slowly decayed and mutated. Mr. Oakenfold, another Briton, used jittery synthesizer lines to add energy to his set, and people cheered every time a new synthesizer line came in. Tiesto, from the Netherlands, structured his set like a rock 'n' roll concert, often stripping away heroic melody lines to reveal the hard, steady pulse underneath. There were three encores, and before each one the M.C. bellowed, "Tiesto!"

The week's other big event was the DanceStar USA award ceremony, a bizarre ritual here on Wednesday in Lummus Park. (Like the Ultra Music Festival, this event had no official connection to the Winter Music Conference. In fact, the conference organizers sponsored their own, less prestigious awards ceremony the next night.)

For the most part, the speeches were dull and the performances were duller. The night proved that D.J.'s make lousy pop stars. But there was a moment of levity early on when D.J. Sammy from Germany, accepting an award for his gaudy trance remake of the Bryan Adams hit "Heaven," used his time on the podium to reminisce about an impressive woman he'd seen at the beach. The British group Dirty Vegas won the award for best use of music in a commercial. (The group owes its success to a Mitsubishi advertisement.) Steve Smith, the group's singer, declared, "If that's what it takes to get onto American radio, then fantastic."

DanceStar also played host to the week's most outlandish appearance: P. Diddy took the stage to celebrate his new identity as a techno producer. Dressed in baggy cargo pants tied at the ankle, he performed his crudely effective new single, which has a jackhammer beat and a simple refrain: "Your dreams have now been fulfilled/Let's get up and let's get ill!"

For the next few nights, P. Diddy kept materializing, often sweeping into a club with his entourage sometime before sunrise. His ubiquity in Miami made an odd kind of sense: he covets the disc jockeys' nightclub credibility the same way that the D.J.'s covet his mainstream celebrity.

Some of the acts in Miami mixed electronic production with live instruments. Royksopp, from Norway, used a live bass player to create thick, hazy grooves. The duo Metro Area, from New York, threw a stylish pool party, using a small string ensemble to embellish stately disco-influenced tracks. And Underworld, from Britain, gave one of Ultra's most impressive performances, matching richly textured electronic compositions with impassioned vocals.

Still, if dance music chases innovation, it also embraces repetition, and this was a week in which familiarity bred contentment. Veterans like Danny Tenaglia and Masters at Work attracted huge crowds. And some of the most memorable moments came from D.J.'s who unabashedly traded on nostalgia. D.J. Harvey, from Britain, drew a big roar when he interrupted a set to play Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love." The brilliant Belgian duo 2 Many D.J.'s joined forces with James Murphy, from New York, for a set that included Nirvana, the Cars and a Justin Timberlake remix.

In a week dedicated to dance music traditionalism, this playful, messy approach was an appealing alternative. But while the mix-and-match style seemed fresh, the underlying idea was as old as dance music itself. Like most of the other D.J.'s in Miami, these three had figured out that if you want to get people moving, it helps to play something they already know.



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