Another portion of this interview will appear in the Parting Shots section of the upcoming July/August issue of Relix.
Lorin Ashton has come a long way since playing impromptu sets at Burning Man in the 1990s or opening for the String Cheese Incident in the early 2000s. A veritable master of the musical gumbo, Ashton—or as he is more commonly known, Bassnectar —has made a career out of throwing some of the wildest dance parties on the scene. It’s a relentless onslaught of ups, downs and more ups that fuses an assortment of seemingly disparate styles into a crazy, coherent whole. The uninitiated may have him pigeonholed as just another DJ, but his fans know he isn’t that easy to pin down.
Bassnectar’s penchant for working with different sounds is as evident as ever on his forthcoming album, Noise vs Beauty, which drops on June 24. The record, as the title suggests, is something of a rollercoaster, and that’s exactly what his fans have come to expect. We caught up with Bassnectar as he was gearing up to perform at the New York City edition of Electric Daisy Carnival after a rare six month touring hiatus.
Let’s talk about your forthcoming album, Noise vs Beauty. What can fans expect from this record?
I tried to give myself the time to create something that was as diverse as possible to reflect my multifaceted interests in music and culture. So I basically wound up with 15 different songs, each of which represents a different point on a spectrum—a clash of extremes, between noise and beauty. It’s kind of like I’m Goldilocks in this situation where I’m going from the hottest to the coldest and everywhere in between. Some songs are just really raunchy, aggressive, wild, loud, and some are really soft and gentle or just more on the beautiful end of the spectrum to me. I don’t really expect anyone to like it all, but I love it all. That was what was really gratifying for me at the end of finishing it up, was to feel a way I’d never felt. I’d never felt so final and so at peace and so inspired by a finished work of my own before. I always end and feel like, “Shit I don’t know if it’s done, or I should have done this differently or done that differently,” and this time around it was exactly how I wanted it to be.
On past albums you’ve collaborated with people like Lupe Fiasco and RJD2. Will we be seeing more of that kind of thing on this record?
Yeah there are a lot of collaborators. The creative process for this record was really intense because I was writing different songs with different collaborators at different phases of the song’s life. I might make a song, strip it down to only guitar, piano, sometimes me humming over it. Then I’d take it to a vocalist and we’d sit and write an entire vocal part to the song, write the lyrics or whatever, and then I might switch the song slightly and take it to a different vocalist to kind of give the song more dimension in that way. Then the end product was very different than what I started out with. So some of the collaborators were people who inspired me but who I didn’t end up using in the end. Some of the collaborators are lower on the profile and higher on the flexibility, which is actually something I gravitate towards. It’s always fun to have a name to throw around and be like, “Hey I worked with so-and-so,” but the reality is that having an artist who is totally open for creativity and collaboration is just more inspiring to me. So working with an MC who writes the lyrics with me, who I can say, “Hey can you try saying it like this; could you not say that and try this; let’s talk about that; hey try it in this tone or here let me show you how to do it like this,” makes it a lot more organic and interactive for me. Some of the more high profile people I worked with on the record, I didn’t end up using, because what they did, even though it was badass, I just couldn’t customize it enough, and I really just wanted to get deep. The collaborators, most of them are friends or kind of like indie singer/songwriters, and just people who I was inspired by.
So collaborations aside, what’s the process like for you when you’re in the studio? When do you start, when do you know things are finished?
Well I’d never done this process before. This is the first time I’ve ever taken six months off the road to be creative. The year before that, I was on the road 11 months out of the year, and every album that I’ve made, I’ve made on the road, completely exhausted, just trying to find a quiet hotel room with some headphones to get a second. This process started off last summer when I had basically a full album created but it just felt too electronic and what I was hearing from all the other artists in my field was just sounding really similar and I wasn’t inspired by it, so I kind of remixed myself as if I was an indie band remixing a DJ. I produced these soft indie rock remixes of my own music where it was just a couple chords, piano, guitar, and my voice. Then I took those around to different artists, different collaborators and wound up with these new versions that sounded like a fucking rad indie rock band. Then I took those files and remixed them and made them more electronically enhanced. So that process took many moons, and I worked almost every day of the year—so far this year, seven days a week pretty obsessively. Even though I told everyone I was taking a vacation, I was recharging.
