Lorin Ashton, better known under his stage name Bassnectar, is an American DJ and record producer. He is best known for his live performances, light shows, and community engagement.
Musical Style and Influences
Lorin grew up in a San Francisco Bay Area commune and initially identified with visual arts rather than music, creating movies with his dad’s camera at the age of ten. Bassnectar's original musical influences included metal and rock bands such as Metallica, Megadeth and Nirvana. These influences are clearly integrated in tracks such as "Pennywise Tribute", "Seek and Destroy (Bassnectar Remix)", and "Boomerang", which combines samples of heavy metal & punk with overwhelming basslines. Bassnectar has also stated that early ambient artists, such as Orbital, played a major influence in his style; the chords from Orbital's 1991 hit "Halcyon" can be heard in Bassnectar's track entitled "Empathy", off the "Vava Voom" album. In the mid-90s, he briefly toured with Exhumed as a bass player.
Bassnectar experienced an immediate sense of welcome and comfort going to raves in the mid-nineties, which led to the confluence of his heavy and electronic style of music. He has been creating genre-bending music since the 1990s, using a variety of programs such as Vision/OpCode, Reason, and Ableton Live. Bassnectar describes his music as amorphous and ever-changing, which is reflected in the diverse sounds and personalities of his numerous albums, EPs, and podcasts.
Bassnectar honed his style playing house parties in the San Francisco Bay Area, known at the time as DJ Lorin and began gaining momentum at Burning Man, often playing up to 7 sets a night. Lorin began the project as an open-sourced musical experiment exploring the interplay between music and community. He released his first album in 2001 and performed as Bassnectar for the first time in 2002. Since gaining momentum and commercial acclaim, Bassnectar has collaborated with and remixed a host of artists and producers, including Lupe Fiasco, Perry Farrell, Ellie Goulding, Gogol Bordello, Sound Tribe Sector 9, Datsik, Andy C, ill.Gates, Mimi Page, Excision and Jantsen, among others.