By the time Capote died in 1984, my family was in the video rental business, so I had seen every Edwards movie to date. I liked him. And I loved every minute of Audrey Hepburn’s portrayal, developed a mad crush on George Peppard’s “Fred,” and was slightly scared of Patricia Neal’s jaded, lusty socialite. I was just a teenager, and I read my destiny in the tealeaves that swirled about these damaged, fabulous creatures. But his ending really irked me. How dare he cheapen such a masterpiece with disposable sentimentality? That summer, after reading Capote’s eulogy in the LA Times as I sat on our porch in Silverlake, I went to the library and read the novella over and over. My heart broke repeatedly when Holly jetted off to South America dreaming of spawning tan babies with light eyes. It broke because I accepted the lesson. You cannot be a “real phony” in one place for too long.

Naturally, this first-generation Mexican American sissy eventually moved to New York and scored a job at Playboy. Their offices were located right across the street from Tiffany’s. I could not walk to work from the subway with my cheap deli cup of coffee in my hands and not think of Edwards’ scene. Holly was always there. My fantasy was further heightened by the woman I called boss: a petite black Irish girl who greeted me in a mini skirt and sunglasses pushed up over her head. When she leaned over the catwalk along the giant neon bunny in the lobby and called my name, I felt like Fred looking at Holly on the fire escape. “Moon River” echoed in my head. Throughout the years, I encountered and became enamored of many such women in New York. And every time I did, I thought of Edwards’ Holly, not Capote’s.

The older I became the more I came to understand Blake Edwards’ ending. There was nothing cheap about it. In its own way, it was revolutionary. Like Truman and the rest of us, Edwards fell in love with Holly. Unlike Truman and the rest of us, he dared give her what we all secretly longed for — more than comfort, an immeasurable joy in one’s own skin, warts and all.

Blake Edwards died Wednesday night of pneumonia. He was 88. His wife of 42 years, Julie Andrews, “that broad with the incomparable soprano and the promiscuous vocabulary” was at his side. His description of her, like his movies, revealed his uncanny compassion for creatures that are most sacred when they are profane. When I heard the news of his passing, I choked up. I had never met the man. But I felt like I had lost a mentor and protector. Born Wiilam Blake Crump in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Edwards knew the intersection of redemption and reinvention well. It looked a lot like the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street.

Annie: “I Don’t Like Your Band”
From the album Don’t Stop (Smalltown Supersound), out now in Australia and the UK, out November 17 in the U.S.

Flavorpill: How are you?

Annie: I’m exhausted! I had a DJ gig in Oslo last night, and then three hours later I helped a friend move his things in Bergen.

FP: Nice, most people I know wouldn’t take the subway to help you move. So your new album took four years to make. What happened?

Annie: First of all, I was doing a lot of shows, touring all over — US, South America, Australia, all over. And then I did a DJ Kicks [mix] as well, and I had to promote that. After that, I started to record the album, and then that thing with Island [Records] happened. It was a bit annoying. I signed with this guy and then a few months later, he disappeared. Typical A&R, it happens to a lot of artists. Then you get someone who doesn’t get what you’re doing.

FP: What kind of advice did these label people give you? Madonna, Britney, Kylie — the blonde pop star isn’t a hard sell…

Annie: And Kylie — she’s not even writing her own songs. I was talking to Brian Higgins [of Xenomania] and he says — and I think — that many labels just don’t know how to work with artists. They’re not sure if it’s going to be a hit; they don’t know how to build up people. They don’t trust the artist. At the same time, they want something and they don’t know what they want. For me, it was uncomfortable to work like that.

FP: You cover a lot of styles; I can imagine all kinds of other people wanting to play these songs. Do you keep the rights, or sell songs to other artists?

Annie: Yes, I do, and we were just talking with some people, but I can’t really say yet. I’m doing a lot of writing with Xenomania, writing for a couple of other people and it’s quite inspiring, but I’ll let you know.

FP: What else are you working on?

