Review Summary: if you weren't already a soundsystem addict, you are now.
I wasn't much older than seventeen when I attended my first deep dubstep event. At the time, I had difficulty grasping what it was about this strange music that managed to entrance a crowd in such a profound way. Between me and the odd character that found themselves scouring the room for eyes that parroted a "what the hell is going on" look, the scores of hypnotized heads and smiling community were swept up in the pulsating basslines and reverb-laden percussion 'til the wee hours of the morning, weekend-in and weekend-out. At this point, I wasn't nearly as enthralled as those who had taken roots in this local scene, but I was curious enough to keep with it, chasing whatever high my teenage brain thought it could find between the dim lights and hugs from strangers. I kept crawling out of my smokey basement adorned with black metal posters and half-smoked spliffs on those fateful Friday nights to see if I could "click" with all this fuss. Before long, I could feel it. That click. The music was starting to make sense.
You see, at first, I was made victim by the weight of my own pre-conceptions. I was looking for the sounds of the big room acts that first introduced me to electronic music a few years prior. The big build-ups, the big drops, the lasers, the pop-culture-savvy remixes, and of course the rainbow-clad whippet fiends that lined up for their spot along the subwoofers. Little did I realize at first, but the whole underground movement I was exploring orbited around a subtlety of expression that shrouded the genre's mystique. You don't need much to make a good dubstep tune and they all knew it. Toss a snare on the 3, chop a vocal, pump some pads, set the pace to 140bpm, and cradle it all with a thick and dubby sub-bass. Those are more-or-less the bones hiding in plain sight. It's a simple recipe, and like a good Neapolitan pizza, it's the quality of the ingredients and the spacious palette that allows each flavour to shine. This is how minimalist music is made magic, and this is how Quasar and his contemporaries make their subterranean brand of dubstep so intoxicating.
Wherever that sound strikes, deep 140 music breathes an air all its own, be it in a disheveled basement nightclub shoehorned into an obscure part of Bristol, or the vast expanse of an open air festival in the Rocky Mountains. Its a tether, if you will, between the tribal rhythms fried into our species' collective subconscious, and the cutting edge soundscapes that mirror the architecture of our ever more dystopian society. Knotted, sculpted and catapulted out of the biggest sound systems the blue collar underground can slap together, the intangible vibe that unfolds when it all hits just right not only moves masses of sweaty bodies, but the souls that live inside of them too. It's honest music, not keen to be mired in pretense, even if the high-browed neckbeards and unlabelled dubplate connoisseurs of the scene beg to differ. So when an artist like the Parisian sound designer Quasar come around to remind us what it was like to live it for the first time, it's a special thing.
Soundsystem Addict is indeed like a trip back to your first moments in front of a subwoofer wall. The bass is dummy-thicc and almost suffocating, the ceiling pipes are dripping with crowd sweat, and the stage lights are periodically burning holes in your retinas when you watch the DJ mix his steez. You won’t find any toothy synthesizers or boisterous foghorns here. In fact, unless you’re listening spot has some good and proper sub-bass capabilities, you might not find much of anything. This is real bass music, alive in the 30-100hz realm and addled with a layer of minimalistic yet brilliant top end that deliberately eschews trite notions of "melody" to make space for the trunk-thumpin' and rump-bumpin' low notes that pin down Quasar's Artikal Music debut proper. The intuitive use of delay and reverb on the foley that fills the gaps keeps things acutely delirious, as exemplified early on by the slipmat warping
"weh-woo-wahs" and mechanical chirps of the title track as it percolates those jabs on the off-beat. Onward from there, the knuckle-dusting Haze0 collab "Oops" is anything but a mistake as it postures an undulating groove that bounces with the scrumptious weight of a million granite elephants all glued together with a subdued 4-note jingle that wouldn't sound out of place on a 90's hip-hop record. Hot on its tails to kick off the b-side, "Post Echo Dub" is a truly curb-stomping jaunt, with a driving rhythm that pressurizes your skull like King Kong himself was pounding a war drum right beside your head, inside a shipping container, while you're both high on mushrooms. It's a real trip, with all of that girthy heft mingling with bubble-guns and alien communication signals that effectively dismantle whatever faint notion of validity the spacetime continuum thought it had in this dimension. After that, things are rounded out by "Dub Speech", a choice selection that restores the earthly familiarity of human language, but doesn’t make matters any softer in the process. It's certainly the most "dub" thing on here, with a roots bassline that jostles around with enough breathing room for the veritable metropolis of little sounds on top to skank about and run from the processed police siren samples, making for a vibin' closer rich with details that underscore the whole experience.
Ultimately, every track here is a show-stopping delight worthy of infinite spinbacks, and on the whole,
Soundsystem Addict is an absolutely massive flex on the 140 scene. The thing that differentiates Quasar's sound from approximately anyone else making deep dubstep in 2019 is how its density seems to bring the night life right to your ears, instead of the other way around. A lot of great bass music is built for the intimate club spaces that pepper the underground, but to make it impactful enough to carry the weight of an entire subculture, replete with the fuzzy memories of late night outtings and slack-knee'd dancing, right to the doorstep of your brain is another ambition entirely. It takes a rare combination of fresh ingredients, mad science, and a bird's eye view of soundsystem culture to pull it off, and Quasar hit the nail on the head with this one. Whether it's heard on the streets, at home, or in the club,
Soundsystem Addict is a perfectly executed and highly detailed EP that dubstep veterans craving 140 with staying power and newcomers looking to get their socks blown off alike will surely find enchanting for years to come.
