Edited by @elizatrnx___

We were nearing the end of Ravenscoon’s biggest headline set yet. As Born I stood in front of a vibrant, red, cosmic visual, the audience of roughly 2,000 people on the floor of The Mission Ballroom swayed gently in front of him as the song began to build. Multi-colored beams of light swung through the masses. The combination of spontaneous spotlighting and collective movement resembled a sea anemone undulating through the invisible force of an underwater current. Another invisible, yet strongly felt force enveloped us all as another wave of deep sub-bass vibrated from the ranks of tremendous speakers in front of the stage. Born I began rapping his incantations for their song “Mind”, the rhymes hypnotically chopping through the rich waves of sound, and the bass seemed to deliver the message of the moment directly into my gut. Something way deeper than just a concert is being cultivated here.

There’s a lot of reasons I love Ravenscoon. In addition to being just a genuinely good human, he’s one of my top favorites because, musically, he does a lot of things very well. One of the qualities I admire most about his soundscape is his ability to generate and weave intensity on two seemingly polar ends of the audio-energetic spectrum. I explained it this way to Mia before the first time she saw him:

“He’s my king for heavy dubstep. His way of mixing the cosmic & ethereal with HUGE, deep, punchy bass takes me to another level. Primal and transcendent at the same [time]. Just phenomenal.”

In that moment in Mission Ballroom, it felt like Born I & Ravenscoon were building a sonic bridge between the primordial and spiritual elements within us, from root to crown. The moment was both astonishing and grounding, a prime example of dissolving into the present moment, which Mia has discussed previously on The Dancer’s Dispatch. For me, the key to this state of wonder was that these songs weren’t just an auditory experience, they were powerfully kinetic—the hairs on my arms can attest to this. At that moment, I thought “What is it about drums that activate us so deeply?”

Across time and tribe, deep drum sounds have summoned our fight to survive and our call to the divine. In the modern rave, this ancient technology re-emerges in the rumbling, powerful, and otherworldly bass music of artists like Ravenscoon, harmonizing our primal roots with our spiritual selves.

🔊 Welcome to the power of high-energy, low-frequency sounds.

To understand why this bridge between body and spirit feels so profound, we have to zoom in from the Ballroom into our biology and look at what bass actually is—a physical force.

Sounds are waves: waves of compressed energy traveling through the air. As the Encyclopedia Britannica put it,

If the prong of a tuning fork vibrates in the air, for example, the layer of air adjacent to the prong undergoes compression when the prong moves so as to squeeze the air molecules together. When the prong springs back in the opposite direction, however, it leaves an area of reduced air pressure. This is rarefaction. A succession of rarefactions and compressions makes up the longitudinal wave motion that emanates from an acoustic source.

The two properties of waves that are important here are energy and frequency:

⚡️ The amount of energy behind a sound determines its amplitude, or how big it is. This affects how loud or quiet we perceive the sound to be, which is measured in decibels (dBs).

🌊 The number of waves per second determines the sound’s frequency, which we perceive as its pitch (low or high). Humans can generally hear sound between 20 and 20,000 Hertz (Hz), with sub-bass sounds barely audible between 20 and 60 Hz, and bass sounds between 60 and 250 Hz.

When we “feel” Ravenscoon’s bass, we are feeling tall, long waves of pressure. Each wave pushes against the body, then releases it. Push, and release. This happens repeatedly, many times per second, but slowly enough for us to perceive the waves. This is why the hairs on your arms stand up: the receptors in your skin sense the changes in pressure the same way that they’d sense a breeze. This sensory experience in Mission Ballroom was intentional, as Ravenscoon brought twenty additional d&b SL subwoofers into Mission Ballroom (which already has sixteen). Juggernauts of power and precision, these subs can play frequencies as low as 30 Hz at amplitudes as loud as 144 dB (most concerts are capped between 110 and 120 dB). Just one of them weighs over 300 lbs.

30 Hz test tone:

Low-frequency sounds also have a substantial impact because they approach the human body’s resonant frequencies, or the natural speed of vibrations of your various body parts. When the body encounters a wave with the same frequency, the two resonate: the body efficiently absorbs the sound’s frequency, and the wave gains energy, increasing its amplitude.

As the picture below shows, many of the body’s resonant frequencies are either so slow that we wouldn’t hear such sounds (i.e., infrasonic), or in the sub-bass and bass range. The chest wall in particular, at 60 Hz, is likely responsive to bass from Ravenscoon and other artists.

Feeling the bass resonate in my chest is a feeling that has enchanted me since my very first rave. My body truly loves it. 808 drum sounds rule the low-frequency range, so it’s also part of why I love trap music. Low frequencies played at high volumes add another layer of depth and fullness to the experience of music. Emma Marshall, PhD researcher on the medicinal effects of music and movement (as well as the cultural legacies and implications therein) shared this insight via Threads:

Your fascia listens to bass. Not your ears, your tissue. Low frequencies vibrate through your whole structure. That’s why the right sound system feels like therapy. You’re not just listening. You’re resonating.

In a later post she extrapolates specifically on sub-bass:

Sub-bass isn’t just felt in the chest, it’s processed by the vagus nerve. The same nerve that governs digestion, heart rate, and emotional regulation. That drop you feel in your stomach? It’s neurological, not just musical.

This is why certain bass music is such a visceral experience: it penetrates past our conscious processing (hearing the music) and directly interfaces with our nervous systems (feeling the music). Further still, the somatic influence of rhythm extends far beyond just sub-bass. Marshall explains this by referring to fascia as our “drum skin”.

Fascia is a continuous web that wraps and connects everything in the body and like a drum skin, it holds tension, vibrates, and responds to pressure and rhythm. It’s also where a lot of somatic memory is stored...

