There are records that arrive as collections of songs, and then there are records that arrive carrying the weight of an entire cultural conversation.

For Bassnectar, Music Is The Medicine is undeniably the latter.

Released November 6, 2026 on Amorphous Music, the eight-track EP marks another chapter in Lorin Ashton’s ongoing innovation of a subculture he helped create: bass music. After dozens of listens, I found myself wondering about the meaning behind the title, Music Is The Medicine.

“I think it’s a pretty literal title, no hidden meaning,” Lorin Ashton told us in an extensive interview about the EP. “Music can be such a unifying catalyst for community and human connection. It’s a universal language, and I’m guessing it’s also unique for everyone. For some it can bring light and joy, for others it can be an escape. For me personally, it’s the perfect way to plug in to the wonder of being alive, on a level that defies explanation.  I’ve personally experienced so much healing through music, and it’s like coming full circle after a long journey: I am simply bursting with energy, gratitude, and a driving reflex to create sound that celebrates my love for life.”

For Bassnectar, the answers have never been entirely one-dimensional. Since the beginning, we’ve been treated to an array of descriptors like “Omni Tempo Maximalism”… “Spanning The Spectrum”… ”Freestyle”… ”Noise VS Beauty”…. ”Unlimited Combinations”… ”Impossible & Overwhelming”… ”We Are What We Give”… and so many more. His catalog has always been an exploration of dynamic extremes, juxtaposing the beautiful and the energetic, the meditative and the downright ferocious, the cerebral and the visceral. At its best, Bassnectar music has a peculiar ability to make these polar opposites feel less like a cacophony of opposing forces and more like the perfect blend of different frequencies occupying the same, unified space.

Interestingly, Ashton describes the creative process behind Music Is The Medicine as particularly freestyle, emphasizing an approach rooted less in predetermined outcomes than in a surrender towards following an idea wherever it happens to lead.

“My father, who has always encouraged me to “enjoy music as a Process, rather than a Product,’ was definitely one of the inspirations behind this record,” Ashton explained.

The philosophy apparently became something of a guiding light throughout the Bassnectar project’s development. Particularly, throughout this past summer when he found himself revisiting years of unfinished material and, at the same moment in time, generating entirely new ideas.

“I didn’t want to create music which sounded like a remix, or a genre, or like an electronic song,” he says. “I just wanted to let my imagination run wild, explore the universe of sound, and let the creativity flow naturally. I also did a deep dive into the evolution of electronic music history with respect to George Martin & Abbey Road studio, where the Beatles basically flipped the script on the status quo, and invented not only genre-defying music like ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ and ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ but how creative they got, playing music backwards, incorporating orchestras. When I studied Electronic Music in college, we learned about the birth of sampling back in the 1940’s, and pure synthesis invented in the 1950’s… we got to play with massive modular synths, and cut & splice physical audio tape, and just immerse ourselves in every aspect of sound & vibration. I kind of followed that same yellow brick road this past summer.”

Landing as his 18th career EP, there’s a bit of everything coming out of Bassnectar’s signature sound arsenal—from the usual ragga-style flows juxtaposed with hip-hop elements, to high-octane heaters laced with deep riddim wubs that no producer has quite been able to replicate like Ashton, and softer ethereal moments that completely entrance listeners. But the main feeling it evokes, at least for this listener, is a deep sense of nostalgia: as if I’m hearing samples from every set I’ve ever personally witnessed at some point or another. 

Featuring collaborations with Cocoa Sarai, Jesse Edwards, and Blakkamoore, the EP brings together a cast of vocalists whose contributions help define its identity. From the opening collaboration, “The Medicine,” to the blues-infused “Black Cat” and the sprawling possibilities of “The Viking 808,” the project’s tracklist hints at a creative palette extending beyond the familiar architecture of electronic bass.

And yet, the most compelling conversation surrounding Music Is The Medicine may ultimately have less to do with where Bassnectar goes sonically. More than that, it’s a discussion over what deeper messages and philosophies exist beneath the foundation of Ashton’s 25-year-long artistic project.

We sent over questions for a quick Q&A on the EP, and what we got was a full deep dive into his psyche, his technical and creative flow, the meaning behind the project, and the wildstyle stories behind how the collaborations came together.

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CE: Hey, Lorin. I’ve had tons of questions swirling through my brain as I listened to these new songs, but let’s start off with a simple one: How are you?

BN: I’m feeling good, grateful to be alive, and super excited to share this music. It was so much fun to create, and also a really intense deep dive: days, weeks, and months of total immersion in the music studio, letting my imagination drive while I rode shotgun.

