LAS ROSAS: III Points Open House ft 7.Zip, Amar, Blind Fish, Bricolage, Bygone Summers, Cumbiamba, Dedro, Grabba Ranks, Kyra, Love, Jane, Mapa, Mijita, Playshado, Trippie Hippie
LOST WEEKEND MB: DJ Spiff
KILL YOUR IDOL: DJ Chris Black
FUNKY BISCUIT: Jim Lauderdale
8/13
MAD ARTS: Sophie Wong “Roots & Reflections”
LAS ROSAS: III Points Open House ft Dr3bae, Emily Afre, Ezmehfw, Foureyes, Homicide Jenny, Huracan, Iiry?, Lylac, Madison Kay, Mekanik & Hormiga, Nicole, Nxtel, Sucia!, X13f
FILLMORE MB: Masego
8/14
FILLMORE MB: 3BallMnty
ZEYZEY: Le Youth, Eric Luttrell
KILL YOUR IDOL: Honky Tonk w DJ DER$
ITHINK AMP: Motley Crue, Tesla, Extreme
GUANABANAS: Irie Souljah
PROPAGANDA: Dyke Night
ARTS GARAGE: Kat Riggins
8/15
GREEN SPACE IN MIAMI: Words with Wings Poetry Workshop & Reception
FILLMORE MB: Intl. Ballet Festival of Miami
KILL YOUR IDOL: The Keepers
ZEYZEY: Sam Binga, Derrick Carter
ARTS GARAGE: Live Bowie
MAXI’S LINEUP: Crazy Fingers
GUANABANAS: Johnny Dread, Sierra Lane Duo
8/16
MADARTS IN DANIA BEACH: Words w Wings Poetry Workshop & Reception
KILL YOUR IDOL: Late Nite Loops Improv Jam
FILLMORE MB: Intl. Ballet Festival of Miami
SQUARE GROUPER: Electric Rubber Band
GUANABANAS: Victoria Leigh
8/18
ARTS GARAGE: Spoken Word Open Mic
ITHINK AMP: Jack
8/19
CULTURE
8/20
HARD ROCK LIVE: Squeeze, Adam Ant, Haircut 100
CULTURAL COUNCIL PBC: Artist Marketplace
ITHINK AMP: Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson, Hu, Orgy
FILLMORE MB: Clarent
MAXI’S LINEUP: Bryan Smith
PROPAGANDA: Open Mic
BOCA BLACK BOX: Simply Clapton
8/21
FILLMORE MB: Ronkalunga
MAXI’S LINEUP: Jutt Huffman Band
ZEYZEY: Ritual by Jay Cruz ft Rara, Bellamar, Bebo Dumont, Punchis
KILL YOUR IDOL: GO!
PROPAGANDA: Old Habits
ARTS GARAGE: Never Stop Believin’ GUANABANAS: Sonny East Band
8/22
REVOLUTION LIVE: Still Alive, Foo Fight
BRYANT PARK: WPB Beer Fest
LINCOLN’S BEARD: Nascar Aloe & Jasiah
MAXI’S LINEUP: Mark Telesca Band
ZEYZEY: Zest Fest w Mustard Service
KILL YOUR IDOL: Medicine Room, Shad, Sofia Luna, Le Belle Michele, Joshira, Venus Whisper
SUNSET COVE AMP: Slightly Stoopid, The Elovaters, DENM
CULTURE ROOM: Buck Cherry, Tyler Bryant, The Shakedown
ARTS GARAGE: Siempre Flamenco
FUNKY BISCUIT: Fabulous Fleetwoods
GUANABANAS: Spred the Dub, Tritone
ARTS WAREHOUSE: Intro to Photography
8/23
GUANABANAS: Mangrove Mark
KILL YOUR IDOL: Late Nite Loops Improv Jam
8/25
HARD ROCK LIVE: Goo Goo Dolls, Neon Trees
KILL YOUR IDOL: Haus of Poodle
8/26
PROPAGANDA: Respect the Vibe
8/27
OLD SCHOOL SQUARE: Full Moon Yoga & Night Mrkt
BANYAN LIVE: Emarosa
FILLMORE MB: Bossman Dlow
ZEYZEY: Easy Honey
MAXI’S LINEUP: Bryan Smith
8/28
FILLMORE MB: Devo
OLD SCHOOL SQUARE: Party in Paradise
ZEYZEY: Maria Nocheydia
PROPAGANDA: Mangrüve, Stony Fools
KILL YOUR IDOL: Butterbrain, ¡FUÁKATA!, Wild Spark, Skull Crunch
HARD ROCK LIVE: Freestyle Explosion
BANYAN LIVE: Goth Circus
GUANABANAS: Jake Walden Band
MAXI’S LINEUP: Tritone
8/29
ZEYZEY: Esoterica ft Eristheplanet, Flavor*, TC Silk, Suun, Mold!, Trust Nobody, Racci, Jayswann, SliccJuice, Born at Midnite
RESOURCE DEPOT: Upcycle Day!
