Tranzfusion hits to 2005 Miami Winter Music Conference

After talking about it for quite a few years now, in March this year I finally made it to the Miami Winter Music conference. For those of you not familiar with it (I'm sure most of you are) it's set up like many other professional conferences throughout the world, where you pay your registration fee, get your badge and pack of general crap that you're never really going to use again, and have the opportunity to attend a number of workshops, demos, discussions etc related to the industry whilst doing a bit of that all important networking. With a few differences however... Firstly, while most conferences are held in rather boring conference centres or halls, this one is set at a resort on sunny South Beach Miami. Secondly, more often than not hardly anyone is really there to go to any workshops (well generally not the ones that are listed in the guide); and thirdly, compared to other professional conferences, most of the people attending WMC wear cooler clothes and listen to cooler music (well at least some do).

After proceeding to registration on the first morning, it was explained to us that our conference ID would gain us entry to all official conference workshops, forums and parties (of course). We were at this time reminded that should we lose our badge and needed a replacement, a fee of US$400 would be applied. Now while this may not have worried most people, to me this seemed a little troubling. Why- Well fact that I will more often that not arrive home after a weekend out with considerably less of my own possessions than I began with, not to mention maybe a few extra things that I managed to "collect" along the way, means that I would need to be extra careful this week. If I was not, then it would be most likely that I would be forking out extra money that I didn't have for a new conference badge—and so would the poor guy/girl who's badge that I somehow ended up with from the night before. It was such a sobering thought that I had to head to the pool for a few cocktails to fix that.

5 hours later I was much calmer. I'd also managed to meet half the delegates at the conference, been passed at least 6 CDR's (who said everybody is a DJ, everybody is a producer these days), and a friend I was with was offered a remix by another budding producer we met over our third Pina Colda. Not bad for an afternoon really. After a little rest (and some more Vodka) we proceeded to head out to Opium Gardens, a club that came highly recommended due to the fact that the main room of the venue was actually an open-air type number, with a DJ booth cunningly disguised as a thatched hut on stilts in the middle. And true to form the club did look absolutely amazing. Tonight was a showcase of a number of DJ's represented by a Dutch management company, including Matthew Dekay and Ozgur Can. Having never seen Ozgur before I was especially looking forward to his set. After a couple of warm-up DJ's, one of which included sporadic interludes involving him playing live Violin over his records (which actually sounded a lot better than it would seem from my lame description, and certainly a lot better than anything that "One Perfect Day' had to offer) it was Ozgur's turn to hit the decks and I would have to say by the end of it I was rather disappointed with what he dished up (think run-of-the-mill electro as opposed to the lush soundscapes the he is so very good at creating in the studio). Even more disappointing was the fact that it cost $13 for a scotch and coke! When I enquired as to whether the ice was gold plated, I was politely told that the "house' scotch that I was consuming was in fact Black Label, and if I wanted something different the only way was up. Welcome to Miami.

The next few days included much of the same (it's a hard life, but someone's got to do it), along with some record shopping thrown in. It seemed like everyone in Miami had the same idea as there were more people in the store than many club nights in Melbourne could ev Tags

• Miami