CE: I have to ask about The Layers! When listening to this new EP, I personally feel like I’m hearing four different songs wrapped into one, like I do during your live sets. As a DJ, you have this uncanny ability to match beats with different keys and octaves, which gives them a distinctly complex quality wherein you’re hearing new songs (or teases of other songs) coming and going seamlessly beneath the surface. I hear the same thing in the music you make, so I have to ask: When you are in the studio creating a song, are you already calculating how it can be pulled apart and re-stitched for a live audience?

BN: I know what you mean about layering, how a DJ set can truly be a journey of layers and unique combinations, so the answer is absolutely YES. That’s a key ingredient, whether it’s a DJ set, or producing a song, or especially when producing a body of work, like this EP. Each of the songs in this collection overlap in unique ways. In some cases, there were three totally different ideas that got blended together, in other cases, I was stripping ideas apart and reconstructing them in other combinations.

And yes – especially when the song creation process is super dynamic, you end up with all of these variations and alternate versions. I save many of them into sub folders while I work, so by the time a song is “finished” there are a zillion different loops, alternate intros/drops/outros, etc, and then when playing live, you can just re-combine all the various layers into a brand new customized flow every time.

CE: I really want to know about The Viking 808 – it sounds symbiotic, like it was created both for the audience and from live moments of inspiration you get from the audience?

BN: “The Viking 808” is a perfect example of how meta it can get, a song within a song, within a song… Starting off, I had basically three different songs (absolutely massive projects, each project was like 50-80 minutes long, with 300-400 tracks each, all custom created from scratch, or huge banks of field recordings and basically symphonies of crowd recordings) and they were basically three different vibes of mayhem/pandemonium…like ‘blast off energy’… but then I had this other session, which was a collection of recordings my friends made from FIFA games, during the World Cup. That session was like an orchestra of massive crowds chanting in unison, etc. Then I built this crazy drum kit of crowd noises and percussion, and created a loop of this ultra intense call and response chant. Then at our show in San Jose, I played that loop, and we recorded the audience, capturing so many new insane noises and hypnotic crowd chants. Then I blended everything together into one of the most supernatural sessions I’ve ever worked in, cranking my entire system to the max, it was sonically belligerent.

The version we released on the EP is basically the most basic sequence, but I am definitely gonna release an extended mix of that song, because I kept having to dial it back, and mute entire groups of layers, there was too much sonic depth to fit into one song. Then when Cocoa heard it she got all buck wild (after we finished “The Medicine”) and I already had these killer vocals from a previous dubplate session with Blakkamore, and so ironically, the whole thing continued to get overloaded in this cycle of maximalism. If this sounds like word salad, it’s just because it ain’t easy to put this all into words. But yeah, that cut was particularly deep in terms of layers and energy.

CE: What can you tell us more about the message behind the Music Is The Medicine EP?

BN: Honestly, I didn’t lead with a desire to express a specific message, but conceptually, I guess music is a beautiful form of expression that is unique to everyone. Also,  it was just fun to let myself make art without any goals or preconceptions. If anything, there were many “philosophies” I studied, researched, and day dreamed about while working in the laboratories…

First, I think, was a study of sound as a physical form of energy, known as mechanical energy (vibrations of matter). Meditating on the scientific concept that energy moves in waves (bear in mind I ain’t a scientist, so it wasn’t some grandiose academic study) but basically:

The rate at which those waves move, or how frequently one wave completes a cycle of movement, is the “frequency.” And at different frequencies, we refer to that energy as different names. Between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz, we call that energy “sound.” Below that is “infrasound” and above that is “ultrasound.” So I was getting off the hook nerdy with sound design, using a synth called Serum 2, and that was a huge game changer especially for the song “Sounds Like Stars” which is centered around a Serum 2 patch with an extremely precise percussion pattern (like a shaker) that’s also mapped/synced to the bassline, which defines the entire, complex groove. It felt ridiculously deep, almost wild like a snarling animal, but once all the layers came together, it developed into this pattern of movement which felt undeniably like the chugging of a train.

Then, beyond sound, I learned about music, and it’s origins. In all my life I have never studied music theory; I know almost nothing about it, and that’s been a creative choice for me. It feels more authentic to be lost in the mystery, and that allowed me to be more freestyle in my approach to making music since childhood.

