“Bass music is slower and stranger, taking its listeners on an aural journey through viscous, low end frequencies.”
Bass music—as it’s known in America—is a broad term. But not without nuance. Glitch-hop, dubstep, garage, IDM, temple step, crunk, ambient and beat music are a few that fall under the umbrella of “bass music,” but at the nucleus of all of these categories is a slapping bass so powerful that it hits you in the solar plexus like a sonic cannon.
Today, bass music seems like a West Coast fixture because of its pervasiveness in Southern California festival culture and its popularity at Nevada’s annual Burning Man, but its origins come from UK dubstep. Deviating from the high BPMs that eclipsed electronic music in the 1990s, dubstep was a welcomed variation in the electronic Renaissance. When prominent dubstep artists such as Benga, Skream, and Hatcha exploded on the West Coast, stateside artists not only adopted this newfound sound but reshaped it."
