My City: ArtOfficial Welcomes You to Miami

Nothing beats the sound of live hip-hop, especially when you've got a line-up consisting of drums, keys, bass, saxophone, and vocals provided by two emcees. That's exactly the case for Miami based group ArtOfficial, a jazz/hip-hop collective that sounds like Soulive with a harder edge or The Roots, but jazzier, with more depth, and wildly spontaneous. In this edition of My City, Art Official emcee Logics reveals the real side his Miami home, a place were international cultures meet and live music can be heard on seemingly every street.

RefinedHype: Miami's a very diverse place, and you're far from a conventional sounding band. How has the cities blend of cultures influenced you sound?

Logics: Miami's not really an East coast city, it's not really in the South either. Geographically it is, but culturally its not, if you know what i mean. We're also really close to the Caribbean and to certain parts of South America. With all these cultures smashing together in one place, you get to hear a little bit of everything. It's a tool box, so we pick the elements we like from each culture. While our recordings are mostly Hip-Hop with touches of other types of music, our live shows is where all the hip-hop, jazz, funk, reggae, salsa, samba, and rock elements are fleshed out.

RefinedHype: When most people think of Miami they most likely either think of beautiful people on the beach or the city's rougher neighborhoods. What about Miami would surprise someone who's never been there?

Logics: Like any major city, Miami has it's fair share of rough neighborhoods. On a positive note, there is growing arts and live music scene. You can't compare it to other metropolitan areas quite yet, but it's getting there. Coming into town as a tourist you probably don't get to see either of those sides of Miami unless you have a local taking you around.

RefinedHype: You're known throughout the city for your dope live shows. How do you make sure that live energy translates to your recorded material?

Logics: I gotta say that they are different energies and we approach both aspects really differently. The live show is about getting people moving, getting people to lose their shit, wake up the next day and tell all their friends how much fun they had at the show. Being a hip-hop band, that's not always an easy task. At the end of the day, we're not playing dance music, but we still get the people to move and lose themselves in the moment.

When we record, we're very aware that people are going to listen to the recordings over and over again. The shows are like one night stands, and the recordings are a long term relationship..haha. We spend a lot of time on the details of an album to make sure it has replay value. We put our hearts into both aspects though, and people are going to feel that.

RefinedHype: If I'm visiting Miami, where can I find you?

Logics: On any given day you can find us playing somewhere in the city. We play a couple times a week all over the place at all of Miami's popular live music venues like Transit Lounge, The Florida Room, Tobacco Road, Jazid, PS14, and others.

RefinedHype: Last words?

Logics: Much love to Refined Hype and all our supporters thus far. Be on the lookout for our currently untitled mixtape which will be presented by illroots.com and kevinnottingham.com. We're also working on getting other major music sites to premier the project, so this can possibly be really big for ArtOfficial. It's going to be an all live mixtape with unreleased material and brand new songs where the band will be playing reinterpretations of some of their favorite instrumentals by Jimi Hendrix, A Tribe Called Quest, Radiohead, Jay-Z, Sublime and others (with new rhymes by myself and Newsense, plus some guest MCs as well). It's turning out to be a really dope project and we think people are really going to dig it. Be sure to check out our website, our Twitter (@artofficialcrew) and out official YouTube channel.

Also keep an ear out for our stateside debut album,"Misfits, Scholars, and Mystics." Which will be next on the lineup soon after the mixtape is released.

To download ArtOfficial's "Stranger EP" click here.