I'm by no means breaking new ground when I refer to greater Boston and its outlying hamlets as a rock-driven music culture. The list of famous Bostonian bands literally reads like your favorite 1996-1999 modern rock radio playlist. Aerosmith, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Staind, Godsmack, Dinosaur Jr, The Pixies, Guster and, perhaps deceptively, Boston, all hail from Boston-area towns, and this regional legacy of loud guitars, louder live shows and generally traditional popular music aesthetics leaves little room for electronic music.
In some ways, the area's music climate bears this out. While comparably sized cities like Baltimore and Seattle have cobbled together diverse, vibrant popular music cultures rich in all kinds of electronic music, Boston's accomplished and promising producers have moved out and moved on to locales more friendly to their music.
In other ways, I'm a complete moron. For over a year and a half, Boston's BASSIC Crew — Dabu, Pandai'a, C-dubs, and Damian Silva — have helped local electronica blossom from the forgotten corners of a rock-heavy music scene to a small clique of castoff drum and bass, house and breaks DJs to a broad and truly exciting music culture rooted in Dubstep but splintering into anything that bumps. It's a culture that, whether Powerman 5000 likes it or not, is now an inseparable part of the city's musical identity.
As Dabu tells it, the evolution was pretty natural: "I was spinning at this weekly in Mission Hill, and whenever I played any Dubstep, people would always come up to me afterwards and want to know where they could hear more."
I, and tens of thousands of people worldwide, can relate. The first time I heard a Dubstep record played out live (it was "Midnight Request Line" by Skream if you're keeping score at home) was literally dumbfounding. The moment when the beat dropped — a wobbly, propulsive explosion dripping with sub-bass that the bar's sound system could just barely handle — was unlike anything I had ever heard or felt (as in physically felt in my body) before.
After the requests for more Dubstep, Dabu said he "thought we should try and put something together." So was born BASSIC, Boston's most successful live electronic event featuring two of BASSIC's resident DJs and the kind of national and international talent that Baltimore and Seattle wished they could get. Though the event started out as an ostensibly Dubstep party, BASSIC has changed as its members and the genre have. "For the first year or so, we were stepping on each other's toes," struggling to both find records with the massive bass drops that Bostonians craved but also play new and exciting tracks each month, he said. "Now, its just a place to play different things that fall under the umbrella of dubstep."
This makes BASSIC parties kind of like a circus: there's something for everyone, but all of it is totally absurd. On a given night, you can hear deep, decaying techno-leaning Dubstep; rootsy, reggae Dubstep; Dubstep with hip-hop; or the darkest, most evil, most bizarrely sexy music your virgin ears can handle, plus whatever electronic music all-star they bring to town.
BASSIC's January installment, hosted again at The Good Life, pitted Pandai'a's all-vinyl set of dark, downtempo Dubstep against Dabu's laptop set of experimental hip-hop beats, both of which set the stage for New York electro hip-hop kingpin Eliot Lipp, mixing a range of electronic music as broad as it was good. Blending the pummeling sub-bass of Dubstep heavyweights like Rusko with smooth hip-hop tracks by Tufts' own Obey City, Lipp put together a murderous set drawing on all electronic music genres. It was a fitting achievement for a BASSIC event, and one that encapsulates the legacy this production company is carving into Boston's live music culture, one month at a time.
--
Mikey Goralnik is a senior majoring in American Studies. He can be reached at Michael.Goralnik@tufts.edu
