Sub Focus Touches Down at Red Rocks This Week

Nick Douwma believes the truth is out there.

At the end of this week, the 3I/ATLAS comet is scheduled to come closest to the sun, approximately 126 million miles from its orbit. And the British drum-and-bass artist known as Sub Focus is happy to talk about his fascination with outer space and the possibility it harbors extraterrestrial life.

“I think there’s a 100 percent chance that there is,” he says. “But the distances might just be too far to ever discover that in a conclusive way. In a selfish way, I’d love it if we found conclusive proof of extraterrestrial life in my lifetime, but I almost don’t really want them to make close contact because I feel that it would be potentially dangerous for us as a human race. Chances are we’ll be very far away when we make a conclusive discovery like that.”

Some people believe that 3I/ATLAS is some type of alien mothership, but there is no sufficient evidence that it is nothing more than an interstellar object passing through our solar system, according to professionals who study such phenomena.

Back here on Earth, Douwma is preparing to release his fifth full-length, Contact, on November 21 via Casablanca Records, an album heavily inspired by the Voyager Golden Record that NASA sent out into space in 1977. You know, in case Martians wanted to rock out to some Chuck Berry.

“I’ve always been quite fascinated by the Voyager Golden Record. I loved the idea of imagining what an alien version of the golden Voyager disc would be. Like, let’s say we got one sent back to us, what would that look like? Just the idea of, ‘Is there life out there?’” Douwma explains.

“I’m always really excited about sci-fi themes. I grew up with a lot of sci-fi novels, and I love to consume that sort of thing, so it ends up infiltrating a lot of my visual ideas as well,” he continues, adding he recently listened to a podcast featuring a scientist who talked about exoplanets that could potentially contain the “building blocks of life.”

With Sub Focus, he’s pondering such hypotheses with music. “There’s always been a strong sci-fi cyberpunk aesthetic in drum and bass that I’ve been attracted to,” Douwma says. “It has a lot of synergy with how I see drum-and-bass music. It’s very futuristic music.”

With a handful of singles out already, and one with Grimes scheduled to drop on Halloween, Contact is an eclectic offering full of collaborations — John Summit, Firebody DML, Subsonic —  and cross-genre pollination.

“It’s a very up-tempo album. It’s almost totally drum and bass. I’m being [unapologetic] about my roots, like club music and fusing that with a lot of flavors,” Douwma shares. “It’s definitely something I’ve always been about. I get a lot of inspiration from being quite magpie-ish about different genres, like, ‘What if you fuse techno with this?’ I love to get inspired like that, listening to a lot of different electronic music and mashing it together, really. My big thing has been trying to incorporate ideas from techno, house, trance, electro, dance hall, even.”

That transcendental tick is exactly why Sub Focus was tapped to be the first drum-and-bass headliner in Red Rocks history. He lands with collective WORSHIP — Dimension, Culture Shock and 1991 — on Thursday, October 30. There’s also an official after-party at Mission Ballroom.

Douwma considers the appearance a high water mark for him and his peers.

“It’s probably the most special one of its kind in the world. When we started doing tours of the U.S. as WORSHIP a few years ago, our mission was to try to reach new audiences with the style of music we were doing,” he says.

“It’s grown year over year. But the bucket list venue was always Red Rocks. It’s a nice full-circle moment for us to finally get there,” Douwma concludes. “We just want to show off what we think is the best of the genre to people. We want people to fall in love with it the same we have all those years ago.”

Mission accomplished.

Sub Focus, with Dimension, Culture Shock and 1991, 5 p.m. Thursday, October 30, Red Rocks Amphitheatre, 18300 West Alameda Parkway, Morrison. Tickets are $100.