ARTS GARAGE: Ashley Pezzotti as Ella Fitzgerald
PROPAGANDA: Last Laugh w Creature Cage, Slimers, Burlesque
KILL YOUR IDOL: Prophets of the Dark Side
ABACOA AMP: Pepper & The Movement, Surfer Girl
GUANABANAS: Uproot Hootenanny, Funkin’ Grateful
8/30
ITHINK AMP: Dirty Heads, 311
KILL YOUR IDOL: Late Nite Loops Improv Jam
GUANABANAS: Nouveaux Honkies
MANGO FEST
by abel folgar
Every South Floridian has a mango story. Maybe it involves a backyard tree that produced more fruit than anyone knew what to do with. Maybe it’s the annual debate over whether Haden, Kent or Carrie reigns supreme. Maybe it’s climbing over a neighbor’s fence as a kid, or arriving at work in July to find a paper grocery bag overflowing with ripe mangoes to share. Few things bridge South Florida’s many cultures quite like the mango. Now that shared tradition has inspired the Mango Music & Arts Festival, a new Labor Day Weekend celebration debuting in Downtown Lake Worth Beach. More than a FREE music festival, it’s a love letter to one of Palm Beach County’s most creative communities.
“The vision was always to create something that brings people together,” says Pomona owner and festival founder Alexandra Dupuis. “A day where neighbors meet neighbors, families discover local artists, small businesses gain new customers, and people fall in love with Lake Worth Beach all over again.” Then, through a chance meeting with the teams behind PureHoney and Tiki Tumbao, the vision grew into something far larger than originally imagined. What began as a neighborhood block party evolved into a professionally curated music festival featuring some of South Florida’s most respected musicians alongside local businesses, artists and nonprofits. Rather than centering everything around one stage, the FREE fest transforms an entire downtown block into an immersive experience. Six performance areas—including four primary stages—invite guests to wander between Pomona, Propaganda, Rudy’s Pub, Bamboo Room and neighboring businesses, discovering new music, local food, art installations and unexpected moments around every corner. “As a young entrepreneur, I’ve learned communities don’t grow by accident—they grow because people intentionally invest in each other,” Dupuis says. “Festivals create those moments. They turn streets into gathering places, introduce people to businesses they may have never walked into, and remind us that supporting local has a real impact on the people behind these storefronts.”
If Miami often defines South Florida’s skyline, Lake Worth Beach has long embodied its creative soul. Its colorful downtown has become one of Palm Beach County’s most eclectic cultural corridors, where artists, musicians, entrepreneurs and longtime residents all contribute to a distinctly local identity. The mango itself represents far more than clever branding. It reflects South Florida’s agricultural roots and the Caribbean and Latin American cultures that have shaped the region for generations. In neighborhoods across the county, one tree can connect families from dozens of different countries through a shared summer tradition. “Something I’m especially proud of is realizing just how many of our participating businesses are women-owned and minority-owned,” Dupuis says. “That wasn’t something we planned, it happened because that’s who makes up the incredible entrepreneurial spirit of our community. Palm Beach County is filled with people taking chances, building businesses from the ground up and creating opportunities for others.”