You have a pretty big fanbase on the jamband scene. Do you have any roots in the Dead or the Phish scenes?
No. In fact, there were a couple other stoners in high school who liked The Dead and we were always kind of friends with them but their music was so light. When I was 16 I was so obsessed with death metal, I think I was just trying to get away from Christianity, so I just wanted the most offensive, freakish sound. Now when I look back I can see, there is so much musicianship. I love real deal country bluegrass that was recorded before 1950. Shit that was so authentic, rich, and vintage—I love that. Modern day, I just prefer louder and heavier sound. Working with [The String Cheese Incident’s] Michael Kang was killer though. One of my favorite Bassnectar songs in existence is “Dubuasca,” I created that with him based on recordings he made of a shaman at an Ayahuasca ceremony. We just took her voice and her chants and cut it up and he played all kinds of instrumentation over it—or most of it; half of it was played backwards, and then he played again over it. It went pretty deep [laughs].
A lot of festivals now have this sort of jam in the day and electronic at night format they’re going with. Where do you think the crossover appeal between these two scenes lies? Is it in the sense of community?
Yeah, absolutely. I feel like I was able to present a new and raw sound for the younger brothers and sisters of the true Deadheads and the true Phishheads in the earlier 2000s. Then as those kids grew into their own I think they made it more of their flag. Hitting a nerve like that without intending to is pretty interesting. When you set out to make magic, that’s one thing, but when you have no idea it’s going to come and it just happens and you’re kind of witnessing it more as a spectator your like “Damn, what the fuck, this is outrageous.”
During my days in the punk rock/ death metal scenes we were too few to make a community without reaching out to other people in other towns, and we were kind of bonding together over this shared love of something that was left of center, and the community that comes out of that. When you have something special and you’re sharing it from Milwaukee or Florida or you live in New York sharing it with someone in L.A., I think it’s immeasurable and special and it just fit right into my ethos. What I couldn’t believe was anyone liked my music in that scene, specifically because jamband music, to my ear, is lighter. It’s not as full, it’s not as hard, it’s not as heavy; and in a lot of ways I think that makes it better music for being at festivals, because it’s not so overwhelming. I’ve seen sets played by a band like Phish or something and the music and the tone is not as loud or as overwhelming, yet people are just going HAM. I feel like that is, in part, because their senses are not fully overwhelmed by the music.
The first time I played All Good, I came on after all these banjos and a tambourine and a guy in his 50s whispering about moonshine or something on the other stage, and I’m thinking, “Well I guess I don’t know what’s going to happen.” Then to watch that bowl of 20,000 people erupt; they didn’t not dance, they didn’t leave—they stayed and flipped out. I really developed a love for the eclecticness of that audience and I kind of assumed I would continue growing as an after party DJ or a warm-up DJ for those bands. I remember playing a 7pm opening set for String Cheese, or playing 6:30pm in Boston opening for STS9, just hustling in 2004 or whatever. Then sure enough, in 2005, Madison House started putting me into the same markets in small rooms, like a pizza parlor in Lafayette, or a random ladies night in Knoxville on a Wednesday night and it worked. We’d be the only artists in a room full of 300 or 400 people and we were the only people that ever brought in bass. They’d say, “What do you need the bass for?” and we’d tell them, “You’ll see!” and it just caught on. I think as the times developed and the culture developed, youth culture just started gravitating toward more of a crossover sound. That’s not to say that happened in general, but it certainly happened in force. I was lucky enough to have an infrastructure, a community, a network built within the country that allowed me to tour 30 cities in 30 nights, and I think it just allowed me to build on that.
You’ve always been pretty engaged with your fan base, particularly when it comes to political and cultural issues. Do you think artists like yourself have a certain kind of social responsibility?
