WMC and Miami Music Week 2013 and fast approaching and here’s something to get you even more hyped. MYNC, R3hab and Nari & Milani are coming together to mix this year’s Cr2 Live & Direct Miami 2013 compilation. Read on for more info:

Hot on the heels of 2012’s successful instalment of its annual Live And Direct Miami compilation, mixed by MYNC & Nicky Romero, Cr2 ups the ante for what will no doubt be the biggest WMC/MMW on record. Released on February 22, “Cr2 Live And Direct Presents Miami 2013” features a coming together of MYNC, R3hab and Nari & Milani on a triple disc pack each featuring a unique take on a party vibe for dance music’s biggest week.

In addition to the compilation, there will also be a collaboration single from MYNC, R3hab and Nari & Milani titled “Miami Back Again”, to be exclusively released on March 1st via Beatport.

Be on the look out for the teaser for “Miami Back Again”, full compilation tracklisting and news of the Cr2 Miami events in the coming weeks.

Wanna know what’s been bumpin at the Wantickets office this week? Find out below!

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BEN: PIXL ft Nicole Millar – Crazy

RUSSELL: Just Blaze x Baauer “HIGHER”

JEROME: David Amo & Julio Navas & Rober Gaez – This Is True House (Original Mix)

MARISA: UZ – V6 (Astronomar edit)

STEFAN: Nicky Romero – Symphonica (Bare Remix)

CHLOE: Brodinski’s BRTV Set

VANESSA: Knife Party – Power Glove

JESSICA: The Postal Service – Such Great Heights
In honor of the Coachella line up finally being released…

PERFORMER SPOTLIGHT: Dan Deacon

Dan Deacon is a Baltimore-based composer and electronic musician, who since 2003 has released eight albums under several different labels. Deacon is renowned for his live shows, where large-scale audience participation and interaction is often a major element of the performance. His audience participation is part of a larger strategy to take on conventions of performing, touring, composing and recording. His latest release, America opens with ear-bruising electronic squelches and beats but at times morphs into strings, marimbas, and horns. Deacon is currently touring in support of his latest album and will also be stopping off at the UR1 Festival!

PERFORMER SPOTLIGHT: Benjamin Hollingsworth

Contemporary artist, Benjamin Hollingsworth is a postmodern artist who transcends art-historical movements with ambition and originality. Originally a soccer player, Hollingsworth’s career was cut short following a traumatic foot injury, and turned his full attention to large-scale paintings and has never looked back since. He’s worked with internationally recognized art director John Fergason, became a featured artist for GenArt, an American representation company who focuses on emerging artists, and was selected to donate art for Christie’s 2010 Inaugural Green Auction. Hollingsworth takes a multidisciplinary approach while incorporating large scale works. Additionally, he includes experiences and observations in his body of works that are continually growing.

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Don’t miss your chance to attend the UR1 Festival! BUY YOUR TICKETS HERE!

Artist Spotlight: Iggy Azalea

Azalea. A name that is so unique that the world seems too small for two of them, let alone in the same musical niche. However Australian born hip-hop musician Iggy Azalea has successfully holds her own, separate from fellow like-named rapper Azaelia Banks. Neé Amethyst Amelia Kelly, Iggy began her illustrious music career at the age of 14, which was when she began rapping under her current moniker, a name she absconded from the family dog. In 2011, she released her first mixture titled Ignorant Art, a 9-track compilation meant to “make people question and redefine old ideals”. However it was her music video collaboration with former wrestler Tiny Lister that gained her viral internet presence and respect. In it, she satirizes the big budget, glamorous materialism of ’90s aesthetics – from pimped out rides to gold studded leather jackets – while questioning her own participation as a white female rapper in an industry that at times can be so polarized.

Ever since signing on to independent record label, Grand Hustle Records, earlier this year, the 22 year old has been busy! On top of landing a modeling deal with well-known modeling agency, Wilhelmina, she also recently became the face of Levi’s “Go Forth” campaign. In addition, with collaborations with major artists like Steve Aoki and Angger Dimas in “Beat Down”, Iggy Azalea has been strategically widening her scope to the realm of EDM, with a focus on the surging trend of Trap. Look out for her upcoming Diplo produced mixtape “TrapCold!”

[youtube_sc url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6IAFUzmgSU"]

Music Spotlight: KRELwear (Karelle Levy)

The name Karelle Levy hasn’t solidified as a house hold name… yet, but you definitely have seen her works. Celebrities such as Nicki Minaj, Carmen Electra, Christina Ricci, Cameron Diaz, and Pink have all been spotted sporting Levy’s characteristic day-glo colored knitwear pieces.

