We’ve been featuring the music of Boston-based electronic artist and producer BASSEAH.
In this interview spotlight, we chat with the maestro about influences, the music industry, his newest project and more.
Full Q&A along with links and a stream of his Mineral Rave EP can be found below. Be sure to show your support by grabbing your copy from Bandcamp.
-Find our previous BASSEAH features here and here.
Let’s start off with the basics. Tell our readers where you’re from and what style of music you create…in your own words, not necessarily by traditional genre categories.
I’m based out of Boston, USA, but originally I was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey, up to age eighteen. What would categorize most of my music together is sound design, which I try to do as interestingly as possible. I create rich soundscapes which are sometimes accurately describable as ‘hypnotic’, or at least alluring, to keep the increasingly ADHD minds of our generation hooked for enough seconds before the next cool change happens. There’s a clear influence of the less repetitive, non-electronic genres on my music that gives it some direction, and narrative, by form. Storytelling through wordless music is becoming a lost art on the mainstream and I’m not ready to let go of that concept. By ‘traditional’ genre categories I suppose my work can be tagged under electronica, IDM(a term I’m not a fan of), Downtempo, electro house(some of it), and ambient/psybient(some of it). There’s bits of glitch aesthetics, trap/future bass (in drums), and dubstep (in wobbles, rhythms and bass sounds) that comes natural to me.
What does your creative process look like? Do you create the audio before the visual? Vice-versa? Or does it all manifest simultaneously?
I create only the audio, and then ’DJ’(VJ is the term, but it’s not a common one yet I think) the visual art of great visual artists who happen to be my buddies who also make the artworks of my releases. The visuals are independent but I’ve made music/sound to many of the short psychedelic art videos that I use for the shows. When I score music to a video, it’s very specifically custom-made music tailored to the needs and wants of the video. When I live-mix the visuals to the music, I try to match it in a more general sense. During a buildup I try to generate tension in the visuals through the filters and effects I had set, and I sync the drop with a big change in visuals, but that’s as intricate as it gets, for more detail I would need a separate visual person to perform with me, which is in the realm of possibilities in the future.
Who or what influences your creativity and what pushes you to keep going?
What influences me are the music-filled years of my life to date. I was raised to be a classical musician until I went to the contemporary Berklee College of Music, where I met and was surrounded by a hundred types of music and several hundred musicians who make that music. I had to take many jazz-related classes, both in theory and as a pianist, and also participated in a bunch of both classical and film/video-game-like media music orchestras and ensembles as a violinist, and I think every part of that journey added something into my creative world, willingly or not. Influence is inevitable, and the faucet of creativity does not stop when I’m not making music. Music is theoretically endless and what keeps me going is that I don’t believe I can run out of the creative juice at this point after all that. There’s an audience for every type of music and I feel responsible to put out what’s going on in me, both for them and because I’m already so far on this road with so much I can do that’s available to me. If you had put in two decades of work to be able to defy gravity and fly anytime you wanted, would you not be flying it most of the time? Same principle, if that makes any sense.
What’s one of the biggest challenges you face as an indie musician in a digital world?
The oligarchy of the music industry, to be honest. The music you hear on the radio isn’t there because people love it, it’s because it’s playing all the time because millions of dollars were laid down to promote it 24/7 and because nobody Minds it, and over time they get familiarized with it until the next big song that’s marketed by incredible amounts of money and aggressively pushed on people who don’t feel like looking for something that they really like arrives. And I’m not blaming the people, I had not looked into the world of electronic music with the hope of finding something I would love until I was twenty because I had not liked what I had heard and the stuff I like now was not on any mainstream outlet that you can accidentally come across. But the industry is dominated by a few labels and artists of extreme budgets, and the rest of us have to cut through the noise by finding our relevant press and our crowd through many challenges. Most of the music-related press(just like Most unrelated industries also, I’m looking at you Hollywood, with your endless spin-offs and sequels and the same old stories) wants to avoid risk and push what’s already selling, so no wonder most non-mainstream musicians have to work day jobs for decades and make endless sacrifices. There’s too much supply of music coming from too many people with different motivations, so much of it sounding too close to what’s already out there, not to be cynical or anything.
How is your newest release different than previous ones? Were you trying to accomplish anything specific with this one?
I am aware that it is very different but it’s not a permanent change of direction. It has more of the trap/future bass and prog metal vibes than EDM or psychedelic stuff in it. It’s totally not appropriate for any club, it could maybe go in a sci-fi movie or something. Most others have some pulsing sense of flow, but I had almost no emphasis of a dancy groove on this, it came more from the dramatic, cinematic, media composer side of me where I felt like showing off some cool dark techy sound design and tell a story through that alone. I was (and am) low-key hoping it would get licensed for a futuristic movie or a commercial etc. and I will probably make a few more like that one in the future. It’s self-mastered which I probably shouldn’t have done honestly, I might release a remastered version in the future along with a couple other tracks.
Where can we connect with you online and discover more of your music?
Under the name BASSEAH, one can always follow me on my Soundcloud, or for the avid music finder and listener I’m on Bandcamp too, which has a tighter artist-audience connection and probably is my favorite platform. I follow many artists that I Really like on Bandcamp because it’s where I discovered some of their works that are found literally nowhere else.
Also I recently set up my website www.basseah.com which is ever-evolving with updates, so putting your e-mail on the list thing there would be the best way to connect. I’ll directly reach out through that once and then, possibly do house shows and stuff in your area or even at a listener’s place etc. I have no idea what will come out of that whole thing, time will show, I’m excited. It’s new and lonely in there right now and I’m not writing e-mails to four people, so get in there, haha.
I also try to keep all my social media regularly updated with cool stuff (youtube, instagram, twitter, facebook page, Spotify) and make time to broadcast myself producing things live on Twitch. On all of the platforms I’m under the name basseah to be an easy find for anyone interested. As an indie artist, I really cannot overstate how much I appreciate those who choose to connect with me.
Anything else before we sign off?
Well, my sincere thanks to you for the interview and the beautiful write-ups on my music from earlier, you’re a real trooper for going after the underground scene against the grain, we need more of that. I hope to see more of Middle Tennessee Music and its readers in my life, stay well and keep in touch!