I have a social responsibility because I choose to, but I don’t think that artists do just because they’re artists. I think that what defines an artist—because all humans are multidimensional and we can be an artist, a mechanic, a teacher, and a father—we can be all these things at once depending what our makeup is. So in terms of what you are as an artist, I just think it’s about being free and wild and fearless and creative and you can be generous or you can be selfish you can be all these things. For me as an artist I really focus on creativity, working with sound collages, and mashing up cultures, and reflecting, reflecting, reflecting. As an individual I feel socially responsibility because I’m empathic, I feel pain when other people feel pain. I love giving to others. I have a lot of gratitude for life and one of the ways I’ve processed that without religion is simply being in awe of little moments and trying to give that kind of awe in the form of inspiration to other people. So sometimes I’m looking out for people, if there are laws that are going into place that are unjust, then I might be talking about that or trying to do something about that. If it’s just a simple humanitarian interest in someone having more access to friends and family and health and happiness then I’d go in that direction too. I don’t feel as black and white political as I am just interested in having people lead happier healthier lives if I can.
I’ve noticed that on your social media, on your Facebook in particular, you put up these posts that sometimes devolve into these crazy, out of control debates.
I wouldn’t say that “sometimes they devolve,” I would say it’s almost guaranteed. I even did a couple of tests. I would be in a conversation with someone about how pointless I thought it was to try to interact with meaningful dialogue on Facebook. They would say, “No you just have to word it right.” So I would post right there with them “Check this out, how could this go wrong?” And then boom! You post a picture of Mother Teresa with a quote of hers of something beautiful, and within three comments it’s off the chain. One time I was simply drinking water, by myself, and I just stopped and had this moment of gratitude where I was like, “Holy shit, I just walked up to this metal spout on the wall and turned it on and fresh water came out, and if I want, I can fill it up and heat it up and I can get in and take a bath or drink it.” That’s so crazy, so many people don’t have that. For thousands of years animals and early humans never had that, and that was awesome. Took a picture of it, gave thanks, put it on Facebook, and the next thing you knew it was just the most horrifically racist and hateful things.
I guess a couple things happened: First, some of my dreams were dashed, and those dreams were really rallying intellectual discussion online. That was something I’d always wanted to facilitate and be a part of that I realized probably wasn’t going to happen. Second, I got really bored of social networking. I can’t fucking stand it honestly. Short of promoting music and celebrating Bassnectar online, I don’t personally have any interest. I don’t have any profiles. I don’t like it. And third, I really feel that I have an understanding of why there is so much hate, disrespect and immaturity online because I have incredible road rage when I drive. When I’m driving, I just drive faster. If I think that I see the right lane to get into quicker, I’m waiting behind someone with their blinker on and I get pissed. But I’m a really gentle person and the person I’m pissed at is probably a really sweet person with kind parents and a great life outside of that car. But when we’re in the context of that car, it’s easy to feel that kind of road rage, and they’re all feeling that too. And I think the internet is a lot like that; it’s like everyone’s caught in a traffic jam without accountability and they don’t take the sensitivity required to remember that they are talking to another human on the other end. When you say, you know, “Get out of the way asshole!” when you’re in the car and they don’t hear you, it’s no harm no foul, but when you write that up online, people do hear it, and it can be really painful for people. So I like to interact more in person than online. And I don’t mind going online, like I said, for Bassnectar purposes, but personally it’s just uninteresting for me.
Getting back to your live show, a Bassnectar show is very much a multi-sensory experience. Beyond the music, how much input do you have in the production on the whole thing?
