Miami

Friday, October 17

I arrived as the sun set. Erika De Casier’s “Two Thieves” rang out softly as I rushed past the guards toward the Mind Melt stage. A small crowd of alt-kids was gathered as close to the front as possible. Erika swayed to a gentle trip-hop drone.   

“Is Nick León present,” she asks, half-teasing. The crowd cheers and points, and sure enough, keeping it casual, one of Miami’s key producers was dancing toward the center back. Erika ends her set with their collab “Bikini”, a swoon-worthy storm of techno and harp that was a strong contender for last year’s song of the summer.

Strolling after her set, I run into (and subsequently walk quickly next to) Caterina Haddad, the Club Space senior marketing manager and Miami nightlife Swiss Army Knife who co-founded the Suero collective/party series alongside León. Her short black hair whips around as we speed toward S3QUENC3, the outdoor scaffolding cube stage that has hosted some of III Points’ best techno moments and will serve as Suero’s stage this year. She’s just dropped off a bunch of capsule zines that capture the party’s universe, and has to show up before dawn tomorrow to set the stage up. “We’re gonna have bubbles and red fabric…we’ve never decorated the stage before, it’s gonna be exciting.”

Back at Mind Melt, Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso are “tender but gangsta.” The crowd waves their hands to and fro. I run straight to The Player’s Club, a VIP mini-nightclub by the mainstage. My eye catches a small room by the entrance: a small sit-down tea room. This little slice of heaven run by JoJo Tea has apparently been a best-kept secret of the festival’s upper echelon for years. “We’ve been secretly doing this room since 2014, the first [III Points], then after a pause for the pandemic we’ve done all of them since 2021”, says co-founder Mike between pours of a smoky white blend. 

It’s refreshing to take some refuge from the booming techno in the lounge, and the greater outside noise. I end up next to Hunter, a long-time attendee hidden by a bucket hat and sunglasses (I talk to him, also hidden by sunglasses). I ask what keeps him coming back: “Every year it develops a new scent, becomes a new animal, but every year we return and it’s the same portal.”

Full of tea, I run to Sector 3. Sean Paul’s boisterous takeover has everything you’d expect. Between twerking and Jamaican flags feverishly waved, a sweaty mosh pit throws it back to “Temperature”. The crowd walks out as Nelly Furtado’s “Say It Right” plays on the speakers. 

I walk back toward Mana, the internal area that was once the sole host of the festival, which has since grown to a largely outdoor behemoth. I find the festival’s publicist, who tells me I must check out the Despacio sound room. We try to cut the line but not even she’s allowed to. “We’re working the festival,” she pleads with the guard, who retorts “me too,” with the kind of side eye of someone who’s been dealing with Miami partygoers all day. Out of the corner of my eye, a shirtless twink chatters his teeth without blinking and frantically sends a text. Yeah.

We eventually sneak in through a back curtain, face-to-face with a circular room where LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and Belgian electronic brotherly duo Soulwax (silently tucked away, top of their heads barely visible above a black tarp near the back) have curated an analog sound room for the gods. With the crowd rotating around the gigantic disco ball in the center, techno and funk and French disco on vinyl abound well until 3:00 a.m. both nights. On my way out, I hear “Andy” by Les Rita Mitsouko with the bass turned all the way up.

The Halo 88 stage to the furthermost right of the building is hosting arguably the night’s most lit stage, curated by party collective Masisi’s co-founder Akia Dorsainvil, who DJs as Pressure Point and was celebrating his birthday. A beaming bastion of community, he vamps and blows kisses and tears the decks in two alongside Mr. Bitch, mixing Plan B’s “Guatauba” with transcendental breakbeats. Before giving the stage to Venezuelan Miami mainstay V1fro, Dorsainvil spins a mix of Ne-Yo’s “Closer” with a breakbeat that gives us all the euphoric fist-pounding ending we needed. On the way out, a girl catches her breath, eyes popping out of her head and hair disheveled by the bass: “That stage was crazy…everyone was soooo FOINE.”

Saturday, October 18

It was absolutely criminal that they put James K. on so early when Friend is one of the best records out this year. I could say the same for Oklou, whose set I catch the tail-end of. I can grumble as much as I want about showing up late, but it makes sense to put the ethereal indie acts at sundown…how else can one listen to the fairy voice of “Doom Bikini”, to the electronic hum of “God’s Chariots”? 

Cate made good on her promise: the DJ booth at S3QUENC3 is covered by a large tarp of orange vinyl film with the word “SUERO” cut out in block letters. Colombian Miami DJ Berrakka played a charged b2b set with Houston underground delight Hyperfemme, ending (appropriately) with a breaks remix of a cut from JT’s “City Cinderella”. Jonny from Space and DJ Plead are next on the decks, switching the vibe toward minimal dub by way of trancey beats, tribal drums, and a minimal dub situation that grows gently with each rattle of an electronic shaker. A small crowd begins to gather, everyone ready to let absolutely loose.