Music serves as Mango Fest’s heartbeat. Cumbiamba revives the electrifying psychedelic chicha and cumbia sounds of the 60s and 70s. Miami favorites Tony & the Kings bring their high-energy Latin boogaloo and The Glades drop their impossibly cool take on retro jazz. Jeremy’s Way, provide the timeless energy of Santana’s legendary Latin rock sound. tiny. blips’ soul-filled beats and compositions weave abstraction, heavy grooves, melodies and found sounds, while The Soul Vaccinators, featuring Eddie Garcia Jr. from Tony & the Kings and Addison Rifkind from The Glades, pull double duty with their soulful jazz and cut-at-theclub authenticity which blends blues, bebop, roots and funk. Brett Staska’s “coastal cowboy” is one part honky tonk jukebox, one part vintage single fin longboard and Mala Onda are a high energy experimental trio who take the bright, echoing riffs of classic 60s surf and inject them with fast, driving rhythms and distortions of 70s and 80s punk. Throughout the day, vinyl DJs, roaming performers and live visual artists will keep the energy flowing between stages, while more than 30 local artisan, vintage and maker vendors line the streets with handcrafted goods, fashion and artwork inspired by the creative spirit of Lake Worth Beach. Guests can also enjoy mango-inspired food and cocktails from downtown restaurants while exploring one of Palm Beach County’s most walkable arts districts.
The festival’s mission extends beyond entertainment. A portion of proceeds will benefit The Guatemalan-Maya Center, which empowers immigrant families through education, health and social services, and Path to College, an organization dedicated to helping local students pursue higher education and long-term success. Behind every great festival is a community willing to believe in it. The inaugural Mango Music & Arts Festival has been made possible through the collaboration of the Lake Worth Beach Community Redevelopment Agency, neighborhood associations, downtown businesses like The Lake Worth Playhouse, The Dancing Elephant Bookstore, PureHoney Magazine, Tiki Tumbao, local artist Emmanuel Gonzales, who coordinated much of the festival’s vendors, and countless volunteers. Together, they’re transforming one downtown block into a celebration of the music, art, culture and entrepreneurial spirit that make Lake Worth Beach unlike anywhere else in South Florida.“I hope this festival becomes known not only for great music and amazing food, but for creating opportunities, celebrating diversity, and proving that when we invest in small businesses, we invest in the future of Palm Beach County,” Dupuis says.
Can one fruit unite South Florida? Maybe not entirely. But it reminds us that the best stories about this place have never belonged to one neighborhood, one culture or one sound. They’ve always been shared—from backyard to backyard, table to table and stage to stage, one ripe mango at a time.
FREE FEST! The Mango Music Festival featuring Cumbiamba, the Soul Vaccinators, the Glades, tiny.blips, Tony and the Kings, Brett Staska, Mala Onda and much more launches 1pm on Saturday, September 5 in Downtown Lake Worth Beach.
TONY AND THE KINGS
FERNANDO CANO
by kelli bodle
Fernando Cano starts the conversation by announcing, “I’m three years pregnant.” Unexpected, to say the least! “This is my baby,” Cano says, gesturing to the entirety of a restaurant under construction on Lucerne Avenue in Lake Worth Beach. It’s the brainchild of Sub-Culture Group restaurateur Rodney Mayo. Called Man Ray, after the avant-garde pioneer, it will open as the latest outpost in Sub-Culture’s Dadaist empire.
Born in Barranca, Peru, in 1964, Cano is one of the restaurant group’s in-house artists — the upshot of a relationship with Mayo that dates back a few years to a first encounter Cano remembers well. “I was working for a construction company, and we did some work for him,” Cano says on a recent visit to Man Ray, lingering outside beneath the shade of a large canvass umbrella. “I told him I graduated in the fine arts back in Peru and in residential planning and design in the United States. So, before he let me try a mural, he tried me first on [painting] a bathroom. He said, ‘Can you do this?’ All the time, he keeps asking, ‘Can you do this? How about this?’ But when you graduate in art and design, there is nothing you cannot do.”
