“Do you see this?” coach Frank Porter says, pointing to a long shelf jammed with trophies. Porter, program director at Ace Boxing Club, is talking to his beginner...

For most, fitness since the “Arnold era” means a gym with cardio equipment, free weights, mirrors and machines, and people counting out reps and sets. That's fine. Some people prefer that. But because machines isolate particular muscle groups, they...

The last time I heard Donald Glaude I was at Mighty, a San Francisco venue tucked away in the shaded alleys of the Mission District. The year was 2006; it was late September and I had traveled to the Bay Area alone to dance away the weekend at the U.S. version of The Love Parade.

One of the Twin Cities’ best known emcees and one of its best known DJs, respectively, Eyedea and Abilities return to Milwaukee with their polished two-man act of sly, subversive battle raps and quick, beat-changing cuts. A trio of Milwaukee hip-hop mainstays have come out for the duo’s 10 p.m. show at the Stonefly Brewery tonight: The Rusty Ps, Kid Cut Up and King Hell Bastard will all open...

Before he was a DJ, Bad Boy Bill was another just Windy City house fan, mixing records in his bedroom at 4 a.m. and priming for a shot on the decks. Like many players of the day, Bill let his beats speak for themselves-until they piqued the legendary ear of Farley "Jackmaster" Funk of WBMX's Hot Mix Five team. While Funk gave him his first radio broadcast, the rest of Chicago would soon go on to embrace big room sound with every nasty rub of vinyl. From his rise as a turntablist in the late 1980s to the launch of his own . . .

Cuban producer Maetrik will be passing around plenty of "Space Chronic" this coming weekend. The latest EP on Claude VonStroke's new Mothership Music label has the backing of one of the Bay area's most exciting techno and tech-house producers. Maetrik's Aug. 22 Space Chronic record release party at San Francisco's seminal party palace, The Endup, solidified his dark, seductive sound as a primal force on one of electronic music's hottest scenes. Now a resident of Dallas, Texas . . .

Techno keeps twisting its way toward the top of Milwaukee’s underground dance music scene. This week, it’s Detroit/Berlin’s Lee Curtiss who bridges the gap between house and techno with dark and minimal tenacity. The Spectral Sound artist says he took cues from Chicago’s Derrick Carter and melded them with the reverb of producers such as Ricardo Villalobos, Zip (aka Dimbiman), Matthew Dear, Peter Ford and Richie Hawtin. In 2007, Curtiss headlined Spectral Sound’s sixth “Death Is Nothing to Fear” tour across North America, garnering critical success from the underground dance music masses. Dark, deep and uncompromising in his mix, the DJ/producer has performed live sets with the likes of Samim and Alex Smoke for the Kontrol crew in San Francisco, as well as a play date for Bill Patrick’s acclaimed Robots bash in New York City. An alumnus . . .

The perpetual flux of underground dance music has caused the party to continually change. The scene finds a way to reinvent itself every couple of years, proving to the veterans and uninitiated alike that this so-called simple music might not be so simple after all. Who better represents such a free-form, sample-heavy state of mind than U.K. electronic music phenom Dave Taylor? More commonly known as the driving force behind the genre-defying production hype machine Switch, Taylor has redefined the rules for producers who once abided by the conventionalities of the game . . .

John Larner earned his reputation in the 1990s under the guise of Cyberjive. More than a decade later, the multifaceted house DJ/producer says he still can’t shake his past. “Nearly every show, someone wants to hear tracks from the rave days,” says Larner, who now sets up shop in Indianapolis. “Back in the day I played a lot of Chicago house mixed with some techno and acid. It’s pretty much the same thing now . . .