Well I have total creative control, which can be pretty daunting for anyone working on my crew, because I’m a total perfectionist. I’m neck deep in everything. I try to step back as much as I can and let the people in my crew do their jobs as they want to. I do have an incredible crew. In the lighting world, that means kind of allowing the lighting team to do their art and giving comments or giving requests, but I don’t have a lot of overbearing directedness. I usually say pretend the Beatles were on the Magical Mystery Tour with Slayer—what would that be like? That’s kind of the lighting direction. The video, I have that down to the micro frame. I personally either create or collect the content with a small group of friends online, edit it with a small group of editors, and obsess with it, like “28:05. That’s got to change. That’s all wrong. This one at 29:30 is perfect, duplicate that and put that there.” And I can actually use Ableton, which is my live program to edit video as well. That’s pretty fun. If you’re ever at a show and you see my song ‘The Matrix’ there’s like cuts from The Matrix movie, and that’s all stuff I edited, just like hyper impact synced. It’s like the training when they’re in the dojo with Morpheus and it’s super hyper synced.
So are you actually editing video live on Ableton?
So we created this thing called the UNS, the Ultimate Nerd Server. It’s a computer robot system interlocking music, video and lights, so that I can assign a video or a video clip or a video occurrence or words or light effects to any clip in my set of music. Any sound, any song, any sample, any loop, and the music and the video sync up perfectly so it’s pretty insanely liberating. I’ve got an effects box up on my table, where I can add effects to the video or take it in a different direction, but I also have an entire video crew that’s running it and it’s synced to the music. Pretty diverse.
You and Pretty Lights have collaborated on a few Bass Lights events, are we going to see any musical collaborations from you two?
Yeah, it was supposed to happen 4 or 5 years ago. It’s just simply that we’re too busy. Every time I see him it’s, “What’s up Derek. When are we gonna do that track?” I’m sure it will happen soon. We keep meaning to do remixes for each other; we keep lagging. We say were going to do an EP; we keep lagging. I think it would be really fun.
You have a way of synthesizing so many styles in your music like world, hip-hip or just old school rock and roll. Where do you find inspiration for all of this cross-pollination? What makes you think, oh this would go great with a hip-hop beat or that would go great with a metal riff?
I guess it’s two forces. One force is that my tastes are wildly eclectic. When there was rock and then they got alternative rock, I was into alternative rock. I really like that left field shit, and I don’t think most humans like only one thing. So, I think we can all find a classical symphony that we enjoy, or we can all find some dirty hip-hop song that we’re like yeah that beat is sick. That’s one force of it. The other is the juxtaposition. The irony of opposing forces where you’re like, “Fuck this is so much different from that, what would happen?” And then you collide it. And then you see what happens and some times it’s unexpectedly beautiful.
You gained a lot of notoriety on the Burning Man scene. What is it that sets Burning Man apart from all these other events?
I can’t really comment on that because I haven’t been in three years now. I went for 13 years and the last few years I went I only showed up to DJ. I did it because I would always have a show on the weekend so I would come in play a couple shows and bounce. But when I first was going it was like church. Burning Man was really what allowed me to build Bassnectar. Partly because I would play five shows a night for seven nights straight at this massive festival, the only one of its kind. This was in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Secondly, it was a showcase for me to play music to a diverse crowd of freaks from across the country. So it’s how I got shows in New York. I would finish a set at sunrise at this camp and this dude would walk up to me in a rainbow onesie, be like, “Hey man I have this loft in Chicago. You should come and do a Halloween show for us.” And I was like “Fuck yeah! I would love to.” And it would just build. That’s actually how I met Michael Kang, he wasn’t the guy in the rainbow onesie, but he definitely contacted me through his crew. He was like, “Hey, we saw you at Burning Man and we would love to have you play at some after parties.” It was just a bridge for the freaks. I’m sure it still is. I don’t know, just 13 years or something is… a lot.
So you have spoken out, at times, sort of about the prevalence of drugs in the music scene today. How do you feel artists, promoters, festivals should address this issue?
I don’t think that there are many “shoulds” that one human can cast out to every other human. For myself, I experimented with drugs. I was always pretty tame when I did it. I had a best friend who had a lot of bad experiences when I was a kid and my father cautioned me to be careful. So in high school and college, I did experimenting, and it was beautiful, but it was something I looked at as like a key that would unlock a door and once the door was unlocked you could open it yourself; and you could go in and out and return anytime you wanted, kind of like Narnia. So, I stopped experimenting in 1999. I haven’t touched anything since. I have lot of respect for it but I think it’s very dangerous.