Evidence of Cano’s capabilities spreads from the design of the outdoor mural anchoring Man Ray to its seating, tables, bathrooms, and ceiling. A construction worker stops Cano to confer on a drill bit before Cano returns to the subject of Mayo. “He has 800 people working for him and 24 restaurants. I don’t know how he does it. Also, he likes dogs, so he has a dog shelter. I see him once a month when he needs something. But we have a good connection.” Their shared visions for artistic design can also be found throughout West Palm Beach at The Hacienda (coming soon), Hullabaloo, and H3 Dog Rescue.
For Man Ray, Cano has drawn a monumental representation of Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, swapping out the original biblical grouping for luminaries of early- to mid-century Paris, rendered in charcoal and painted with acrylic house paint. Like Man Ray’s photography, it’s in black and white. Each cultural icon at the table is identified by a name tag or place card.
Arranged for dinner in Cano’s mural are: Antonin Artaud, Balthus, Alexander Calder, Coco Chanel, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and Gertrude Stein, with Man Ray himself occupying the Jesus position at the center of the table. “Coco Chanel modeled for Vogue with Man Ray as her photographer in 1924,” Cano says. The mural reflects Man Ray’s influential approach to fashion photography, which emphasized sharp contrasts between light and shadow.
“Man Ray portrayed all the most amazing people at the time; the time of Dada,” Cano says, referencing the artistic and literary movement formed in response to the disasters of World War I. “When Rodney assigned me the job, I was like, ‘What do I do with this mural?’ I decided it’s The Last Supper. But I don’t put food because these guys are messed up,” he says with a laugh.
Instead, he explains, “It is called La Bohème, like the Charles Aznavour song.” The 1965 chanson, about a painter looking back at his Parisian heyday, is a wistful farewell to the artistic French life of old. And in this bohemian last supper tableau, Cano points to a figure cheekily peering around the leaves at the shenanigans happening at the dinner table: “This is Rodney over here hiding in the bushes.”
Historical references are the bedrock of the establishment’s design, and Cano leads PureHoney inside to see the bathrooms, hallway, and bar, where he has also painted and collaged all things Dada and Man Ray. Cano covered every inch of the bathrooms with quotes by the artist, and freehand sketches of figures, swirls, and eyes. “The eyes are very important for the pictures,” Cano says. The eyes appear again on the ceiling collage above the bar’s chairs and throughout the outdoor bathrooms as well. “Ultimately, for me, Dada is like the second French Revolution, but for art. Dada is a declaration of independence, a Magna Carta,” Cano says.
Learn more at sub-culture.org/man-ray & @manrayrestaurantlw
DEVO
by david rolland
When a band call themselves Devo, as in short for “de-evolution,” it helps to go back to their beginnings to look for truth in advertising. Just how devolved, really, are Devo? Without a time machine it’s tough to see the new wave band’s reported origins in Akron, Ohio in 1973 as a kind of anti-art adventure. But a listen to their first LP, 1978’s Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, is revealing.
The opener, “Uncontrollable Urge,” is all spastic, kinetic energy that leaves a listener defenseless against the impulse to shake, rattle and roll, and it belongs on the short list for greatest opening songs on a debut album. So in a sense, after starting with perfection, there was nowhere for this band to go but down, ergo devolve.
Yet the second track is a different kind of de-evolution: a cover of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Where the canonical 1965 Rolling Stones song radiates so much cool and lust for kicks that we take it for granted, Devo decided to play it sounding like foreign exchange students from another solar system. Through their dry line readings you can almost believe they had not heard “Satisfaction” a thousand times like everyone else before they tried it. (Legend has it that Mick Jagger, upon first listen, was ecstatic.)
Other Q&A songs arrived with titles that could get a band cancelled in the, if not deevolved, then definitely more sensitive 21st Century. First single “Mongoloid” is lo-fi, postpunk sociology that won praise from rock heavyweights David Bowie and Neil Young The b-side, “Jocko Homo,” is as otherworldly as the title would make you hope or fear, and is featured in Devo’s own short film, In The Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution. The album’s de-facto opus, Gut Feeling (Slap Your Mammy), builds from a twangy motif with ticklish keyboards to a yowling vocal aimed at a soon-to-be ex, and finishes with a demented, double-time coda — a breakup song with heart and bile.
