The FM8 Accident That Rewired American Bass Music

Sonny Moore walked into Noisia's studio in May 2010 with no voice, no label, and no band. Three years earlier, the post-hardcore band From First to Last had been his entire life — until the screamo style tore his vocal cords apart badly enough to require multiple corrective surgeries, and he had to walk away from the microphone for good. The solo career he tried to build afterward stalled. The debut album he planned, titled Bells, never came out. He was sleeping on his friend 12th Planet's couch, technically homeless, building the first Skrillex EP on a laptop in that borrowed space. By the time he landed in Groningen to spend time with the Dutch drum-and-bass trio Noisia, he was running on nothing but the stubbornness of someone who had already lost everything once and decided to keep moving anyway. What happened next was an accident. Noisia member Nik showed Moore a Native Instruments synthesizer called the FM8. Moore started playing with it, not writing, just testing — and what came out of that session became a file he saved as "FM8 Test." He finished the first draft after flying back home. That test would become "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites."

The song has a structure so simple it sounds like a dare. It opens with a pitched-up, serpentine melody and fragmented vocal samples — the kind of delicate, almost whimsical intro that makes you lower your guard completely. Then, at the forty-second mark, a sampled scream of "YES OH MY GOD" (lifted from a video of a teenager rapidly stacking plastic cups) detonates the whole thing, and the bass drops in like something falling from orbit. The contrast is the point. Moore had spent years in a band that communicated through volume and distortion, and he understood intuitively how to weaponize a setup. The FM8's capacity to generate those frequencies — frequencies that sit in the body before they register in the brain — gave him a new instrument for the same emotional gesture he'd been making since he was sixteen. The title itself was borrowed from David Bowie's 1980 LP Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), a record about transformation and dislocation, which is maybe the most honest thing about the whole project. The vocal samples on the track are recited backwards, audible but unreadable, which means the song's human element is always present but never quite graspable — a feeling Moore knew well from the years after From First to Last, when he was making music that nobody could figure out how to categorize.

The full EP came together in roughly two weeks. Moore recorded it at his apartment on a laptop — no studio, no session musicians, no production team. The EP's guest appearances, Pennybirdrabbit on "Kill Everybody," Foreign Beggars on "Scatta," and Bare Noize on "Ruffneck Bass," were woven into a set of tracks that Dazed would later describe as marking "the birth of brostep outright." But the origin of the title track was always that FM8 test, that accidental afternoon in Noisia's vocal booth, a man with a ruined voice discovering what he could do when he stopped trying to sing. Deadmau5 heard the first EP, My Name Is Skrillex, and signed Moore to his nascent mau5trap label. Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites dropped on October 22, 2010, co-released through mau5trap and Atlantic's electronic subsidiary Big Beat Records, whose CEO Craig Kallman had already heard Moore play the tracks off a laptop and called him "a must-sign." The EP peaked at number 49 on the Billboard 200 — slowly, over fifteen months — which tells you something about how it actually spread. Not radio, not a single push. The dancefloor first, then everywhere else.

The 54th Grammy Awards in February 2012 gave the EP Best Dance/Electronica Album and the title track Best Dance Recording, the first time the Recording Academy had recognized dubstep in any form. Skrillex accepted the award and said, "Everyone in the EDM community, man, this means a lot to us." The "us" was doing real work in that sentence. He was accepting on behalf of a generation of producers who had built their entire practice on laptops and DAWs, who had no studio pedigree and no industry infrastructure behind them, who had been told by dance music veterans that what they were making was crass and simple. By 2017, Vice would rank "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" as the best EDM song of all time. In 2019, Billboard placed it ninth among the greatest dance songs of the decade. The producers Moore directly inspired — RL Grime, Porter Robinson, Baauer — were already headlining the same festival mainstages that the song had helped build.

What the song actually did, in physical terms, was teach a generation of producers that the drop could be an event rather than a resolution. The build-and-release structure existed before Skrillex, but the FM8's mid-range bass design — those wobbles that sound like alien machinery, that sit below the chest and above the floor — gave the release a new quality of impact. It turned the forty-second mark into a unit of time that every producer in the scene was suddenly measuring against. The song is 140 BPM in B-flat major, written by a twenty-two-year-old with a broken voice and a borrowed synthesizer in someone else's vocal booth, finished on a laptop in an apartment. The displacement that produced it is audible in the music — that contrast between the delicate opening and the drop that follows is the sound of someone who had already survived losing his instrument once, and learned to make the loss itself into a weapon.