Musync^®: You Need Better Music!

Our Take

Band Talk

While existing as a mutating collaborative effort, Bassnectar is traditionally the amorphous music project of Lorin Ashton, a San Francisco based Musician/Producer/DJ with “probably the largest cult following of any DJ in San Francisco”—SF Weekly. The music is highlighted by massive bass lines, thick mob scene beats, freak show energy, emotive melodies, traditional acoustic instrumentation, and fearless mashing of genres, styles, sounds, moods, and approaches. Fusing elements of midtempo breakbeats, big beat, old school hip hop and dub, DnB, glitch, IDM, electronica, death metal, grindcore, punk rock, alternative, folk, swing, and jazz and sampling anything from the human history of sound and music, Bassnectar might be most accurately described as “omni-tempo maximalism.”

There are nearly three-hundred and sixty five nights a year, and on one third of them, somewhere across North America, you will find a modern day social mosh pit of hippies, ex-ravers, hipsters, dub reggae heads, Dead-heads, Burning Man freaks, artists, fashion experimentalists, social activists, and hip-hop enthusiasts all packed into one steamy room of grinding, orgiastic expression and musical experimentation known as a bass ritual, or, more precisely, a night with Bassnectar. Playing at over one-hundred and fifty shows a year to thousands of different people a month—from sold out festivals to overcrowded clubs and warehouses to tight and tiny bars and venues—Bassnectar’s enormous popularity reflects the current hunger for raw substance in modern music and a desire for social integrity inside the party scene.

2005 saw the debut of Bassnectar’s double-disc collection entitled “Mesmerizing The Ultra”—a journey through next-level musical mutations, dreamy dubtempo, massive bass lines, heavy sledgehammer beats, head-nodding hip-hop, and a wild assortment of unlikely collaborations. This album set featured remixing and producing with such artists as the enigmatic and mysterious Buckethead, the jam band super group Sound Tribe Sector 9, cult bluegrass rock star Michael Kang (String Cheese Incident), roots musical activists like Michael Franti (Spearhead), Heavyweight Dub Champion and KRS One, and dubstep/breakbeat pioneer FreQ Nasty. Both critically acclaimed and voraciously consumed, “Mesmerizing The Ultra” helped define the current sound of the West Coast Underground.

On its new album, “Underground Communication,” Bassnectar takes another step forward in its genre-bending blend of musical styles and emotions, combining the visceral melodic presence of modern listening music, with the force and volume of sound system dance hall devastation. Whereas the previous record featured collaborations with musicians and bands, this new album is more of an exploration of hip-hop culture, featuring scores of MCs and rhythmic poetics mashed atop a heavy, driving range of tempo and throbbing bass lines. Rooted firmly in political conviction, “Underground Communication” sets a new standard for the possibilities of merging music, art, new media, and social activism.