Correction (April 10, 2012) : This article incorrectly reports the name of the company that created the Wall of Bass™. The correct name is AURA System. Also, Gritsy did not create or own Wall of Bass™; it was AURA System that hand-engineered and designed the Wall of Bass™. Gritsy used the Wall of Bass at its parties.
Also check out our slideshow of the dubstep DJ collective Gritsy.
Suraj Kurian is tired. But he's finished. And he's happy.
He just spent the last hour with a man who calls himself John The 3rd hauling cinder blocks around Engine Room, a medium-sized venue in downtown Houston.
It's one of a handful of unique precautions they know they have to employ for the dubstep party they're throwing later in the evening. Because at a good dubstep show, the music will make the room pulsate. But at a great one, it'll wobble it the fuck apart completely.
And the group Kurian and The 3rd are a part of — Gritsy — a DIY promotion company composed of 11 DJs, an emcee, a vocalist, a photographer or two, a graphic designer and a someone in charge of social media and production, has earned a reputation nationally for throwing great ones.
Dubstep is a branch of electronic dance music. Despite being actively championed on indie-cool music sites on the Internet since 2005, and despite having been the subject of trend pieces in The New York Times, Spin, Rolling Stone and more, it's still a relatively new, mostly unknown music to mainstream America. But the nation's pop stars have noticed; Jay-Z and Kanye, Britney Spears, Usher and handfuls of other superstars have begun incorporating it into their music the past year or so. It's popped up in Nike's ad campaigns and Mortal Kombat's ad campaigns alike.
Spawned in the dank corners of London nightclubs right at the end of the last century, dubstep was fashioned as a slowed-down amalgam of 2-step garage and drum and bass, genres made (reasonably) popular in Europe in the mid-to-late '90s. It borrowed style and influence heavily from Jamaican dub and other variations of EDM, eventually settling in as dawdling and obliquely sexual. Unlike with other kinds of EDM (fairly or unfairly), the stigma of heavy drug use has never been attached to dubstep.
Over its 13-or-so-year history, though, and particularly since 2005, when it began popping up in different parts of the United States, dubstep has mutated aggressively, due in equal parts to the Internet's acceleration of cultural change and the correlation between the relative youthfulness of dubstep's American fan base and how quickly that fan base is expanding.
What started in London as an organic, hyper-niche genre with a small appeal has evolved into a bombastic, layered wave of digital destruction.
The original and the new strains of dubstep sound totally different (slower and methodical vs. frenetic and spastic). But they're still tied to one another by their most important, most easily identifiable trait: the bass.
Where, say, electronic dance music sprigs such as house or techno move like jittery hummingbirds, fluttering in one place for a few moments before shooting to the next, dubstep's core moves like robo-elephants, purposeful and slow, stomping and plodding along.
A long-standing criticism of EDM (among those who own zero pairs of fuzzy boots, at least) has been that its songs justneverfuckingend; they seem to wander on without direction for weeks. With dubstep, however, there are gargantuan, black hole heavy bass drops and WAH-WAH-WAHs that are built up into moments of climax.
In their most effective fashion, the drops are meant to rattle a listener's spine. Experienced en masse, they toe up against being transcendent, and serve as the primary mechanism responsible for turning dubstep into the most unilaterally consumable party music of this generation.
The Gritsy gang knows this. More than that, though, they understand it.
In 2006, they created the Wall of Bass™ for their parties, a trademarked phrase for their show blueprint. It was hand-engineered and designed by AuraSound after the sound company that Gritsy used to employ killed too many subwoofers. And it is exactly what it sounds like it'd be: a big, big stack of speakers.
There are a few variations of the setup, but the most massive one, the Super Wall of Bass™, is composed of 28 18-inch subwoofers housed in 14 separate speaker cabinets. It requires seven 9K amps to operate.
The structure forms a barrier around the DJ. At its highest point, it reaches about seven feet. An average household consumes 14,000 watts of power a day. A typical Wall of Bass™ setup will eat more than one million watts. It is a destructive maelstrom of thump.
During sound check, after everything had been hooked up to Engine Room's main electrical source (the regular house power wasn't sufficient), the empty room shook with enough force that it worked insulation loose from the exposed ceiling.