I think on a biological level some peoples’ bodies are different than others. Some people are allergic to different things. So, this is where I say “should”: you should not make a blanket statement condoning any kind of pharmaceutical or recreational drug carte blanche to the world because there is some kid out there—one in a thousand—who is going to have some kind of reaction, or his body isn’t going to be ready for it or whatever. I would rather play it safe and say, while I understand humans want to get out of their minds and kids want to rage, I think the number one truth to me is that our lives are precious, our bodies are fragile. It’s so fucking magical and it’s so ephemeral that we only have this tiny moment in life, I would rather enhance my life with as much clarity and health and ability to be overwhelmed and wonder and happiness. And I do that through not fucking myself up with drugs.
I don’t judge when people are experimenting. Anyone that is being reckless and is putting themselves or anyone else in danger, I don’t really feel a lot of kinship with. To my fans, I would just say I think it’s much more important that you take care of your nervous systems and you take care of each other than it is for you to get high. And I don’t think you can trust a lot of what you’re buying at shows. I have personally seen friends both lose their lives or have their lives crumble irrevocably through drug abuse. It’s something I take very seriously, but it’s not as black and white that I would speak out against drugs, because I’ve seen a lot of beauty come from experimentation too.
So electronic music has really blown up in the past few years. In the next decade, half decade, where do you see the scene heading? Is the current level of popularity tenable for the long run?
Um, fuck. I started studying electronic music in college in 1996 and even then—and that was the height of the rave scene, maybe even after the height of the rave scene—I realized that everything I had been listening to or a lot of what I had been listening to in the ‘80s was electronically produced. I didn’t think about Run DMC, Michael Jackson or Madonna as being electronic dance music, but they were. Even disco was, kind of. That wasn’t a band playing. They were using these samplers. They were enhancing and mastering it with these techniques. From that point on, I stopped making the distinctions. I’ll use the terms to talk to people but my own mind thinks of it as just electronically enhanced. So it’s not electronic dance, it’s electronically enhanced music, EEM. I think that’s never going away. People are never going to be like let’s stop enhancing our music electronically, because you can’t really record it without electronics.
It’s just like fashion, I have had some scrambling of a beard and the audacity to not cut my hair and tie it on my head for over 10 years now and there have been years where that was the dumbest look, and now everywhere I look there is a dude with a beard and a top bun on. It’s just style and I’m sure that next year no one will be caught dead with a top bun and I’ll still have one on like I just didn’t get the memo. I haven’t worn pants in years. I only wear shorts; it’s just more comfortable. Sometimes it looks ridiculous and sometimes it looks great. I think that human style and human fashion is hysterical and I don’t keep track of what’s in and what’s out. It’s the same with music. I love what I love, and I love to make sound collages of what I love. So it may sound like the most diverse and intelligent juxtaposition of these extremes or it might just be like, “Oh yeah. That makes sense. That’s a sick track.”
This is the last question here, what’s next for you? What’s coming for the rest of the year or beyond?
It’s just kicking off. I’m about to start summer festival season, which will basically go straight through this weekend, Electric Daisy Carnival and Summer Camp, all the way to Tomorrow World in September in Atlanta and a lot of place in between. Then we kick off our fall tour at Madison Square Garden with the Bass Center and the Noise vs Beauty Tour, which will go on for about a month and a half.
So there is going to be a Bass Center at Madison Square Garden?
Yeah, first Bass Center in a very long time.
And how hands on is that for you? Do you curate the whole thing?
Oh yeah. It’s like a little baby. A little crazy angel.
I’m excited for it. I’m actually working on making it the most affordable show ever at MSG, which is hard. It’s hard to do because it’s a really expensive room and the ticket fees are high. I really want it to be like a come-one-come-all type of event. So we are really putting a lot into that.
