illenium tour miami

Denver-based American DJ ILLENIUM announced his return to the Gorge, marking the third round of his Memorial Day Weekend takeover at the venue. Rising high above from the ashes in 2022, he's set to share his big hits, all-time crowd favorites, and newer material from his self-titled EP. Now, the man also invited a star-studded roster of special guests - Day 2 on May 26th features TWO FRIENDS, GHENGAR, LEVEL UP, Bijou, Midnight Kids, and Paws.

The first ILLENIUM Memorial Day Weekend celebration took place in 2021, following the end of the Sasquatch! Music Festival at the Gorge. Since then, the man marked the beginning of a new era, returning to the beautiful venue for wild nights of electrifying music together with some of the biggest names in the scene.

In 2022, the acclaimed DJ scored his first-ever Grammy nomination for his 2021 album "Fallen Embers". It served his hit singles "All That Really Matters", "From the Ashes", and "Worst Day".

In a statement about his new self-titled EP, "To me, a self-titled album is the core sound of who I am... I see this album and its story as a prequel to the Trilogy, where I get to explore my original musical inspirations and blend something that truly feels fresh."

It sure is a record that explores deep within his core. The day it came out, ILLENIUM tweeted "THE NEW PHASE BEGINS!", expressing his gratitude to all of his fans that's been there as he explored new sounds and heights in his career. "Thank you for listening and letting me explore some new territory. I absolutely love the roller coaster this album takes me on... 5 albums in 7 years is absolutely crazy to think about and it’s been the best journey I could have ever hoped for. Thank you for sticking with me and I hope y’all enjoy this one!!"

In a new sonic era, the man continues to impress, and he just teased a collaboration with Martin Garrix. It's hard to believe what power these two producers have, being one of the biggest names in the industry. Posting a photo together in the studio, anticipation of a collab track is at an all-time high. Though there's no official updates just yet, we can expect some big surprises from the DJ real soon.

So, as ILLENIUM hosts another Memorial Day Weekend celebration at the Gorge, make sure to mark your spots at the show by booking your tickets now!

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EDM artist Illenium receives backlash for using AI-designed flyer

Concerts are making a comeback at this iconic Arizona destination. Say howdy to Illenium

Relentless Beats will return to where it all began with Illenium coming to Rawhide Western Town & Event Center on June 29, 2024. 

This is the first Relentless Beats event at Rawhide since 2021. The venue is on the Gila River Indian Community just south of Phoenix.

The Phoenix-based promoter has presented many of the Valley's biggest EDM concerts and festivals since 2015 at the Western town, from Dada Life at the Mad Decent Block Party to Diesel ringing in the New Year at Decadence , Deadmau5 in the Cube, Goldrush, Zeds Dead's Deadbeats festival, Skrillex , Diplo , REZZ and Marshmello.

Illenium is a fitting choice to mark the promoter’s return to Rawhide, having played at several of Relentless Beats’ marquee events there, including Phoenix Lights Festival, Goldrush Music Festival, Global Dance and Decadence.  

In a news release, Relentless Beats founder Thomas Turner said, "I couldn't be more excited to be producing Illenium's biggest Arizona headline to date for our return to Rawhide. We've shared so many memories at this venue over the years. Illenium, the team and I are thrilled to kick off a new era together."

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In that same release, Relentless Beats said it’s “impossible to say what the future holds for this iconic venue partnership, but whatever it is, it begins with Illenium.”

How to get tickets to Illenium at Rawhide

Additional artists and details will be announced in the coming week. In the meantime, fans can sign up for presale tickets through the  Return to Rawhide  presale link.

Presale tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. Thursday, May 23. General admission and VIP tickets, $59 and $149 respectively,  go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday, May 24. Get tickets and more info at www.relentlessbeats.com . 

Reach the reporter at  [email protected] . Follow him on X (formerly Twitter)  @EdMasley  and  facebook.com/ed.masley

Support local journalism.   Subscribe to azcentral.com today.

More From Forbes

Miami: murals, mangos, martin and muhammad.

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Street art, graffiti and murals around Wynwood neighborhood in Miami.

No, Miami doesn't have something for everyone. There are no mountains. If you like cold weather, pass. Solitude? Less and less, unless you can get offshore.

Short of that, from nightlife to culture, dining, history, outdoor recreation, beaches, shopping, sports–if you look close enough, you'll be able to find your Miami.

Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood was once one of the most dangerous places in America. For that matter, so was the entire city during the early 1980s “cocaine cowboys” era when seeing cars riddled with bullet holes while driving around was a thing that happened.