Upstairs, Dominican experimental producer Diego Raposo and V1fro are stressed about a girl hanging from a rafter. “I think the police got her down,” Diego tells me before the two run off. Downstairs, Tayhana plays to a full floor, spinning guaracha, raptor house, and trance mixed with alt rock and pop from the ’90s and early 2000s: deep cuts by Sinéad O’Connor and the Killers, Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” with a Latin Electronic kick. 

I spend some time talking to a seasoned manager; this is her first time at the festival. “I went to the first Coachella, and now…well, we know what it is,” she says. “I feel like there are still freaks at III Points, like the tech bros haven’t found it yet.”

“That’s not entirely true,” Cate and I giggle later on at the S3QUENC3 entrance, coordinating a time to chat between the two of us running around the grounds. Before she runs off, she adds something true: “I guess it’s big enough of a festival that you can curate your entire experience away from the tech bros!” My mind goes to the polo- and boat shoes-wearing wolf pack I saw earlier at the entrance buying poppers at the smoke shop. I was in line for gum, which they didn’t sell—the cashier felt bad and gave me the last stick of Orbit out of his pocket. 

Back at Mana, tonight’s Halo 88 set is curated by Gami, Miami’s underground doll extraordinaire, who spins as Ultrathem. I catch Proletar b2b with Vsyana, one of them in a skeleton shirt with a Palestinian keffiyeh wrapped around their waist. German-style hard techno, a meaty bass so engorged it threatens to devour us all, the light smell of amyl nitrate, and not a tech bro in sight.

Before heading back to S3QUENC3, I somehow find another tea room. This one is by the VIP festival entrance, a small outdoor stand run by Haifa Ballol of Haiphanated. I’m still not sure exactly what she sells, but the little open air stand—replete with bottles of pure oud, rose, and leather essence, vintage metalwork seating, hot tea, and a typewriter — has given me enough sanity to keep pushing. 

Back at the Suero takeover, Bambii is mixing Robin S’s “Show Me Love” with Beyoncé’s “Run The World.” The divas are twirling. I find myself near the center when M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” comes on mixed with minimal techno, maybe the festival’s most transcendental moment. Nick León follows, an intimate midnight set that starts soft. The Erika de Casier collab returns, this time bolstered by gentle bongo percussion. The gentle tropical techno of it all expands until it collapses into beat changes, synapses, claps. The bubble machine envelops us in the front. Overwhelming drums barely hide the a capella from a Tainy song: No me importa nada / Yo soy un adicto. He keeps growing, moving us through guaracha, raptor house, and baile funk onward to club heaven. 

I find Cate, who spirits me away to the green room as Boy Harsher’s set blisters in the background (pain breaks the rhythm / breaks the rhythm / breaks the rhythm). We’re both exhausted, soon joined by Nick León and his manager, frantically planning to cover a last-minute cancellation at the Suero stage. She explains the stage’s history, her work on Suero specifically (doing, well, everything from management to creative and art direction to marketing) and her own relationship to the festival, one she had first attended in 2017, though she had heard of since the start, a teenager in Broward just starting to get into nightlife. “If I had to make a Venn diagram [of Suero], the center of it is the club [Space] where it was born, and then there’s an outer ring where I guess III Points would fit,” she says. “Then there’s the community outreach, these Ableton music production classes that we wanted to do, and then the gallery…for the festival, they gave us free range to curate a lineup. For me personally it’s also an excuse to make things. I don’t have a bunch of free time to invest into my ‘practice,’ so it definitely mirrors a huge part of my identity in that way.”

The post-cancellation lineup coalesces: Nick León, Berrakka, Jonny From Space, and Hyperfemme tear up the decks for a surprise marathon set. Yasuri Yamileth, Six Sex, techno, breakbeat, and a clear-skied night lit up by Orion’s belt round out the stage to be at this year’s festival, one that’s grown exponentially from an indoor event that sought to mix art and music but keeps an energy that’s all Miami. Sometime around 4:00 a.m., Nick gets off stage and we head to a golf cart that takes us, his manager, and two of his friends from New York to a black SUV. “It’s like we at Coachella,” one of them exclaims as we speed into the night.

We arrive to The Ground for the afters. After sips of Club Space-branded coconuts, we step out before Nick’s set with Ela Minus—who arrives in a flowy black Acne Studios jacket, all smiles to see him—to reminisce about how he got to this point, from a young Florida jit playing keys at early III Points to an emerging DJ in 2015 booked at (RIP) Bardot by Ashley Venom to one of Miami’s most exciting producers at a global level and co-curator of III Points’ most dynamic stage.

“I was reflecting on this with David [Sinopoli, Space’s co-owner and III Point’s co-founder]; it was a collaboration in the way that Cate would say ‘if we did our stage, would this fit?’,” he says of Suero’s dynamic. “We ended up curating in a group effort last year, which is cool. Then this year, being able to do it at the S3QUENC3 stage and having it be a bunch of club music that we really enjoy, like Tayhana, and Bambii….it feels tied to something new.”