Annie: I’ve started working on some new stuff with French producer Fred Falke. So I’m basically just writing for that now to finish before Christmas. Next year, I start touring.

FP: Richard X, Brian Higgins… how did you end up working with them?

Annie: Richard X was already keen to do something, so that was easy. When it came to Higgins, I met him through Saint Etienne because I started doing a song with them that didn’t end up on my album, but wound up on their album, “This Is Tomorrow.” Brian always loved “Heartbeat” and he didn’t know that I wrote it myself, so he was immediately interested. I was skeptical in the beginning about Xenomania because I didn’t really know them, I just knew about Girls Aloud. But it turned out really well; it was nice to work with someone that knows about songwriting and not just production.

FP: Were you worried that a lot of people heard these songs before?

Annie: Of course. The whole business is going down. I know that a lot of my fans are Internet people. That’s just the world, so you can’t really think about that. But what really annoyed me is that you like to have some kind of secret, something to give to people when it’s ready. It’s really annoying when someone else destroys that.

FP: How did you end up at Smalltown Supersound?

Annie: I had started my own label, and this album was the first thing I wanted to do on it. But my problem is that I’m not a business person. I know that I have to work with other people.

FP: Your song “I Don’t Like Your Band” — is it about someone specifically?

Annie: I just thought it would be interesting to do a song about something that you don’t like, but not from a hate perspective. I’m just looking at you and telling you it’s wrong. I’ve had a couple people contacting me, really so sweet, and you want to work with them, and you’re thinking, “Sorry, you’re really nice, but….”

FP: You’ve written songs titled “My Love Is Better” and “I Know UR Girlfriend Hates Me.” Do other women like you?

Annie: I think these days they do. But I’ve always been the sort of girl that hung out mostly with guys. I like to think that women like me. It would be pretty sad to think they didn’t. There seems to be a lot of men at my shows.

FP: Go figure. What kind of teen were you growing up?

Annie: I used to be kind of nerdy. I used to collect magnets. I was always into magnets. Then I got into machines. I always felt most girls cared about silly things, and I’m not saying that I hate women, but I did spend more time with guys.

FP: What did you study in school?

Annie: Well, of course, I was going to be a photographer, like a lot of girls. But I was never really good. And when I started to do music I realized that this was what I wanted to do.

FP: Have you thought about doing anything else lately — acting, fashion, a cartoon maybe?

Annie: Actually, there was supposed to be a cartoon. There was this guy who was going to start up a magazine. And he wanted to do a cartoon about Annie. But it didn’t work out.

FP: If you were a cartoon superhero, what kind of super power would you like to have?

Annie: I would like to fly so I don’t have to pay for airplanes or deal with air conditioning. It’s terrible. One of the nice things about this part of the world is the clean air.

24/7 is the group’s first album on Cologne’s micro-house juggernaut Kompakt, so it’s filled with darker, abstract electronic tracks instead of club hits. The video for the first single, the share-friendly “Add This Song,” takes place in a morgue and includes a fetish-friendly corpse-licking scene. Despite these quirks, singer Daníel Ágúst says that this time around, the intent was to take a break from the circus vibe the group spent the last decade cultivating. “We allow the band to go through changes and develop musically,” he explains. “When I came back, it was because I felt I had something to share.”

Since forming as an experimental multimedia collective in 1995, GusGus’s lineup has undergone numerous changes, acting as an incubator for many solo careers, including that of Emilíana Torrini. The band’s sound is equally permeable and resilient, calling on Detroit techno, Chicago house, New York disco and Scandinavian indie rock. On stage and behind the decks, the shows are late-night vaudevillian raves. But for Ágúst , who returned to the band after starting his own solo career, knowing when to leave a party is just as important as knowing when to get it started — and when to get it started, again.

Stream the entire album now »

Earplug: It’s nice to have you back, but I’m also wondering what happened to Earth, the only female in the last incarnation of GusGus?

Daníel Ágúst: Well, it’s similar to how I felt. You’re in a band, you have maybe a different a vision, and it’s hard to go in the direction you want to with everyone. I think she’s just listening to her heart. She did a good run with GusGus, there was no bad breakup of any sort.

