The Roseland teemed with awkward and excitable youth dressed in festive dance-friendly couture. At 8pm--an hour before Super Dre would transform it from waiting room to otherworldly dance party--the space felt small and inadequate. Security and staff had their hats on straight, hair combed nicely, and, most importantly, still had coffee in their systems. They tore tickets, stamped stamps, and searched purses cheerfully for the early birds.
The balcony provided ample space to survey the crowd, which in the course of an hour, bloomed from an incoherent mash-up of subcultures to a consistent whole. Super Dre facilitated the fusion by unleashing a chain of “minimalist dubstep techno from Berlin” (the most accurate term she could come up with when I asked her to describe it). At first, it was atmospheric enough not to jolt everyone to attention, so the chatter continued while an eager group swarmed to the stage, blinky lights in-tow. When the high BPMs kicked in, the mood changed drastically; clothing flew off, pupils dilated, and from the sea of faces, hands shot up like protest signs, dropping only briefly to circulate the blood.
Super Dre--though the moniker contrastingly brings to mind Dr. Dre--reminded me most of Beyoncé, a generally shy superstar who reflects a dormant persona through a style of music that’s both aggressive and introspective. She laughed and shook her head in embarrassment at the wooohoooooo!’s” in the quiet moments when the bass dropped away and the crescendos started building. Super Dre’s music is as conducive to deep thought as it is to dancing. Distorted voices drenched in echo-effects periodically bleed through the thwack thwacks of the bass and shhhhhhhs of rushing water. The effect is trippy, ambient, and super sexy, which I’m sure the kids making out on the dance floor were hip to.
Dre wound it down and delivered a gracious salutation on the microphone before clearing the stage, followed by an unexpected break in sets where the music stopped and the florescent lights shined their assaulting beams on us once again. The stagehands moved Dre’s table piled with sound equipment backstage and began to prepare Filastine’s. There was no sharing of turntables here – each act had their own table set up on three different portions of the stage. I’m not sure what to make of this other than it being an early indication of the drastically different styles of music each performer had lined up. During the intermission, I met a couple guys in their forties who were there to see Bassnectar. They were as amused as I was by the teenage day-glow fest, and it turns out, for the same reasons – more years ago than they could count on two hands, that was them.
Filastine wasted no time getting started as he approached his personalized table with a pair of drumsticks. Drumsticks? Yes, drumsticks. In all my years of staring wide eyed at DJs, I have never seen one beat on an electric drum set, nor play actual drums and simultaneously beat match records. Filastine was captivating to watch as he mixed Middle Eastern-style tribal breakbeats, then switched to a shoulder harnessed snare drum (think marching band). The background visuals scanned spastically through a montage of cityscapes, marching soldiers, machines, cogs, bombs, numbers on assembly lines, graffiti trains, and a string of brand-name processed food packaging, communicating his political and social convictions through a kind of Kuleshov effect. A number of his tracks feature raps by Spanish and Middle Eastern artists with heavy reliance on violins and sitars for melody. This international mélange of influences categorizes Filastine separate from the average club DJ in the same way that, say, M.I.A. or Manu Chao are categorized separate from the average pop star – his music is loaded with social commentary and history; lurching back and forth between contemporary and ancient culture, perhaps mimicking the architecture of an aspiring Middle Eastern city. Filastine concluded his set with a proper goodbye, where he expressed his love for “Cascadia.” He said, “I lived here [Seattle] for twelve years … you’re very lucky to be here.”
Lorin Ashton, aka Bassnectar, is kind of a big deal, and the anticipation of the crowd reflected this. He is well known with the “Burner” community, considering he's been spinning at Burning Man since the late '90s. In an interview with NotMTV, he said his most prominent influence was an earthquake he experienced as a child, comparing its “massive, uncontrollable sub-bass” to his music, which he in turn uses as a springboard to promote "doctrines of empathy and compassion." He also cited Metallica, and The Grateful Dead as a benchmark of community-creating jam bands. Ashton’s waist-length hair, which hung unrestrained by rubber bands or hats, showed that he indeed gives a shit about heavy metal. He succeeded at utterly drowning the audience in sensory detail. The bass was constant and tactile, feeling as though vibrators had been fastened to all sides of my head and were turned on full power. The visuals on stage were neither subtle nor psychedelic, but a movie-screen-sized grid of white LED lights panning and scrolling in waves like a Las Vegas billboard. This is typical for a big sold-out concert, but it’s especially striking after seeing the place so hollow and unspectacular only three hours before.
Bassnectar’s sound falls in the ever-progressing genre of high-energy house, hip-hop, breakbeat, and jungle. He has recorded over six albums, his latest, called Wildstyle is generously available for sampling on his website www.bassnectar.net. He has no apparent trouble with marketing, considering that half the crowd that night wore his prominent “BassHead” tee-shirt, and press passes were printed on a snazzy cloth sticker bearing the Bassnectar logo. Overall, the mash-up of spirited dread-heads, affectionate goth couples, aging ex-ravers, and squealing teenagers was heartening but too heavy and chaotic for anyone low on adrenaline or chemical stimulants. So, I relied on the certainty that I had seen and felt and understood this music passionately years ago; which kept me buzzing when I left as early as I arrived.