Wynwood began as a working class neighborhood in the nineteen-teens evolving throughout the 20 th century into Miami’s Garment District, a haven for Puerto Rican immigrants, a haven for pan-Latin immigration, it became industrial, was filled with warehouses, and then drug infested before being transformed by an arts community.

In 1987, a former bakery in Wynwood was converted into Florida’s largest working artist space . In 1993, Don and Mera Rubell purchased a 40,000-square-foot building previously owned by the Drug Enforcement Agency to house and display their growing collection of contemporary art. A few brave galleries followed.

When Art Basel arrived on Miami Beach in 2002–the world’s most prestigious contemporary art fair–it signified something globally significant was happening around the arts in Miami. Wynwood was a part of that and kept art-ifying .

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The Big Bang came with the opening of Wynwood Walls in 2009. Real estate developer Tony Goldman’s outdoor street art museum captured the artistic energy of the graffiti and murals which had increasingly been covering all those windowless warehouses around the neighborhood.

Wynwood became the model for how to reinvent downtrodden industrial areas into cultural destinations via art. The Wynwood playbook has been used around the globe. Anywhere street art has led a community renaissance, a debt is owed to Wynwood.

The neighborhood now has the highest concentration of street art and public murals in the world, and of a higher quality, too. Wynwood is the measuring stick for other cities and artists. The best muralists in the world are routinely flown to Wynwood to create wall-sized masterpieces.

While Wynwood Walls is a ticketed experience, the blocks and blocks of street art and murals surrounding it are not. Strolling is encouraged if you can bear the heat. Wynwood Buggies offers artist-led neighborhood tours in thankfully shaded golf carts showing guests the artistic highlights, sharing the neighborhood and movement’s history, and clueing newcomers into the graffiti lingo and culture.

Street Art: History, Language, Ethics

Today’s modern street art and mural movement grew out of New York’s emerging graffiti culture in the early 1970s . Graffiti’s history from outlaw to the most popular artform in the world is shared at the Museum of Graffiti in Wynwood .

Graffiti writers–taggers–start by tagging their name in visible public spaces. Spray painting your tag–your signature, your graffiti name–is a way for unseen youth to be seen. These tags are rudimentary and consist of stylized letters. Graffiti’s foundation is letters. This is vandalism and illegal.

More talented taggers evolve into “throw ups”–still signatures, but larger, more creative, more involved, often featuring bubble letters. Sometimes “fill-ins,” sometimes “hollows.” Street art has a fascinating lexicon.

“Wild Style.” Ultra-stylized throw ups with complex letters rendering them almost illegible to anyone without an eye for reading street art.

Throw ups can feature imagery beyond letters, too–characters, icons–but they’re quick, taking only three to five minutes

After mastering throw-ups, street artists move on to “pieces.” Pieces require more colors, more skill, more time, and greater scale. This is where graffiti writing becomes recognized as art making. Pieces can be illegal or commissioned.

Wynwood is covered in basic tags, quick and dirty throw ups, and gorgeous pieces, but it’s the opportunity of producing massive “productions” that brings the greatest street artists in the world here.

“A production is when you have several pieces and then there’s a background and maybe a theme with characters or images versus letters,” legendary Miami street artist Atomik (Adam Vargas; b. 1981–Miami), told Forbes.com. “A production, in graffiti terms, is basically a full-fledged mural.”

Atomik’s smiling orange face character can be seen around Wynwood and the city. He was formerly a member of the MSG “crew”–Miami Style Graffiti–formed in the early 90s. Keep an eye out around Wynwood for the MSG acronym.

In addition to a language, taggers have a code of ethics.

“You’re not supposed to tag over someone that’s died and has work up, (or) the memorial that was painted for someone that died,” Atomik explained.

Pieces from deceased street artists remain untouched by contemporary taggers around Wynwood. Tagging churches and houses is also off-limits. A newbie painting a rough tag over a strong piece is highly frowned upon.

Wynwood 2024

Painted staircase at Arlo Wynwood Miami.

Remnants of Wynwood’s gritty past are becoming fewer and fewer. The neighborhood is gentrifying. Fast. Multiple high-rise residential buildings are under construction. Fashionable boutiques and restaurants–especially since the pandemic –now populate the area.

All of Miami has blown up since the pandemic , hyper-accelerating growth and development that had already been occurring at a breakneck pace.

On a weekend night, Wynwood feels like an open-air nightclub, a Vegas strip for the 21 st century.

