BIG PLANS FOR NYE & THE MOST AMAZING FAN TRIBUTE
If you only watch one thing on the internet today… let it be this. Open Your Eyes is an eight-minute documentary that brings together visuals, music and interviews clips with LorinAshton aka Bassnectar. But you don’t have to be a Bassnectar fan to find this documentary interesting. If you like music at all, there’s a good chance you’ll find some take-aways.
Director and editor Cara Allen created the mini documentary on the music and philosophies of the bass music community as a film project at the Savannah College of Art & Design. The documentary allows you to step inside one of bass music’s most influential minds, as it poses ideas about what’s really going on with this music and the generation banding around it.
“I’ve always loved music, but for me music is a means to an end, and the end is touching the world. So I want to change the world. I don’t know if I’m going do it to the extent that I want to do, but music is the means because it’s kind of a gravitational pull and it creates this magnetic force that calls people around. And when they come around, I can give them my energy and my opinion or whatever. It’s baby steps right now. I’ve got crazier plans than we’ve manifested right now, so we’ll see what happens.”
For those that didn’t already know, Ashton is not your typical party-purveying producer. The idea of partying, in fact, felt counterintuitive to what he wanted to do. He had to actually convince himself that making music and bringing people together through this music could – in fact – impact people enough to make a real difference.
“For a while I thought it was almost fucked up to spend your time partying when other people were suffering. I felt like we had a duty or a responsibility to get to the bottom of it, to use our voices to make a difference, and I still do. But I think that there is also something that I was overlooking which is just the genuine, positive, emotional experience of music on humans. Humans love music.”
Watch the full documentary to hear more about Ashton’s childhood being raised in a commune, why he went from heavy metal to electronic music, the bass music movement and more…