Levy was born in Paris but at an early age moved to Miami. Graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, she earned her BFA in Textile Design and began her career not in couture, but rather as a costume designer. Technically skilled, she designed costumes for major dance and theater productions and found herself drawn towards the versatility of fabrics and the act of their creation, particularly in the art of knitting. Soon, she began creating costumes for her own experimental performance art pieces. It wasn’t long before Levy breached the barrier between art and fashion. Her line, KRELwear, revolves on the basic principal of “toobular” knit design. Each individual article of clothing is knit such that the resulting piece has little to no seams. Her designs aesthetically speak to the malleability and versatility of knitwear as a medium as most of her works have a modular design such that they can be worn in multiple ways. Moreover, many of her pieces sport almost rave-inspired eye-catching neon colors that morph under blacklight, successfully bridging the gap between music, fashion, and art.

***Make sure to buy your tickets HERE and check out more of the line-up HERE!***

Music Spotlight: Lenny Kravitz

Lenny Kravitz has long been a household name – a pop/rock/r&b staple who first started his career playing pots and pans in his childhood kitchen before graduating to drums at the age of three. Growing up on the fruit of motion, gospel, and blues, Kravitz found himself quickly to be an all around musical Renaissance man, easily mastering instruments and singing and tinting his own works with his influences. Early on in the late 1980s, Kravitz struggled to gain the sustained attention of any record labels as his multi-racial heritage left him and his music in an ambiguous liminal space that did not neatly appeal to white or black demographics of the era. Undeterred, Kravitz forged ahead with his distinctly soulful, yet funkified rock vocals and landed a deal with Virgin Records in 1989 with his debut album Let Love Rule. Since then, the Grammy winning recording artist has gone on to produce collaborations with major musical barons such as Madonna, Aerosmith, Vanessa Paradis, and Michael Jackson. His next work, tentatively titled Negrophilia, exemplifies Kravitz’s illustrious music career that continues to question and surpass genre pigeon-holing and racial typecasting.

[youtube_sc url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcU57tAKzng"]

Visual Arts Spotlight: David Datuna

The history of the arts exists as an intricate visual and aural map formed from the action and reaction of many. For David Datuna (b. 1974), the Georgian-born now Brooklyn based artist, the key to finding a spot on this map was in an honest and humble mentality of reference and deference back to the great successes of art history past, and in this case, the pop art movement of the 1950s.

Datuna’s work, separate of their pop art aesthetic, functions to comment on identities, whether of individuals or entire nations. His art resides in the realm of mixed media sculpture. Utilizing cascading glass lenses superimposed over iconic images and symbols, he fuses the worlds of collage, conceptual, and pop art in order to remanufacture new from the old. By providing a literal “new lens” to perceive these already established images, Datuna forces the viewer to subsequently turn the critical eye inwards and question the creation of identities, the importance of visual and cultural icons, and our ultimate parts in the – pardon my pun – bigger picture.

Working antithetically to the gestalt, Datuna strives to “embody” wholes by drawing attention to the elements at the foundation. His 2011 portrait of Russian president Vladimir Putin, which consisted of miniature images of the Mona Lisa, caused quite a stir as it commented on a culture’s commidification of not only stagnant visual images but of deified authority figures. UR1′s exhibit will showcase Datuna’s signature flag pieces, which pay homage to the international music scene. Using his characteristic collaged prism of glasses lenses, Datuna reveals that while we may seem fragmented from individual perspectives, the community as a whole can and must come back together to celebrate our cultural differences in an amalgamation of music and art.

***Make sure to buy your tickets HERE and check out more of the line-up HERE!***

The Andy Warhol Museum has been named the cultural partner of the UR1 Music + Art Festival this year. The museum, located in Pennsylvania, pays homage to the late artist, best known for his contribution to the pop art movement. The festival will feature Warhol’s short film 13 Most Beautiful: Songs For Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, which is a four-minute silent movie featuring portraits of Nico, Edie Sedgwick and Dennis Hopper, to name a few. The silent film is scored by Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, also known as Dean & Britta. Another subject of Warhol’s 13 Most Beautiful: Songs For Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, who will also be performing at the UR1 Festival this year, is Lou Reed. Additionally, one of the covered songs in the soundtrack from the film is from Reed’s The Velvet Undergound days, “Not a Young Man Anymore.” The rock legend, whose career has spanned multiple decades, will be hitting the stage to bring us some of his classics. This is a legendary performance you are not going to want to miss! Below, check out Reed performing “Take A Walk On The Wild Side” at Falconer Salen (Theatre) in Denmark this Summer.

The UR1 Festival will truly be an experience that you will not forget. Be sure to purchase your tickets for the weekend, here, and take a look at the gallery below for work from the featured artists.

Gallery Photo List:
1. Cover Art for 13 Most Beautiful: Songs For Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests
2. Photograph of Edie Sedgwick from 13 Most Beautiful: Songs For Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests
3. Photograph of Lou Reed from 13 Most Beautiful: Songs For Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests
4. Photograph of artist, Ultra Violet
5. Photograph of Andy Warhol taken by William John Kennedy
6. Photographs of Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana by Wiliam John Kennedy