Whether you consider rock stardom evolution or regression, it was the quintet’s third LP, 1980’s Freedom of Choice, that really threatened to make Devo a household name and/ or product. The flagship song, “Whip It,” was the first and only Devo single to crack the US Top 40. As for the video, art-minded Devo had always experimented with a distinctive visual look, but the dawn of MTV allowed image to be everything, and Devo blew up this mandate to novelty-song proportions. All dressed in black, except for their trademark red flowerpot hats, on a dinky old west homestead, the band perform their catchiest hook with total commitment to the song’s blatant double entendres, and to being comically out of place on the little prairie. Rewatching the video almost 50 years later, the subversiveness and sense of humor endure. It also feels like a big influence on the 1984 comedy classic Revenge of the Nerds. “Whip It” ended up being Devo’s evolutionary or de-evolutionary mainstream peak. Through the 1980’s and beyond they continued to stay relevant on the edges of popular culture. The Simpsons and Family Guy both parodied “Whip It.” Devo’s unique cover of Lee Dorsey’s “Working in the Coal Mine” charted after being in the closing credits of the 1981 animated movie, Heavy Metal. If there was a low point, it was ”Theme from Doctor Detroit.” The title song from the 1983 Dan Aykroyd comedy felt stale and, for the first time for Devo, predictable, as though they were trying to commodify their oddball sound.
But there was no need. The magic formula was right there from the beginning: Wound-up songs, straight from the id, warbled oddly and performed with a twitchy choreography, like some adolescent robot stuck between its programming and its feelings. Local fans will have a chance to relive uncontrollable urges and see what is, remarkably, the first South Florida Devo concert of the 21st century, their last being 1988 at The Button South in Hallandale Beach. The current touring incarnation features original members Gerald Casale, Mark Mothersbaugh and Bob Mothersbaugh, and set lists from recent summer shows in Europe promise faithful renditions of many songs discussed here. Devo perform 8pm Friday, August 28 at The Fillmore Miami Beach. clubdevo.com
SQUEEZE + ADAM ANT + HAIRCUT 100
by abel folgar
Squeeze, Adam Ant, and Haircut 100 is more a summit of survivors than a tour banking on interest from aging new wavers. It’s an explosion of British pop, born in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, from bands who’ve managed to keep their identities intact and catalogs thriving. These are three wildly different acts connected by sharp songwriting, styleconscious reinvention, and an understanding that popular music can be both playful and sophisticated.
Led by the songwriting partnership of Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook, Squeeze have quietly built one of the deepest catalogs in British pop, balancing kitchen-sink storytelling with melodies so airtight they often get mistaken for standards.“Up the Junction,” “Tempted,” “Pulling Mussels (From the Shell),” and “Black Coffee in Bed,” among others, remain masterclasses in compact songwriting; witty, bruised, romantic, and endlessly hummable.
Yet the biggest talking point surrounding the band today is Trixies, Squeeze’s first album of new material in nearly a decade. The twist is that the songs themselves aren’t exactly new: The material dates to the mid-1970s, when Difford and Tilbrook were teenagers dreaming up elaborate characters and scenes inside a fictional London nightclub called Trixies. The recordings were shelved for decades before being rediscovered and finally completed with the benefit of experience, stronger musicianship, and a full-circle sense of perspective. What could have been a novelty instead feels strangely perfect for Squeeze in 2026. Their music has always thrived on narrative detail and emotional ambiguity, and Trixies functions almost like a time capsule from an alternate timeline, one where the band’s earliest ambitions finally get their due. It also reinforces what longtime fans already know: Difford and Tilbrook belong in the upper tier of British songwriting duos and merit the Lennon/McCartney comparisons that trailed them through their heyday.
Live, Squeeze have evolved into something warmer and looser than the hyper-clever new wave outfit many people remember from MTV and college radio. Lead singer Tilbrook also remains one of pop’s most underrated guitarists, able to pivot from muscular riffs to jazzy flourishes without ever overwhelming the song, while lyricist, guitarist and occasional lead singer Difford continues to ground the band with dry humor and observational lyrics that find poetry in ordinary lives.