Science has recognized and explored these phenomena with therapeutic modalities like vibroacoustic, music, and dance therapy. While likely the most controversial of the three, the theory behind vibroacoustic therapy is that the combined psychological and physiological experience of low frequencies, between 60 and 600 Hz, stimulate those same pressure receptors mentioned earlier to send signals to our brain that inhibit pain perception. Powerful sub-bass vibrations also showed promise in this early research with inducing parasympathetic states of relaxation by down-regulating heart rate, blood pressure, and metabolic rate.

My moment of captivation during Born I’s performance also stood out to me because of its great contrast and complement to the absolutely savage headbanging we had all just been doing a mere 15 minutes prior. In a short span of time, we shifted from feral headbanging to a form of sacred stillness—each equally profound, each driven by bass. This contrast inspired me to consider how drums have been used the world over to mobilize and unite humans both for warfare and spiritual traditions since the dawn of civilization.

As it turns out, the ancestors ‘been dropping the bass long before Skrillex. My first and most formative experience feeling a big bass wave came from an Odaiko drum. I was maybe twelve or thirteen years old and my dad and I had gone to see the Japanese Yamato drum performers. During an interactive phase of the performance, one of the drummers was showcasing all the different sizes of drums in their repertoire and their respective playing styles. The last drum he brought out, spanning at least 5 feet in diameter, was wheeled to the center of the stage and, when struck with the thick sticks they used, released a soundwave that rippled through the auditorium and my torso. It was so palpable to the audience that everyone let out a collective “woooah”. (And here I am recounting the experience over a decade later!) The taiko drum tradition dates back to 16th century feudal Japan when they were used to deliver live battle commands. The drums are also used (yet play a less prominent role) in Shinto ceremonies to purify sacred spaces and facilitate conference between humans, spirits, and ancestors.

Here in the great plains of North America, drums were widely used by Native American tribes in spiritual ceremonies and to generate unified, entranced states of courage before warfare. The Sun Dance is a spiritual tradition most famously practiced by the Lakota tribe, but also shared by populations covering the geographical area that is now called Colorado: such as the Cheyenne and Arapahoe. The Dance consists of multiple days of strict fasting and dancing to songs played on powwow drums to allow participants to tap into ancestral wisdom, experience visions, and connect with the Great Spirit. The Cheyenne had specific war dance songs that were played on large double-sided floor drums. With both music and spiritual/religious practice being cultural universals, it’s no surprise that we can also see this ritualistic dipole present all over the world—especially Africa. The Ashaniti (Ghana), the Zulu (South Africa), the Dagara (Burkina Faso), and the Yoruba (Nigeria) all share similar use patterns. Beyond Africa, we see examples from the Mongols, the Aztecs, the Celts, all the way to the Maori in New Zealand.

Share

What all these groups of humans across time, culture, and location realized is the powerful mind-body-spirit experience of neural entrainment, a phenomenon where our brainwaves sync with predictable musical rhythms. This was observed by scientist Sylvie Nozaraden and others in a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2012. Nozaradan co-authored a 2018 paper published in the National Academy of Sciences that found that entrainment is enhanced by low-frequency sounds. Other research has suggested that multiple factors of our vital physiology such as heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration are also entrained by music. The formulaic structure of electronic music, and the dramatic rhythmic inflections in dubstep specifically, innovates upon this by providing a clear sonic roadmap for our nervous systems to process provocative emotions. The distinct phrases of music take us through a cycle of tension (build), peak (high-tempo build), release (drop), and integration (breakdown) that mimics the internal process from dysregulation to regulation (@emma.marshall.phd, 3/25/25). So, what happens when multiple humans are all being neurally synced by the same sensational drumbeat?

Well…that’s when we really get into the sauce—the magic.

I hypothesize that this shared experience of full-bodied entrainment to rhythm is the foundation of bass music’s unifying, transcendent, and deeply emotional power. An article published just last week in the journal Frontiers of Neuroscience suggests that group neural entrainment doesn’t just synchronize aspects of our central nervous system, but also primes our minds for altered states of consciousness. I argue that when our brains begin syncing to rhythm together, that alignment multiplies. Mia calls it “collective embodiment”, a state where the distinction between ourselves and others begins to dissolve, and their movement is perceived as an extension of our own.

In the words of Free Your Mind: when I dip, you dip, we dip.

Ravenscoon’s Mission Ballroom set inspired this article specifically due to how his music emphasizes and showcases the brilliance of drum-forward dubstep; a brilliance that flawlessly traverses from the primal to spiritual realms. Through the drum, through the bass, and ultimately through the complete musical experience, we all become shimmering reflections of The Infinite Oneness, the interconnectedness of all things. When the drop hits just right and sends chills through your body, it isn’t just moving you, it’s opening a vibrational portal (and I don’t think it's a coincidence that portal visuals were frequent throughout Ravenscoon’s performance). The ancients knew this. They used the drum to cross thresholds between worlds—between life and death. They understood what we are just beginning to remember in Western culture: awakening doesn’t emerge in spite of the body, as if it’s a barrier, but deeply through it, as a gateway. When you and another raver stomp on the down-beat, headbang in sync, or ripple together, you’re not just dancing. You’re striking the rhythm of our primal pulse.

It’s time we said it. With sweat, darkness, rhythm, and song, the rave is the modern ritual for so many of us. The dance floor is our temple. And in this temple, we like the vibes high... and the bass down low.

Stan Njuguna is a contributor to The Dancers’ Dispatch, and you can follow him on Instagram and Threads.

Mia Arends provided the writing on the physics of sound and resonant frequencies. Mia loves writing and dancing—and thinks both are cosmically important. Follow her on Instagram, Threads, or Reddit.

This voiceover features…