EP: Speaking of contributions, how did Jimi Tenor end up on “Take Me Baby”?

DA: We’ve known Jimi a long time. We met at some festivals back in 1997. We’ve had a lot of vodka and champagne together. I’ve admired him as a musician, and loved him as a friend. He basically did the vocals at his house and… it’s an old Jimi Tenor track actually, like “Call of the Wild,” which Earth sang – that was his track also. I tried to sing it, I had a go at it — but his approach was more in step with the variety we wanted to create on the album.

EP: The last couple of albums — Forever, Attention — were more traditional dance pop. This album’s much more DJ-like, a flowing collection of tracks. Was this an influence of being on Kompakt?

DA: We ended up on Kompakt because they liked the music we did. We don’t tailor our music to anyone else. The album was up for grabs, basically, and they were one of the options. We decided to go with them because of their integrity; the label’s trust-worthy.

EP: What were some of the other labels you were considering?

DA: Um… maybe that’s not a good thing to say. The others were all good labels, of similar size, also German-based.

EP: Fair enough.You’ve got some long tracks on here, the sound is really expansive.

DA: We let things build up; we were in no hurry on this album. We gave each song time to grow – whether that meant six minutes or 15 minutes. We wanted to step away from the party that GusGus had turned into. We wanted to get back to our dubby roots, like Polydistortion.

We went into this desolate fjord in western Iceland. The studio was built in an old fish oil factory. It was very surreal, the surrounding. We couldn’t focus on anything but the music; there was no distractions. The album was very much inspired by the environment, which was very cold, alone. We needed a break. You don’t want to be too much or too long at a party.

EP: I hope the party’s not entirely over. The economic situation probably doesn’t help much, does it? Has it gotten more difficult to live as a musician?

DA: My handicap is that I’m really bad at promoting myself. If my solo album suffered it was more because of that. But I’m not giving up. I’m still working on another one for next year. And we’ve got a ton of remixes coming up for this album. The economic situation was caused by greed and foolishness by everyone. It’s kind of hard for some people here at the moment, but the party scene is very much alive. It may take a while to recover, but I’m optimistic.

The next day was overcast and rainy. Arriving at P.S.1 early, you might have been worried by the sparse line. Would this be the weekend when New Yorkers just gave up and stayed inside? Brennan Green, a Balihu Records artist (which Wang founded back in 1993), was massaging the early birds with some no-wave and retro pop. Slowly, the crowd grew.

And then Wang arrived, dressed in color-splashed shorts and lime Day-Glo Nikes. After a quick round of hugs, kisses and pictures, he needed a moment alone: “Just give me a minute to get my music together. I can’t really concentrate on anything else when I’m thinking about my playlist.”

Photo credit: Jorge Hernandez

Laying out his CDs and vinyl in what was undoubtedly some kind of theme, he stepped out from behind the boards for a quick chat and a few more pictures. “Sorry I’ve been in such a rush,” he exclaimed. “I”m always going from one thing to another.” The occasion, this time? “It was my birthday. I wanted to see my grandmother, my family. And it’s a fun party to play. I get to spin with Brennan, see some other friends. But then, I’m off again, to California tomorrow.”

Photo credit: Joel Shaughnessy

A few tracks into his set, the motif he was assembling earlier became apparent. Patrick Juvet‘s “I Love America.” Odyssey‘s “Native New Yorker.” America‘s “You Can Do Magic.” And one record that sent a certain writer up to the decks. “It’s called ‘Take Me to the Bridge’ by Vera,” Wang said, waving the record sleeve around a la Shirley Temple.

Later, the globetrotting, patriotic DJ’s DJ added, “I got my German/EU permanent visa in January 2009. I’m hoping to retire to a Greek Isle. USA — too many mixed feelings.”

Photo credit: Joel Shaughnessy

Whatever those were, he kept the negative ones off the 1′s and 2′s. At one point he even hopped on stage during the theme to the Star Wars cantina and did the Charleston. It was only a few days after Michael Jackson’s passing, and a poignant ode was inevitable: “Life ain’t so bad at all, if you live it off the wall.”