If Squeeze represent craftsmanship and emotional nuance, Adam Ant brings the swagger. Emerging from the post-punk underground with Adam and the Ants before launching a hugely successful solo career, Adam Ant fused glam rock, pirate iconography, tribal percussion and punk energy into something singular. At the dawn of the MTV era, he looked like a revolutionary cartoon hero and sounded like one, too.
Songs like “Stand and Deliver” and “Antmusic” weren’t just hits; they were declarations of identity. Beneath the face paint and theatrics was a performer deeply influenced by old-school rock showmanship, spaghetti westerns, and a kind of knowingly exaggerated masculinity that helped redefine pop stardom in the early ’80s.
What’s remarkable about his current live performances is how committed he remains to rock theater. Rather than treating his songs as museum pieces, he attacks them with the energy of someone still fascinated by the characters he created decades ago. There’s humor in the presentation now, but also a genuine appreciation for how strange and daring those records were at the time. The drums still thunder, the hooks still land, and audiences still respond instinctively to that combination of camp, danger, and charisma.
Then there’s Haircut 100, perhaps the most deceptively influential act on the bill. Fronted by Nick Heyward, the band exploded out of the UK sophisti-pop scene in the early 1980s with a sound that felt sun-drenched and impossibly stylish. While many of their contemporaries leaned heavily into synthesizers and icy futurism, Haircut built their identity around bright guitars, restless rhythms, jazzy flourishes, and breezy melodies that practically demanded rolled-up sleeves and rides in convertible.
The lineup is a rarity: a curated balance of complimentary acts instead of a package tour built around one marquee name. Squeeze deliver the songwriting depth, Adam Ant brings the theatrical voltage, and Haircut 100 supplies the champagne-pop shimmer. Different approaches, different aesthetics; but all connected by a period when British pop made personality, intelligence, and eccentricity coexist on mainstream radio.
Squeeze, Adam Ant, Haircut 100 Thursday, August 20, 7pm at Seminole Hard Rock in Hollywood.
ADAM ANT
HAIRCUT 100
SQUEEZE
IN THE HEIGHTS
by abel folgar
Before Lin-Manuel Miranda put Hamilton — as in Alexander — behind a microphone, he turned a spotlight on New York City with a play about Washington Heights, a multiracial, working-class neighborhood where Miranda spent parts of his youth. In the Heights was Miranda’s first Broadway musical and a winner of four Tony Awards, including Best Musical, years before Hamilton turned Miranda into a star.
With music and lyrics by Miranda and a book by Quiara Alegría Hudes, In The Heights was a tale in two acts where dreams, family obligations, immigrant life and the meaning of home collide over the course of a few sweltering summer days. Its score mixed hip-hop and Broadway with Latin musical traditions in songs such as “96,000,” “Paciencia y Fe” and “Carnaval del Barrio,” in a story centering a largely Hispanic community.
For its 74th season, the Lake Worth Playhouse’s production of In the Heights brings to life that block, and all its music, movement and complicated ideas about belonging. The production also features a South Florida cast whose own Puerto Rican, Dominican and Latin American backgrounds sometimes intersect with those of the characters onstage.
“For the summertime, I want to capture a younger audience and the non-theatergoing crowd with something high-energy,” Lake Worth Playhouse Artistic Director Daniel Eilola tells PureHoney. “Catering to that, this story, specifically with its sense of community and its message, is important right now to our entire community with all the things out there that are trying to pull us apart.”
For Eilola, who moved to South Florida from Philadelphia 15 years ago and has worked at the Playhouse for 12, this production stands out. “The sheer joy that I see from this cast and crew putting the show together gives you hope,’” he says. Presenting a show that asks what makes a place home has Eilola thinking about the Playhouse as a community. “There’s magic in the beams in this theater,” he says. “it’s a kind of tone that we try to set and try to maintain and uphold, where we open our doors and welcome everybody.”
The Lake Worth Playhouse presents In The Heights through Sunday, August 2. lakeworthplayhouse.org
L’ECLAIR + CHARLIE CHIMI
by erik kvarnberg
It’s a little on the nose when a band from the chocolate empire of Switzerland calls itself L’Eclair. But they are an undeniably delicious blend of keys, guitar, bass, percussion, and influences from both sides of the equator, with body-moving rhythms and instrumental melodies that seem to come from another dimension.
