Teaming up with hip-hop MCs and playing alongside legendary metal bands, Bassnectar represents a whole lot more than the dubstep label he’s sometimes tagged with. DJ Mag USA join him to discuss everything from fine wines and yoga, to Cannibal Corpse and


full moon raves... Words: ELIZABETH DE MOYAPics: CLAYTON HAUCK


A


longside Skrillex, Bassnectar, aka Lorin Ashton, is possibly the most influential dubstep artist that California has produced. More accurate to describe him as a producer of freeform bass driven electronica, Lorin shuns the mainstream by releasing music under his own label –


the aptly named Amorphous Music - and is notoriously secretive with the press. At the same time he regularly headlines at the biggest music festivals in the world, often alongside old school rock stars like Metallica and Black Sabbath. He even has a following of hardcore devoted fans who call themselves “Bass heads”.


After convincing him to give DJ Mag USA an interview, we try to find out what it is about Bassnectar that has inspired such fervor from fans who usually stick to rock or hip-hop. The 34-year-old DJ will not tell us what city he was born in, but he is nice enough to give a brief history of the California music scene, break down his current tour and expand upon his philosophies on music and life at 9.30am in the morning...


So let’s get started with the basics. What part of the Bay Area are you from? “All over. I’ve lived in the Bay Area my whole life in different places. These days it’s more of a suitcase for me rather than a living area. But it’s my favorite place in the world of all the places I’ve travelled.”


So what city were you born in? “I can’t reveal that information.”


Oh, okay. Do you usually get up this early? “I’ve been getting up early ever since the summer when I was over in Europe and then I came back. It was such a wacky schedule, I just started getting up mad early and I kept it. It’s been really amazing. I’ve been really productive this whole winter. I had like all of January off. I’d get up at seven or eight and just be cranking on tunes until midnight every day. It’s really functional.”


Even when you’re on tour? “I did in the fall. I don’t know how long it’s gonna last. Maybe I get up at nine, but definitely much earlier. Also with the whole tour, the venues are usually larger. And the larger the venue – when you get to like a five or ten thousand room – they usually close down pretty early. The doors will open at six and I’ll be on at ten and off by twelve, sometimes off by eleven.”


Your Wikipedia says that you started touring really in 2005? “You should never – you can print this too if you want – nobody should ever believe a Wikipedia about anything because it’s bullshit. We don’t read our Wikipedia or anything. I’ve been told it says insanely


inaccurate things. But I started touring pretty actively in like ‘99. Before that it wasn’t so much touring as it was organizing events in California, mostly full moon and free outdoor parties, or underground raves in San Francisco. So when I started touring I kept that DIY ethos where I didn’t really look at it as a gig I was performing. It was an event that I was co-producing. I would really get behind it creatively and promotionally, and even in terms of the sound system and production and all of that. It’s probably been pretty accurately since ’95.”


Okay so you started producing and promoting shows in ’95. When did you start playing music? “Well it all kind of bleeds together because I started playing guitar and death metal when I was twelve. And in high school, me and my friends would put on battle of the bands at the community center and have a weird death metal show or something. We started going to raves senior year and then we turned it into a rave. There was no hard line when I just woke up and started. It just kind of like got deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.”


But there must have been some point when you were like, “Okay, I’m gonna start making amorphous dance music.” “It was an amorphous beginning, for sure, because in high school I had all of the recording equipment that I used for my band’s death metal. I would record my mouth making beats and I would sample shit off the radio and I would use my guitar effects pedal. And frankly it was pretty fucking psychedelic back then, but it was by no means rock the jams you know, it was pretty primitive. In the early nineties is when I was doing that and 1996 was when I first threw an official event, you know, like an all-night dance event booking


DJs and shit like that. But can I just say it’s all been pretty amorphous.”


Was that with An-Ten-Nae and those guys in the Bay Area? “Oh yeah. Adam was working at a map point the first time I ever went to a map point. I used to think he was so weird and so cool – still do. Really, when I started getting to know him was in the psychedelic trance phase. That was in the late nineties. He was definitely repping a very innovative sound at the time. This was at warehouses that friends of ours owned. We would do underground events, and he lived at one of the warehouses and used it as a map point. So you would go there and get directions to the other place. It was a way of meeting tons of people. My first show was at 150 Folsom or Dimension 7 Warehouse. That was the one in 1996. It was a tiny little room.”


But now you’re producing for big stadiums. Wasn’t your 2011 album ‘Divergent Spectrum’ produced with a big crowd of people in mind? How do you do that exactly? “That is true. As the crowds have gotten larger, I’ve really shifted my focus from making albums and recording and listening to music, to pushing air and moving bodies. It’s fun for me because I get these tours that are so non-stop and high energy – like a wild circus. And I get to create the music in advance, before I remix it live.


“We’re raising the bar up a hundred times for video for what we’ve done in the past. For 2013, we’re developing a very specific custom concept for every song, then having myself trigger it as well as the fucking team adding multiple effects on screen surfaces.”


djmag.com 069


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110