But for ‘Music Is The Medicine’ I went really deep into music theory for the first time in my life (and maybe the last) as a kind of one time visit to another world. As I was working with specific notes within specific scales, I learned alot about the ancient human interaction with vibration, before the development of the concept of ‘absolute pitch’ was invented. There was no “C note”… it was just a vibration of sound at a select frequency – I learned that the standard frequency for for Middle C (C4) is exactly 261.64 Hz under the internationally accepted A4 = 440 Hz concert pitch standard. I had no idea about any of this my entire life. I learned that hundreds of years ago, different sects of monks had basically laws about which notes a monk could sing, and there were like forbidden notes or forbidden scales. It’s all bizarre, and magical, and marvellously supernatural to think about the mathematics of harmonics, and the nature of vibration. I’ll stop here because it’s honestly a neverending nerd-vortex, but if you ever wanna know more about what I learned, just ask 🙂

CE: Tell us about the song “The Undying Light Of Our Grandmothers”?

BN: I feel spellbound by the idea of light as a timeless burst of energy; as an ancient, infinite phenomenon. Because a photon has no mass and travels at the speed of light, according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, it experiences exactly zero proper time. So it seems like, from the “perspective” of a beam of light, it is born and it hits it’s destination at exactly the same instantaneous millisecond, even if it traveled for 13 billion years. To a beam of light emitted by a star 13 billion years ago, time does not exist.

And that concept was instrumental to my creative process: thinking about light as the ultimate encapsulation of unwavering, unyielding energy. As I developed this record, I was thinking about the burning energy of human resilience, and our capacity to endure and to heal, and to press forward even in the darkest of times. So “rage against the dying of the light” is a mantra, for me, that feels less about “rage” and more about “the undying light.”

That final song is dedicated not only to my grandmothers, but honestly to every grandmother, to the concept of our matriarchs, to honoring them. My nonnie’s sister passed away this summer at the age of 99 (she had 21 grandchildren, with many of the family adopting more children; it’s just a huge collection of human beings she brought together in an extended family), and as I was writing that song for her, feeling so connected to her, to her story…. SHE is the reason my parents met so long ago and they recently celebrated their 50th anniversary… so I was just deeply connected to my family, and especially the healing, maternal energy of The Grandmothers.

CE: One of my favorite elements of Bassnectar is the intention behind your music. Of course there’s the sound design, and the emotions which your music touches, but also there’s something else that’s hard to define. That distinction is particularly interesting when considering the origins of “Black Cat,” one of the EP’s most unconventional collaborations. What’s the story behind that song?

BN: Now that I think about it, the creative process for “Black Cat” feels creatively similar to “Prayer Song” – off The Golden Rule EP – because of the unique interactive elements involved with musical collaboration. Several years ago, I was wandering through downtown Santa Cruz with some friends, and we heard music that sounded like Jimi Hendrix or some dirty blues. It ended up being this guy, busking on the street, playing harmonica through a small overdriven amp, and singing through his harmonica. We hit it off instantly, and he was basically traveling around living on the road and busking for fun. We ended up doing a 5-hour recording session in a beautiful graveyard, and it was lo-fi as fuck.

I set up multiple microphones in my car, hit record, and he went wild on the harmonica and other instruments. At one point a black cat walked in front of us and stopped. He just improvised “the black cat crosses my path, he won’t do me no harm” and, like I said, we went on for five hours recording everything in our imagination. Last summer, I started a massive session with all of the files, chopped everything up, organized all the takes, color-coded them, and then started editing and returning, as well as layering with field recordings for ambience. The result was just an utterly hypnotic song, centered on these big blasts of harmonica…. He also sang about “riding the midnight train” and he played all these mesmerizing sounds like a train chugging along the tracks, or “you can hear the whistle blow, and it sounds like this” and then WHAAMMMMMMM.

I knew immediately I wanted to enhance the harmonica and produce the heaviest sounds possible. So I created some drum kits of hobo sounds and it ended up sounding like some dirty blues band’s craziest jam. Again, it wasn’t really about “the end product” though…. It was about The Process; both in terms of my own freestyle creative process exploring my imagination and letting it run wild and free… but also the collaborative process, just following the flow and playing with sound.

CE: Also, I would love to hear more about “Locoqueen – FREAVK featuring Cocoa Sarai.” What did you have in mind for this song? Was it specifically built for your live sets?

BN: There’s a lot to say about that one. Basically, the song “FREAVK” started when I was working with Cocoa Sarai for another song, “The Medicine.” Cocoa and I had just become pals over the summer, and I was just in awe of her. She is such a creative genius!!! And her workflow is so extreme and unique – it took me by complete surprise.