The clouds may have lingered, and a stray drop may have landed in a beer or two, but by night’s end, when the sky was dark and the remaining devotees were jumping around on stage, it was clear that Danny had packed sunshine to spare.

Photo credit: Anna White

Lindbæk, once part of Those Norwegians with pre-Royksopp Torbjorn Brundtland, is presently a third of Meanderthals, along with UK’s disco-not-disco dons Idjut Boys (Dan Tyler & Conrad McDonnel). While Meanderthals’ new record, Desire Lines, was recorded between Oslo and London, it sounds like something out of a Malibu slumber party. After the jump, we chat with Lindbæk about disco dalliances, the impossibility of taking studio albums on the road, and the aesthetics of the Pacific Coast Highway.

Lindbæk had very specific ideas about the new album. “When we started on this project, I said, ‘This record should be like the Pacific Coast Highway – something very California.’ It became a cliche in the studio – our hot crowded studio with the tiny window,”

The trio’s unglamorous confines could have been a set up for failure, considering their working styles. “As a team, we sort of prefer to play alone, DJ alone. I need to go into a zone. Doing a back to back DJ thing, I lose some concentration,” he confesses. While they managed to work things out in the studio, don’t expect Meanderthals to go globe-trotting any time soon. “We’re talking about touring; if we were going to do it, we’d need to bring out a whole studio, a massive amount of gear. What we have in mind would be like a rock setup, and I don’t think it would work in dingy basement clubs.”

With a tour uncertain and the album done, what’s an idle primitive to do? “A remix album is possible; Conrad (of Idjut Boys) is making dub versions of all the tracks on Desire Lines. I’m doing some remixes for Annie, a minimalist/Italo guy on Kompakt called Skateboard, and Dominique Leon from San Francisco. Lindstrom discovered Leon and set up StromLand records to put his stuff out. I’m going back to Oslo on the 14th to work on my next 12 inch ‘Odessa’”.

Reflecting on his homes away from home, the wayward Rune adds, “The area where I live in Berlin, I would be better off learning Turkish, I really love it. I also lived in NY. My heart is there – can you please kiss the pavement for me?” When I ask him what pavement, he says “I used to stay at Danny Wang’s apartment, next to my favorite East Village café, 7A.” By coincidence, I tell him I used to stay at Danny’s as well, and that it was going through Wang’s record collection that I realized Lindbæk had sampled Bill Withers’ “The Stuff” for “Junta Jaegar.” “It’s a great bass line, and when I heard it, I knew I wanted to use it. On the B-side of Junta, I used a sample from a 70′s rock band called Zoo.”

That single, and the album it came from, Sondag, was released by Repap, a left-field sister label to Paper Recordings, the now-defunct deep disco imprint out of Manchester, UK. Paper also released Kaminksy Park, by Those Norwegians. The album’s cover features a pile of melting vinyl, a reference to the Comiskey Park “Disco Sucks” bonfire of the late 70′s often cited as the unofficial birth of House music. “When I was living in London I spent a lot of time in record shops. And one of my best friends used to live in Manchester. So we knew about Paper and decided to send them a demo, just to see. When they called us up, we were like FUCK, YEAH!”

London is also where Rune first met Idjut Boys. “They were on to something with their underground sound long ago. I was always a fan.” But how did this Nordic nomad wind up a disco purist in the first place? “My mom liked Disco and when I heard the rhythm, I liked it too. People my age, we were the first rhythm generation of Norway, I was like a sponge – this was before Paradise Garage and NY radio. We had a radio station, state owned, they had one program for pop music and there was no club scene at all, just really shit discoteques.”

