Bass House
mid 2010s · Los Angeles, United States, building on a UK scene (Birmingham/London)
House with a UK bass scene grafted on: a steady four-on-the-floor kick paired with dubstep-and-garage-style bass design, popularized by AC Slater's Night Bass and Jauz (Wikipedia, UKF).
The sound
A house four-on-the-floor kick, usually around 124-128 BPM, carrying a heavily designed, wobbling or growling bassline pulled from UK garage, bassline, and dubstep, with swung drums and clipped vocal chops instead of a sung verse.
Listen for: The same steady house kick as always, but listen to how much of the track's personality lives in the bass sound design, not the melody, and how the drums swing off-grid the way UK garage does.
Things to know
AC Slater started Night Bass as a monthly club night at Sound Nightclub in Hollywood in January 2014, and it grew from a party into a record label, putting out its first release, This Is Night Bass Vol. 1, in mid 2015.
Jauz's 2014 single Feel The Volume, released on Diplo's Mad Decent label, is widely credited as the blueprint track that put the emerging bass house sound in front of a mainstream dance audience.
Key tracks
Feel The Volume by Jauz · 2014
Bass Inside by AC Slater · 2016
Family tree
- House: Bass house keeps house's core engine, the steady four-on-the-floor kick. What changes is where the personality sits. Instead of a sung hook or a piano riff, the track's identity lives in a heavily designed, modulated bassline borrowed from UK bass culture. Producers like AC Slater and Jauz built it as house with the low end turned into the lead instrument, not a replacement for house's pulse.
- UK Garage: Bass house's swung drums and syncopated bounce come straight from UK garage's rhythmic template, filtered through the 2000s bassline and speed garage scenes. Chris Lorenzo, one of the genre's pioneers, came directly out of Birmingham's bassline scene. The shuffled hi-hat groove bass house producers point to as a defining feature is UK garage's swing, sped up and roughened.
- Dubstep: Bass house's sound design habits, the wobble, the growl, the mid-bass modulation, come from dubstep's tool kit rather than from house. Producers took dubstep's bass-as-lead-instrument idea and reattached it to a four-on-the-floor kick instead of dubstep's half-time drums. That's why bass house sits between the two genres: house's pulse underneath, dubstep's abrasive bass on top.
- EDM / Big Room: Bass house grew up alongside peak 2010s EDM festival culture and pitched itself as the underground contrast to it. AC Slater founded Night Bass in 2014 because he felt shut out of the big EDM lineups, too heavy for house bills and too deep for dubstep ones. Even so, EDM's festival circuit gave bass house its crossover path once Jauz and Valentino Khan broke through.