When we got on the phone for the first time, I thought we were just gonna chat for a few minutes, and she stunned me by basically diving into a recording session right away, before she even listened. She hit the “FaceTime Video” thingie (I never use that, usually) and suddenly I’m face to face with this beautiful person, and she has headphones on, and a mic in front of her face, and was like “Let’s go! I’m gonna record right now.” She hadn’t even listened to the song yet!

So I’m like watching her react to the music for the first time, and her style is so free, she prefers to record instantly on her first listen. Then we would just run it back, record again, get new ideas, laugh about it, and record more. On the first pass, it was really adorable, because she didn’t expect the drop, and she was like “DAMN….” and just laughing and making all these crazy hyped up breathing sounds. I didn’t quite know what was going on until later.

Then later, after a lifetime of work together putting the finishing touches on “The Medicine” I just had all of these insane outakes, not only of utterly stunning takes – so many killer lyrics and different vocal ideas – but also when I accidentally compressed the deuce out of some of her outakes, I noticed all these adorable sounds she was making while she was startled or surprised by this or that drop, but also she was laughing to herself and muttering all kinds of crazy shit, and then she kept launching into these rap hooks, and in between her words there were these crazy percussive blasts of breathing and just freestyling and even laughing at herself and getting surprised and then gasping like “EWWWWWWW” and it was captivating. So after much ado, I ended up with these vocal loops that were just… ’funky…’ like it felt like James Brown energy or just like RAW vibes, and so THENNNN…. I went back into time. With future sounds.

Using Serum 2 for the 808s, I basically rinsed out these different 808 bass hits, creating different beat options; some techno, some electro, some shameless breakbeat club vibes. And then I made a bunch of percussive synth patches Serum 2 which are essentially shakers or barking noises, sounding like a drunken chihuahua, or like a hyped up bird, and I kind of nudged them to the left and right of the grid, to create a unique groove. Everything just kept getting more fun, more club, more old-school feeling, but with these brand new sonics that were straight fire to my ears, like pulverizingly fun. That’s probably the main core element of the Locoqueen project – not taking anything too seriously, enjoying the fact that there are no rules to creativity (it started with a game I invented, blending chess together with checkers, where each game descends into wild chaos with multiple queens running wild across the gameboard.) But yah, that Locoqueen song will have a ton of different versions and remixes… that song has legs.

CE: What can you tell us about the next show you just announced for Valentine’s Day? I cannot express how excited I am that you’re coming back to Miami!!!

BN: Yes! It falls on a holiday weekend in 2027, so we’re putting together a 3-night run for a family vacation in Florida. What better place to travel to in February than Miami? I’m so ready for the heat, the vibe, and the vision – celebrating love, friendship, community and music with so many artists I’m excited about.

We are gonna feature a series of Special Guests hosting each night; each one is a collaborator I’ve worked with on Bassnectar music: Azeem, Rye Rye, and Cocoa Sarai.

Friday night is for Azeem, one of my longest-running collaborators (we first started working together when I was making Underground Communication) and he is just a legend from the Bay Area hip hop underground. But he also grew up in Miami. If you haven’t checked out our “Conversation with Azeem” it’s on the website, or YouTube, or somewhere – point is, he is one of my favorite artists. I want to have him rock “Every Song” live with me for sure.

Saturday night, we have another dear friend and long-time collaborator, Rye Rye, and she is bringing this dude Mike Gip, who has deep roots in the Jersey Club sound, and with Rye Rye’s roots in the Baltimore Club scene, it’s gonna be so fire.

Then Sunday Night, we have one of my new BFF’s, Cocoa Sarai herself – an absolutely brilliant, Grammy-winning artist. And she is so versatile – grew up singing gospel, has roots in multiple scenes (recently released a track with Buju Banton) and worked extensively with Dr Dre, Anderson .Paak, Snoop.

Honestly, there’s a lot I wanna share about our plans for that 3-night run, but I’ll leave it at that for now. And of course, I’ll be seeing you there since you have the joy of living in Miami! Sending my love to the Conscious Electronic family worldwide and looking forward to hugs and high-fives on Valentine’s Day!!!

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There you have it. Tickets go on sale Tuesday, November 10th, so grab yours soon! For now, mark your calendars for February 12-14, 2027.

Stream Bassnectar’s full Music Is The Medicine EP below, and stay tuned for more information on his pop-up three-night run at a super secret location in Miami, Florida.

Bassnectar – Music is the Medicine EP