Just over a week ago Lorin Ashton, with the stage name: Bassnectar, voyaged himself and crew of Bass Cadets to our hometown to play a whimsical performance. EOTO (2 members of the String Cheese Incident) was the opening act for this event.
Today, the “Bassnectar Music/Band Fan Page” on Facebook has 646,074 fans. Comparing this fact to that of a band such as Phish with 521,554 fans on Facebook one may see how our current generation of music-goers cater to this electronic Disk Jockey style of performance. Hence, the reason this genre of concert is beginning to see the average age to be significantly younger. This event followed suit.
Bassnectar has been selling out concert venues, bars, and clubs all across globe, including tours internationally. He provides music enthusiasts with jaw-dropping bass performances and incorporates DubStep, hip-hop, and electronic alterations into his setlists. He is considered a solo DJ that produces unique and creative bass reverberations and has recently been coined the “Monster of Womp,” due to his catchy dubstep bass waves.
The Eagles Ball Room was near capacity and Bass Heads occupied the entire balcony area above. This concert was part of his fall tour promoting his new EP “Divergent Spectum,” containing remixes of Ellie Goulding- Lights, and also sampling Ill Gates and Gogol Bordello.
Bassnectar’s lighting displays have always correlated well with the music he is playing at a given time. Years ago during his mellower drum and bass performances the visuals would match the melodies in an organically, in-depth-growing, adventurous way. Today, his shows contain lighting displays similar to those of Umphrey’s McGee or Future Rock in the aspect that they are more fast paced, continuous bright patterns that rapidly change to the damaging bass cannons Lorin has began to drop.
The show was intriguing because he found a proper way to thread his new tracks into his set-list without making the show seem like too much of a new album promotion. He also found modern ways to incorporate pieces of his previous work into the exploration of his current trends.
There is another minor part of his shows that sets him apart; he tends to mildly sample certain portions of songs out of the realm of the mainstream ear, such as “Juicy Juice, By: Zion I & The Grouch.” He finds a way to mend these short lower-key pieces of songs into his act, and doing it without having to make them “known.”
Here are some photo’s from his performance:
