There was a brief period in 2010 when I was obsessed with On the Bright Side, the album by Finnish electronic producer Sasu Ripatti (Luomo, Vladislav Delay, Uusitalo) working in his Sistol guise. It's a thick, purple, crunchy record where all of the most interesting stuff is happening in the lowest octave. The structure had nothing to do with dubstep, but On the Bright Side seemed bent on transmitting emotional information by scrunching up the bass like a fist and hitting you where you live.

I listened to the Sistol record only on headphones. It's the kind of album you need to get physically close to in order to understand-- a few more inches of air between me and the music garbled the transmission. I only listened to it loud. The headphones I had at the time sat on my ears in such a way that they were also in contact with the arms of my eyeglasses. When I would crank Sistol, the vibrations of the headphone pads would in turn vibrate my glasses-- on the deepest bass hits, my lenses would actually quiver in time, and I felt like I was living inside an earthquake. And I could feel the rumble in my cheekbones, a tiny sound massage not unlike what happens when you really lock into an "Om" at the end of a yoga session. The track I had on repeat, appropriately enough, was called "(Permission to) Avalanche". I enjoyed letting this sound bury me, marveling at how the physics of the headphone driver/ear pad/glasses arm interface transformed three of my senses.

* * *

When Soundmurderer's jungle mix/mash-up Wired for Sound came out on Kid606's Violent Turd imprint in 2003, it celebrated a sound that had gone away. At that time, jungle was in the past; it had its mainstream moment and had since become watered down, and beatmakers had moved elsewhere, many to the world of two-step and the sound that was turning into dubstep. But Wired for Sound was a surprising reminder of how great this stuff could be. The opening few minutes, when it moves from the Mad Cobra's "R.I.P." and the skittering drums start and the the bass overwhelms everything, is one of the more exciting album openings I know.

I wasn't really there for Jungle-- when it was happening, my interests were elsewhere. But when the style hit its peak in the mid-90s, I sometimes found myself walking into a club or party late at night, and that bass was there to greet me. And while those low tones can be comforting, there was something evil about this sound, something I associate with a period of hedonism and bad drugs and anxiety (with some good times occasionally finding their way into the mix). And hearing the enormous, earth-moving swells on Wired for Sound, I immediately get a tinge in my stomach, some reminder of a distant evening where I was ping-ponging between the joy of exploration, an encroaching sense of dread, and, ultimately, a feeling of emptiness. That's where I was then, and that's what this music brings back. All of these feeling are carried to me through the bass, so strong it's uncanny, like how the smell of a certain shampoo can instantly bring to mind a face you'd completely forgotten.

* * *

I've known for a while about the runaway popularity of the Beats by Dr. Dre line of headphones, but I rarely saw them until I recently moved to Brooklyn. They're everywhere; it seems there's at least one person wearing them in every subway car I've been on.

Some audiophiles criticize Beats by Dr. Dre, saying that they aren't "accurate" and are designed to boost bass in a way that reinforces the worst qualities of post-loudness-wars pop radio. Jimmy Iovine, Dre's partner in the line, is unapologetic, recently telling The New York Times, "The way we hear music is almost the opposite of the way these sound companies hear music."

"The way we hear music." It's personal, right?

"Accuracy" in music reproduction is a slippery concept. Traditionally, the most audiophile of audiophiles tend to be fans of classical music, and the yardstick for "accuracy" for them is the live performance. The more a record played on a good stereo sounds like a violinist is standing in the room, the better the system. But recording technology changed that. With the advent of overdubbing, tape-splicing, and processing, the idea of trying to reproduce a live performance fell by the wayside.

There's a quote I love from Bob Dylan from Written in My Soul, a book by Bill Flanagan containing interviews with songwriters:

"See, when I started to record they just turned the microphones on and you recorded. That was the way they did it back in the sixties. Whatever you got on one side of the glass was what came in on the controls on the other side of the glass. It was never any problem. What you did out front was what you got on the tape. And it always happened that way. Whether you played by yourself or played with a band didn't really matter-- there'd be leakage and that stuff, but you were pretty much guaranteed that whatever you did on that side of the glass was going to be perceived in the same kind of way. [...] So what happened to me was, I kept working that way through the seventies. I didn't realize things had changed! (Laughs.) I really didn't. I don't think I knew you could do an overdub until 1978."

"Whatever you got on one side of the glass was what came in on the controls on the other side of the glass." Such a foreign concept. And maybe, like so many things Dylan has said in interviews, it's not true. But he's saying his best records, and his best-sounding records, came when he just played music in a room and someone pushed the "record" button.

Last year I was out for a day and lent the headphones I keep at work to a Pitchfork writer. His had broken. They're Sennheisers, nothing too fancy, but I bought them because Amazon reviews described them as "accurate" and they were said to be useful for studio monitoring. Some Amazon reviews were critical that they lacked bass, but from reading I determined that these mostly came from people who were less interested in "accuracy" than an overwhelming sonic experience. When I returned to the office the next day and asked the writer how the headphones worked out for him, he said they sounded good but didn't have enough bottom end. He wasn't hearing the music his way.

Beats by Dr. Dre are popular because they don't reproduce music as much as they transform it. They are the right headphones for the current era, because their design "customizes" the sound for the listener who wants bass. Music is never finished; we can chop and screw, add bass, slow it down 100x, mash it up with something else. And people will buy headphones that finish the music in the way they like.

* * *

This past week a funny jpeg made the rounds. It was a screenshot of an old Facebook post from the wildly popular dubstep producer Skrillex. He linked to a YouTube of Aphex Twin's "Flim" and called it his "favorite song of all time." Below the post, there are responses from his fans that say, "I was hoping for a drop," and, "that track is waaaaay too light to be my face [sic] song." The responses were edited down from hundreds of comments, many of which had Skrillex fans mirroring his praise of the tune. But the reason why it's funny, and why it's been passed around so much, is clear: These bass fiends have no ear for electronic music genius. They just want that drop.

For me, a fun thing about this image was seeing Skrillex's initial post about his favorite song of all time and thinking, "Hey, it's mine, too." I wrote a column here once about what I consider perfect songs, and one of them was "Flim". I've played it regularly for years and always marvel at how perfectly and carefully it's constructed, not a single snare hit or cymbal brush wasted. It has that brilliantly simple Satie-like piano melody, the kind designed to turn your insides into mush, which is something Richard D. James had already mastered completely by "Xtal", the first song on his first album. But the most interesting stuff in "Flim" is happening elsewhere.

I've written about my admiration of the track's drum programming, how each little pause, hesitation, and stutter is so perfectly placed, and how the drums plant ideas in my head about innocence, awkwardness, burgeoning confidence, and growth. I'm projecting pretty heavily there, but Aphex Twin makes the drums feel, and he knows exactly what to do with the bass that goes with it. There is bass in "Flim", and its role in the track is key, even if it never overwhelms the space; it supports the drums and engages in a dialog with them, but the approach is subtle and precise and intimate, a whispered conversation instead of a shout across the rooftops.

Someone on YouTube has slowed down "Flim". At least one person created a dubstep remix of the song in response to the Skrillex Facebook post, but it's since been removed. More of these will follow. And some people will even like the drop version better. Their ears may work differently from mine, but they are not wrong. Meanwhile, I put on my "accurate" headphones and turn up "Flim" as loud as I can bear, and I picture myself sitting across from Richard James in his bedroom as he works over this material on his computer. It's an illusion, of course, but I like to imagine that I'm hearing what James was hearing right at that moment, that the glass between us is completely transparent. And maybe that's what Skrillex hears, too, even if some of his fans couldn't.