Talking about genres is risky business. Anybody can come up with a label for their music, but few make that classification stick and have other artists fall in line with the concept. Even fewer get away with it without getting dismissed as fad chasers. But for everyone calling themselves jazz or blues or metal, there’s a million other calling their stuff post-kraut-emo-basscore or whatever, trying to make a dent on the highly competitive world of music we live in these days.
So what’s the right attitude? Should an artist reject all labels, adopt the hot sound with its accompanying title, or come up with their own classification? Everyone will have a different answer, but I think Mexico City’s Billion Dollars has a good solution: come up with a genre classification, and then publicly proclaim “fuck genres.”
In this case, Billion Dollars plays something he has been calling satan bass which, not coincidentally, is half the title of his new EP. But instead of detailing a sound and proposing what’s going to blow up on DJ mixes and dancefloors in the coming months, he instead sculpts something that sounds exciting to him.
Satan Bass, Much Money EP has a sound that fuses bass with other genres, from trap and digital urban Latino, to drill n’ bass, and even some mild reminiscence of gabber. The EP is all triplet drum rhythms, half tempo 16th note hi-hats, and frantic programing and sample-dropping. It’s dark, hard, busy, and layered, but not without charm, and certainly with tons of booty-shaking appeal.
Sebastián Carrillo is also seizing the moment to talk about the current social and political climate in Mexico, even going as far as naming one of the tracks “Faltan 43” which addresses the disappearance of students from Ayotzinapa and its subsequent protests. In turn, Satan Bass has been gathering a lot of attention from places like Mad Decent, which posted about this must-hear release.
Even if satan bass doesn’t get picked up (something we think BD wouldn’t be very happy about, if it did), we can say that things are looking up for the producer.
Check the out EP, courtesy of Latino Resiste.