Whether you were grinding along with the heaps of patrons in the audience, sacrificing your drinks to the Gods above in the VIP lounge or planted on boxes of gear backstage, everyone was smothered in a sticky, relentless coating of thundering bass as Bassnectar closed the Red Bull Music Academy stage on Monday night. Unleashing his Whip-It brand bass lines (imagine those adolescent wah-wahs magnified by a million) and eclectic dub step to new wave mash up style and you’ve got a good reason why the majority of the independent vendors were shut down as the sun set and the more hair than flare DJ took to the stage — who would want to miss it? But Bassnectar’s set wasn’t without complication as Lorin Ashton, the California-based multi-instrumentalist behind the name, is quick to point out.
“Last night, we were in Chicago … for Summer Camp,” explains Ashton, his long, flowing locks a well-known calling card for the artist and excellent fodder for the rabid photographers who stormed the stage during his set. “I was bouncing around on the stage as usual, and two minutes later, my whole table crashes — laptops fall, the whole sound system shuts down.” This wasn’t only Bassnectar’s first trip to Detroit — it was his first time going back to the laptop that failed him so abruptly the night before. “On the first song, my computer crashes,” laughs Ashton. “I’m desperately clinging to reality, yelling at my stage manager and thinking, ‘This is the quintessential way to make an ass out of yourself … get in front of 2,000 people — literally a pyramid of people — and fuck up.’” While such technical mistakes were happening unbeknownst to the audience and the performance raged on, Ashton jokingly acknowledged the power of connecting with the crowd through such human error. “You, too, could be fucking up,” adds Ashton. “In a couple of years, just imagine! You could be standing up here blushing with me.”
From start to finish, Bassnectar brought the type of energy that many artists chase to catch — jocund bundles of energy, brilliant, spontaneous splashes of pinning genres against one another and a physical presence that transcends the usual requirements for what most DJs pursue and practice. But while his performance immediately pounced upon the audience and maintained the “rollercoaster of tempos and sounds” Bassnectar is known for, the last segment of the set welcomed a cooling, sharp left turn of a melt down few saw coming.
“I’ll admit — it’s a standard format,” explains Ashton. “I like the Goldie Locks approach of not too hot, not too cold. It’s fun to take people to that mental extreme and then give them something soft to chew on. It is becoming this tradition of melting it down into what I find to be beautiful trip-hop. It … encapsulates the way entire events used to go in the ‘90s when I was throwing full moon [parties] in the middle of the first with my friends. We would start off, rage it all night and, when the sunrise came, it was meltdown time — beautiful, perfect, sensual, mind-expanding music.”
In the same way B.B. King slides up and down the neck of Lucille, Ashton is quick to assign genders to the balancing act of intensity his performances splatter against the drawing board. “What I’m really focused on doing,” continues Ashton, “is balancing the masculine and the feminine — going into really perverse, perverted music and then going super melodic — and trying to ride those two extremes.”
Words by Ryan Patrick Hooper, Photos by Joe Gall
