Bass house in Costa Rica.
It is two in the morning in some club and the kick has not missed a beat in forty minutes. Then a track comes in where that same steady kick drags a bass that growls like it escaped from a dubstep party. Half the floor notices nothing and the other half lifts its head.
What is going on there
Bass house is house with British low-end sound design on top. The base is the usual one: kick on all four beats, 125 to 130 beats per minute, the DJ structure anybody recognises even without a name for it. What changes is what lives between one kick and the next.
Instead of a round bass that backs the track, there is a modulated one: the filter moves inside the note, the sound distorts, it bites, and it often comes out of the same manual dubstep uses. That contrast is the whole genre. The bottom behaves like house and the middle behaves like bass.
It came out of the UK in the 2010s and it did not appear from nowhere. Before it there was speed garage and bassline, cousins of UK garage that were already pushing heavy bass lines into four-to-the-floor music. Bass house is that same idea again, with twenty more years of synthesizers behind it.
That is why it crosses over so easily. A basshead takes it because the bass does what bass should do, and someone who only dances house takes it because the foot never loses the thread. It is one of the few genres where both people leave happy without either giving anything up.
Five marks that give it away
- Kick on all four beats. If you can find the step without thinking, you are not in dubstep.
- The bass growls. It changes timbre while it sounds instead of holding a flat note.
- Between 125 and 130 BPM. Next to dubstep it feels rushed.
- Short drop. Eight or sixteen bars and back to the groove, no moving in.
- Loose vocal. A chopped phrase that turns up and leaves, almost never a whole song.
Bass house in Costa Rica
The common currency of electronic nights in this country is house and techno. You can see that on the flyers and nobody needs to confirm it for us.
Bass house sits right between those two worlds and ours, and it is probably the easiest door that exists between a house floor and a bass night. A DJ who wants to measure how far a crowd will go drops two tracks of it and reads the room before risking anything heavier. That bridge job explains why the genre travelled fast into places dubstep had not reached yet.
What we cannot tell you is who is making it here or which rooms play it regularly. We do not have that information and we are not going to improvise it to make this section look fuller.
Where it lands on a dubstep bill
This is our opinion and it is arguable.
In a program that moves through two stages from 12 pm to 3 am there are real gaps, and they are not a programming problem but a human body problem. Doors and camping open at 12 pm, so by seven in the evening everyone can be settled. At five in the morning legs have stopped cooperating with headbanging and nobody wants to leave anyway. A steady kick with a dirty bass over it works at both hours, because it asks less than dubstep and gives back the same.
That said, the night is built on dubstep and experimental bass. Whatever else shows up inside a set is settled by whoever is behind the decks, and an hour of house that does not exist today is not something we will announce.
A steady kick is the excuse your body needs to stay standing at five in the morning.
What the low-end crowd asks
Is this house or is it bass?
Both, and that is the point. Structure, tempo and kick are house; the sound that takes your attention is bass. Someone arriving from house hears house with a strange bass, and someone arriving from bass hears bass with tidy drums. They are both right.
Can it be mixed with dubstep at different tempos?
Not on their own. 128 and 140 are not friendly numbers with each other, so the DJ solves it by moving the tempo along the way or using a bridge track as a hinge. That is real work, and it shows clearly when it is done well, just as it shows when somebody forced it.
Will bass house be played that night?
Dubstep and experimental bass hold the bill; anything else that surfaces is a decision made in the booth. What we will not do is sell you a house block so you sign up and then explain afterwards why it never happened.
Is it the same as tech house?
Neighbours, not synonyms. Tech house leans on percussion and groove and keeps the bass discreet and in the back. Bass house puts the bass up front and lets it eat the track. The borders between house labels get moved by whoever is talking, so it is not worth arguing over.
If house brought you here and the growl kept you, the road keeps going down. Riddim is that same growl with no kick to organise it, trap shares a tempo with dubstep and not with house, and experimental bass is where people go once both grids bore them. The groundwork is in what is dubstep and the state of the scene, with numbers, in dubstep in Costa Rica. Tickets are on sale now. Choose your night and buy tickets for La Selva del Bajo at The Park at Ocean Ranch.
Riddim in Costa RicaRiddim is dubstep stripped to the bone: triplets, one bass sound, no filler. What it is, how to spot it, and where it sits in Costa Rica near Jacó.
Trap in Costa RicaThe word trap covers two different genres. Which is which, what they share with dubstep, and what that means near Jacó, Costa Rica.
Dubstep in Costa RicaThe bass scene in Costa Rica exists; the festival did not. A 53% dubstep poll, a genre glossary, and the low-end night near Jacó, Costa Rica.