Taken as a whole, the 15 tracks of “Noise vs. Beauty,” the new album by DJ/producer Bassnectar (also known as Lorin Ashton), explore a basic paradox of EDM, or maybe all types of music: Are we supposed to listen alone or in a room with thousands of other people?
“Noise vs. Beauty” shows you can have it both ways, bouncing between the two poles and hitting most points in between: the anthemic, U2-worthy arena-rock of “You and Me” (feat. W. Darling); “Noise” (feat. Donnis), which builds from a soft opening into a club-type banger; the contemplative, guileless “Ephermeral”; or the nostalgic middle section of “Flashback.”
Ashton himself, CTNow discovered, enjoys both working alone and swapping ideas with indie rockers, rappers, producers and any other creative sort who’ll help him achieve what he’s after. Bassnectar performs at the Toyota Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford on Friday, Oct. 10.
CTNow: For “Noise Vs. Beauty,” you collaborated with more than 50 people. Why work with so many different artists?
Bassnectar: It’s something I set out to achieve, like an obligation. It just was kind of what happened naturally, partly because I really enjoy working on music with other people, and that’s how I kind of got my musical beginnings. I was forming bands with my friends, and I don’t really have a need to do everything myself and be kind of enclosed in a creative box. Although I’m a control freak, and kind of an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist, I also just really like ricocheting ideas off other people. I think that music and art are richer when they’re a product of a team. It’s the same thing with making movies: if the director insisted on doing every single job himself, the movie probably would suffer. So it’s been something that I’ve always enjoyed, and also, while traveling, it allows me to work on more music. But having always collaborated electronically, that was nothing new. What was new for me with this record was actually collaborating with songwriters and vocalists in a way that I never had before. Usually I have people over recording with like a bedroom mic, or whatever, and this was actually taking out several months in studios in LA working with fans and indie vocalists, and that kind of person who would really come in and participate with my music in a unique way.
CTNow: What was the criteria for selecting those people that you wanted to work with?
B: There was really no criteria. It was basically a lot of experimentation…. Out of all the music that I created with those people I probably only used 10 percent of it on this record. There was just a lot of stuff that was just creative-process type of stuff, just experimentation.
CTNow: When you’re working on a new album like this, is there a separation in your mind between what’s going to go over really well live and more meditative, headphone-type listening music? Are you able to kind of separate those two things in your mind as you’re working on something?
B: Absolutely, and although I enjoy writing for both, there really is a spectrum for me between the extreme of solo listening music and group based performance, loud concert music. Those are two different atmospheres that oppose each other in the same way that noise and beauty do. And so, playing between extremes, and both spending time at the endpoint of both extremes and meeting in the middle and exploring the different kind of combinations of the extremes is where good music comes from for me. That certainly was the case with the songs here, so some of them I think are more in that headphone realm, and some of them are more in that wild freakout realm. But all of them spent time in interpretations that were more headphone based, where I kind of like stripped the songs down to their musical components and just played them on guitar, piano, or just acapella with my voice. I took those into guitarists or singers or whatever and experimented with them in that realm when there were no basslines or beats. That allowed me to really sink my teeth deeper to the backline of each song.
CTNow: Is that a way of telling you if something works as pure music before you do a whole lot to it to make it more of a public thing?
B: Yeah, it does. As a musician, or an artist, I love making everything, but for Bassnectar music, usually it’s 99 percent of the time going to be something that can be played in a live context, that can move the air and possesses force and weight as well as volume. So, certainly on “Noise vs Beauty,” even the more beautiful elements of the spectrum are still gonna be pretty heavy.
CTNow: Do you ever work on a song and then think it’s going to go over well live, and then it just does not do that the way that you expected it to?
B: Honestly, that happens very seldomly. I’m such a perfectionist and so detail-oriented that before the song would get to a point of failure I would either not release it or not [mess] with it. If anything, I get surprised when stuff works better than anticipated. But by the time I’m going to bring something into a set, even if it’s really experimental, it has passed some rigorous quality tests in my personal judgement. I have a pretty good sense of what’s going to make people freak out at this point.
CTNow: Reading your notes on the song “Lost in the Crowd,” can you expand on what you said about EDM becoming kind of a pop culture facade of unauthenticity?
B: The song “Lost in the Crowd” has two different meanings that are kind of oppositional. One of them is about the positive sensation of losing your ego or losing your sense of self and becoming a member of a larger lifeform, identifying as a group of people as opposed to an individual. That’s the feeling I would get on a dancefloor, when you really close your eyes and just let go. It’s not really about what you look like or what you’re doing, you’re just kind of lost in the crowd in a really beautiful way.
The flip side of it is feeling kind of like an outsider for whatever reason, and it was both in terms of hip-hop — Fashawn, who was singing that, is very old school and also very intelligent, and hip-hop started off as such a powerful form of resistance music that was so bold, righteous and fierce. At least in its mainstream form, [hip-hop has] lost that, and everything’s about basically sex and violence and really superficial, basically making money. Lyrically, I think it’s lost a lot of its validity and a lot of its force. Everything just feels formatted, like it’s just trying to sell units. In a lot of ways, that happened to EDM. In fact, the term EDM, by the time it was really called that, was a facade of what it was referring to, which was the kind of ’90s rave music, which was also a reference to ’80s industrial techno and whatever. You can be anthropological about it, but I think that EDM today, whether it’s the DJs or the festivals, is so mass-produced. So many of the artists appear to me to lack artistic integrity, or at least we just have different intentions for what it means to do this job… The reasons I do this are not to be famous or rich. Really, they’re not about me. It’s just kind of an automatic response I have to having my world changed by music 20 years ago and wanting to give back as much as I can to other people, to share inspiration with them and to contribute. I don’t know. I see other genres having artists that I can relate to, like in rock music I can relate to Tool, Rage Against The Machine, the Beatles and Frank Zappa a lot more than I could relate to, say, Justin Bieber, Beyonce or Jay-Z.
BASSNECTAR performs on Friday, Oct. 10, at the Toyota Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford. Showtime is 8 p.m. Tickets are $33.50-$37.50. Information: oakdale.com.
