The Overthrow Hijacks Ultra Week With Black Magick and the Ivory Tower

​By the spring of 2010, parties thrown by local creative collective the Overthrow were already legendary. The now-defunct Black Sundays series at Bella Rose became, possibly, the only weekly party on South Beach to regularly stage faux murders, scoring a few Best of Miami nods from New Times. Its one-offs were similarly twisted. In February of 2010, while L.A. producer Deathface played a gig at White Room, the crew even staged a full occult ritual, complete with a half-naked sacrificial virgin.

For real, if anyone was pushing dirty decadence to its limit, it was the Overthrow. But just before last year's edition of Winter Music Conference, the group was still a shadowy, floating bunch without a home of its own. That is, until Overthrow co-founders Alexis Mincolla and Sam Baum had an epiphany.

"We were riding around in the trunk of somebody's car, and we went by an abandoned church that we had wanted to make our headquarters," Baum recalls. "But the church wasn't really what we were looking for. But then, we saw this castle! So we said, 'Hey, pull over, we gotta get in here!'"

​The castle in question was the inexplicable building near the intersection of NW 20th Street and NW First Avenue, shaped exactly like a medieval fort, right down to drawbridge-style doors and gargoyles guarding the inner courtyard. ("I heard it was a coven or something. But that's just a rumor," Baum says, coyly.) As magick would have it, on that fateful day, the building was unoccupied except for its eccentric owners.

"We pretty much started banging on the door, and finally the owners came [out]. They're these out-there kind of people. And literally, the first time they met us, they were like, 'You guys are the right people to move in here. We sense it in you,'" Baum says. "Two weeks later we were in there."

With a proper headquarters, Overthrow's momentum continued to build with projects in all areas of the arts, from music to fashion to visual art. But the crew's reputation remained legion -- especially after the first blowout in the new digs, this past December's Basel Castle. The party featured performances from the likes of Rye Rye and Theophilus London, as well as up-and-coming Miami dubsteppers Caligula, in a twisted carnival playground fueled by obscenely cheap liquor. And yeah, there were those damn gargoyles watching over everything.



On the heels of that wee-hours bash, the Overthrow's impending team-up with New York crew Trouble & Bass, again at the castle, remains one of Ultra week's most anticipated satellite parties. The two groups collaborated on another packed-to-the-gills, bass-heavy shebang during last year's Winter Music Conference, highlights of which were searing, much blogged-about late-night sets by Plastician and 12th Planet. When asked about Trouble & Bass, Baum simply says: "I think we're on the same twisted wavelength."