I guess the best way to explain the experience of being at a Bassnectar concert is to describe how difficult it is to continue dancing when there’s a girl you don’t know sitting on your shoulders, using your hair for her only means of balance. It’s tough – not just because of the pain shooting across your scalp every time she leans to one side, but also because of the disorienting nature of the lights and continuous, thumping, driving beat.


But you can’tnot keep dancing, for precisely that reason. The light show is spectacular, especially when it keys on a specific lyric or matches up with a rhythm that might otherwise be lost in the multi-layered soundscape. So you try to stay in the groove, despite your worry that bending both knees at once will end up with both you and your new-found friend tasting the cold hard concrete of the Alliant Center floor.


You’d love to raise an arm and wave with the crowd when the back of the stage lights up like a million little stars to a boisterous remix of the Beatle’s classic “Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds,” but honestly, where is that arm going to go? It’s an unfortunate choice: the head-space of your immediate neighbor or the area between your shoulder-passenger’s legs. Maybe you’ll just let her do the waving.


Successful techno shows require the DJ to create suspense. Here, Bassnectar turned in a mixed performance. Rather than breaking down the beat to build it back up, it occasionally felt as though the tune had softened one step too far. Instead of an anticipatory pause, the audience began to momentarily lose interest in the show. Fortunately, though, the effect was much more noticeable in the early parts of the show, and by the time Bassnectar played his dubstep banger “The 808,” it was a distant memory.


And let’s just get this out of the way: Lorin Ashton – the DJ’s real name – looks like he deals acid from an apartment where the light switches are hooked up to black lights and every single doorway is adorned with those multi-colored curtain-type beads. It’s almost comical, how much it appears that he wandered onto the stage from a VW van which he’d driven straight through to Madison from White Lake, New York in August ’69. He’s looks like a real life version of that dude fromC’est La Mort.


In terms of stage presence, Bassnectar tends to let the subwoofers do the talking, a fact you’re grateful for because your back is starting to hurt a little bit. Beyond the SanFran commune hair-style and some pretty tame attempts to get the assembled masses to wave their arms likethis at the starts of a few songs, Ashton rarely interjects, not bothering to announce his songs and stopping the music just two or three times to thank the crowd.


It’s appropriate and appreciated; people have come for the synthetic bass-driven dance music, not the DJ himself, and he knows it. It’s just bad luck for your back, then, that Ashton breaks that formula toward the end of the show to deliver a brief monologue about political activism and the rallies on Capitol Square.


But the man knows how to close a show. How better to send the crowd into the night than with a bone-rattling remix of the hallucination scene from Disney’s “Dumbo,” complete with inflatable pink flamingos, monkeys and elephants sent bouncing into the fray? Combine that with the amazingly light feeling in your legs thanks to your ex-best friend’s recent disappearance back into the sweaty, elated throngs, and the whole thing feels damn near rapturous. Or that could just be the dehydration.