Fortunately for Oslo, those days are over. Kings of Convenience, Erlend Oye, Lindbæk and company have put their homeland on the global music map. “It’s not like we have one place that we all hang out in Oslo – it’s a slow burning scene, and discos come and go. People have been doing their thing for many years. The rest of the world is just catching up now…”

Thursday afternoon, I headed to an early meeting with NextAid, a nonprofit organization that works with DJs, musicians, and engineers to provide sustainable solutions to problems faced by Africa’s AIDS orphans. “OM Records just adopted this building,” said director Lauren Segal, pointing to a glossy photo of a modest structure. “It could be used for anything from a school to a clinic.” Asked where she got the idea, she chirped, “On the dance floor, of course!”

NextAid t-shirt in hand, I walked up Ocean Avenue to the screening of a Carl Cox documentary. After the movie, Cox held a quick Q&A to discuss his gregarious family, his motorbikes, and an Entourage type show called DJ Diaries. At WMC, as in life, you sometimes miss a boat. In this case, it was a Sasha & Digweed yacht party. Later that evening, back in Downtown Miami, I walked up Biscayne Boulevard, well after midnight, in search of an “Electric Pickle.” King Britt and Q-Burn were both spinning there and twittering about it. The small bar on North Miami Avenue just past the railroad tracks was swaying with an organic, broken-disco vibe.

As I was heading to the Ultra Festival press tent on Friday, the Blackberry buzzed. The Prodigy‘s flight was canceled; they were going to be three hours late, and not doing press. As I was waiting, Pete Tong‘s manager called about rescheduling my interview at the BBC party. These things happen. On the main stage at Ultra, I caught a raucous set by UK electro-rockers the Whip and a block party featuring Santigold. Decked out in a gold jumpsuit made of dollar bills, the latter hollered, “Nobody’s got any, so you might as well wear it.” The Ting Tings managed a similarly tight set, though it felt a bit rushed and perfunctory. At one of the other tents, Swedish House Mafia killed the kids with a finale mash-up of ’90s throwbacks. You’d swear “Show Me Love” just dropped out of the sky in a beam of white light.

The show I was most looking forward to was a live set by Roni Size/Reprazent. After a six-year hiatus, the drum-n-bass pioneer was back with a full band and a new stack of tunes. But it was the classics that got the biggest response during a blistering set. It gave me that warm and fuzzy, “remember when jungle was going to take over?” buzz. That buzz, and the relatively chill vibe at Ultra exploded when, under a flurry of popping flashes, the Prodigy ran up the backstage stairs and were greeted with thundering applause, ripping straight into “Firestarter” with the vengeance of irritated, globe-trotting punks.

Out of my own desperation and frustration at Miami’s “public transportation” system, I shared a cab with a journalism student who was a “major electro head.” I made the trek from Bicentennial Park downtown back to South Beach in the hope of catching Daedelus at the Black Eyed Peas party for Fergie’s birthday. After much red-carpet ado, I waited an hour or so to no avail, before cabbing back to the Design District for a late-night set by Matthew Dear as Audion at a tiki-themed joint called Grass. As cool breezes blew, stars peeked through clouds and Dear swigged Patron, while dishing out slinky funk.

Saturday, at Ultra’s Bayside stage, electro-pop duo the Presets had just launched into their set, when in-between verse and chorus, lead singer Julian Hamilton muttered, “Get that girl off the fucking stage,” pointing to a go-go dancer in a tux bikini and stilettos. In their bus later, confused, the duo asked, “What is that about? Is that an American thing, or a Miami thing?” Unlike Britt and Q-Burn, the Presets were all about their MySpace. “We were really excited when we hit 1,000 friends,” said Kim, who was spinning later that night as well, before heading off and continuing the US tour. To hear them tell it, becoming avant-pop darlings is a click and a snap.

Also at Bayside, angular dance rockers Cut Copy and prog-house iconoclast Deadmau5 had the crowds jumping. On the main stage, none other than Timbaland had the ravers throwing their hands up in the air. Inevitably, I closed out the night, and pretty much WMC in general, at Carl Cox’s tent. Parties continued through the evening and all day Sunday. Recession or not, as long as there were a faithful few shaking it till the break of dawn, in the skies above Miami, the music echoed on.