The best way to experience Wynwood is by basing yourself at Arlo Wynwood Miami , the neighborhood’s first hotel, opened in November of 2022. Wynwood’s best street art and restaurants are right outside the lobby, less than a 10-minute walk in any direction.

The hotel also rents bikes free, allowing for further exploration.

Be careful with those selfies and look both ways before crossing the street–this is still a business district and its easy to forget about traffic framing up a perfect shot for IG.

Mangos at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Gardens in Miami.

At just 22 years of age, David Fairchild (1869–1954) created the Section of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction of the United States Department of Agriculture. He, along with colleagues, began traveling the world in search of plant species they could bring back to the States in service of a growing, industrializing nation.

Over the next 30-plus years, he himself found hundreds.

Alfalfa. Nectarines. Dates. Soybeans. Bamboo.

The famous flowering cherry trees in Washington, D.C.

After retiring to Miami in 1935, Fairchild collaborated with a group of local collectors and horticulturalists to establish a botanic garden. In 1938, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden opened in Coral Gables.

The highlight of its summer programing has become an annual Mango Festival , showcasing the garden's unrivaled collection of nearly 400 mango varieties.

During the weekend of July 13 and 14, 2024, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden will share mango madness with mango tastings–not all 400, but flavors and textures unavailable at any grocery store–mango culinary demonstrations from renowned chefs, mango-inspired cocktails–the sweet and refreshing mango margarita with mango chunks floating on its icy surfaced served year-round in the Fairchild café is to die for–curator led tours of the mango collection, a mango tree sale for home gardens, live music, and more.

There will even be dinosaurs!

Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden 'Jurassic Garden' installation.

Kids and wanna-be paleontologists will flip over Fairchild’s Jurassic Garden installation bringing life-sized T-rex, triceratops, velociraptor, and other celebrity dinos to a portion of the 83-acre gardens through September 2, 2024.

Fairchild is more than fruit trees and fruit drinks. Serious research and conservation also take place there, best exemplified by its Tropical Fruit program and National Orchid Garden, valiantly attempting to return native orchids across Florida through its Million Orchid Project .

Martin and Muhammad

Don’t get it twisted. Miami was not always the celebration of multiculturalism it is today. This is Florida, and Florida–all of it–was as segregated as anywhere else in the Deep South during Jim Crow.

It wasn’t until the later 70s when Miami began looking south to Latin America and the Caribbean for its future instead of north to Tallahassee and the state capital that it began shedding this sinister skin, and picking up another–cocaine–in the process. Miami’s entire history at times reads like a pulp crime novel. Famed Miami authors like Carl Hiaasen routinely talk about how they have to scale back their fiction writing from what actually takes place there because it’s simply unbelievable.

Be that as it may, the best place to relive Miami’s segregated “glory” comes at the Historic Hampton House, a former Green Book hotel catering to the biggest African American celebrities for generations when they were not welcome as guests at the hotels on Miami Beach.

Sammie, Aretha, James Brown.

Josephine Baker, Nat King Cole, Stevie Wonder.

Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown.

Martin and Malcolm.

Pictures throughout the restored property, now a museum and event space, recall their visits, including a remarkable image of Martin Luther King Jr. in the Hampton House swimming pool. Most people have never seen a photograph of him wearing anything other than coat and tie.

The room where King stayed–favored for its side exit to the back of the property and a waiting car and driver should he need to make a quick getaway from assassination attempts–has been recreated. It had a kitchenette, private bathroom, and even air conditioning, like all the rooms.

Ali’s suite just off the pool deck with its double beds has also been recreated.

Walk right in.

By the early 70s, following desegregation, Hampton House was out of favor. In 1976, it closed, never to reopen.

Its decline accelerated through the 80s. By the 90s, ceiling sections had collapsed, and trees were growing through the foundation. At the turn of the millennium, it was barely standing. In 2002, it was scheduled for demolition.

At the last moment, Enid C. Pinkney led a group of local preservationists in convincing the city not to tear down Hampton House and help preserve what could be salvaged. In 2015, Historic Hampton House reopened as “Historic Hampton House Museum of Culture & Art.

Most of what would have greeted Malcom and Muhammad has been replaced, but the lobby floor, floating staircases, and black railings are original.

Hampton House plays a starring role in 2020’s “One Night in Miami” on Amazon Prime .

Whether looking at murals, tasting mangos, or following in the steps of Martin and Muhammad, one night in Miami isn’t nearly enough.

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