Formed in 2015, L’Eclair have waded into their second decade with a three-track covers EP for music blogger Aquarium Drunkard’s must-play Lagniappe Sessions. The mostly instrumental L’Eclair are not strangers to vocals, having collaborated with singers and rappers before. But these cover picks are like unexpected and very welcome house guests: classic disco (Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell”), new jack swing (Lisa Baron’s “Lovin N Affection”), and indie dream pop (Beach House’s “Space Song”).
No matter what era of L’Eclair you listen to, their stream of altered consciousness always yields something different. It’s acid jazz, it’s disco, it’s techno, it’s Kevin Parker’s demos for Innerspeaker, it’s TWRP, it’s Stereolab. Every track on their 2025 LP Cloud Drifter feels like a stopover in some retro-futuristic imaginary city. The band weaves in and out of funk and electronica, walls of synth and percussive slap bass, and then pivots into a psychedelic smooth-jazz rap.
In a January performance on Seattle’s KEXP, L’Eclair featured Charlie Chimi on percussion, just a few months before the release of his debut album, Disco Chimi Born Charles Garmendia in Cuba, raised in the Dominican Republic, currently based in New York and Miami, Chimi also plays percussion for Zambian rockers W.I.T.C.H
On his debut, Chimi as bandleader and frontman stacks Afro-Cuban rhythms, funky bass, and space-age synthesizers to create intriguing musical friction. Each track feels like it could be a musical accompaniment to a Basquiat, a Pollock, a Wilfredo Lam or a Tarsila do Amaral. “Pesadilla” combines a steady drum beat with dizzying samples, and then vaults into an infectious, accelerating state of chaos. “Rico” employs a Latin American bass line and syncopated drums to get every listener to bachata. Concertgoers at this free all-ages show at Little Haiti’s ZeyZey won’t need persuading.
L’Eclair and Charlie Chimi perform 8pm Saturday, August 1 at ZeyZey in Miami.
L’ECLAIR
DOLPHINS
by tim moffatt
The one-woman show that artist, architect and now playwright Jill Karlin is bringing to Scotland’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe will first be performed for one night here in South Florida, where Karlin and her solo foray into theater have deep roots
Called The Dolphins Are Still Singing Can you hear them? The Epic Story of Lee, Me, and the Tree, it’s a love story at heart. Through poetry, monologue and real-time onstage painting, Karlin recounts her life with influential architect Lee Porter Butler, who died in 2005, and the shared passion for environmentalism that they called their “Dolphin Dream.” She also relates the couple’s quest to champion a passive, zero-emissions indoor climate control system that designer and homebuilder Butler invented in the 1970s.
The play is, for Karlin, a way of continuing that work on sustainability. “It’s the most important thing we can do on the planet today, because architecture is foundational for everything,” she tells PureHoney. “So this has been my life mission.”
The husband and wife founded Ekotecture in South Florida as a firm and a building philosophy whose centerpiece is Butler’s pioneering “gravity geothermal envelope.” The envelope is a layered form of construction with space between walls that allows natural air flow and ambient temperature to cool or heat an interior.
The Dolphins Are Still Singing is “the origin story of how Ekotecture gets started,” Karlin says, adding that “it’s also woo-woo and spiritually driven, and [with] dolphins and trees — I mean, it’s out there! And this is a way to get the story heard and seen, and into hearts and minds. Again, the goal is to get the buildings built.”
The Dolphins Are Still Singing director Kleber Soares calls the show “a poetic, humorous, mystical, and deeply moving journey through love, loss, spiritual awakening, environmental activism, and the extraordinary true story of Jill and Lee’s partnership in creating Ekotecture and The Dolphin Dream.”
Jill Karlin Butler performs The Dolphins Are Still Singing. Can you hear them? The Epic Story of Lee, Me, and the Tree, 6pm Sunday, August 9 at the Stonzek Studio Theater in Lake Worth Beach. An afterparty with Karlin Butler at Man Ray in Lake Worth Beach follows. thedolphindream.com
