Bass Modulators

Two producers, fifteen years, one name left standing

Bass Modulators began in 2007 as a partnership between two Dutch producers, Rick Buijtenhek and Roland Evers, built on a shared interest in bass and melody. The sound they settled on was euphoric and high-energy rather than hard — Q-dance's own profile calls it crossover production with euphoric melodies, and the pair's slogan, hear the modulation and feel the bass, was about as much manifesto as they ever offered. It travelled. Across fifteen years the project worked Mysteryland, Decibel Outdoor, Defqon.1 in both the Netherlands and Australia, Hardbass, Tomorrowland and Q-BASE, and picked up anthem commissions for Hardbass and for FreaQshow 2013. 'I Want Your Love' reached number one on Hardstyle.com; 'NRGizer' and 'Dragonblood', the Defqon.1 2016 anthem, did much of the rest of the work of making the name legible on a festival poster.

That arrangement ended on 28 October 2022, when Hardstyle.com reported the split: after fifteen years Evers had concluded his ambitions lay elsewhere, and the two agreed to separate rather than continue half-committed. Buijtenhek kept the name. The arithmetic of that is worth stating plainly — a producer who had spent his entire working life as one half of a two-person studio had to become a one-person studio, a one-person live act and a one-person brand, with the brand itself unchanged.

Back to the label where it started

In 2023 the project returned to Scantraxx, which Buijtenhek has described as where it all started, with a stated intention of refreshing the sound rather than reprising it. The label's own artist page puts the catalogue at over a hundred releases spanning 2011 to 2026, and the official site claims more than 150 tracks in total and close to half a million monthly Spotify listeners. The first single of the return was 'Bass Squad'.

The titles that recur when the catalogue is summarised are 'Oxygen', 'Chemical', 'Imagine', 'Dance To The Rhythm', 'Coming Home', 'Music Is My Life' and 'Fire In The Sky' — melodic hardstyle built around a lead line rather than a kick, which is why the solo-era positioning line, the architect of euphoria, reads less as a slogan than as an accurate genre tag.

The last two years have been the busiest stretch of the solo period. 'Who I Am', a collaboration with Demi Kanon, landed in 2025, followed by 'Final Call' with vocalist Diandra Faye in November 2025 and a 2025 remix of 'Oxygen' by the American trio KAMI. In October 2025 came the compilation 'Bass Modulators Presents: REWIND', collecting the classics material that had become the backbone of that year's live work. On 16 January 2026 he reunited with Demi Kanon for 'Back 2 Euphoria', a 155 BPM record on Scantraxx named after the event the two had staged together the previous October. 'Another World', with DÂVINØ, followed in 2026.

One producer, several acts

Rather than consolidating after the split, Buijtenhek fragmented deliberately. The booking sheet at Platinum Agency in Amsterdam now lists Bass Modulators alongside four other configurations, each with its own remit.

Bass X Machina arrived in 2023 as a dedicated live act for the harder end of the spectrum. In a Scantraxx interview he described it as a science-fiction concept — a time traveller returning to warn humanity about technology and artificial intelligence, with the music mapping different possible futures. Musically it runs from 155 to 200 BPM, blending hardstyle with hard trance and what he calls futuristic sound design; the name came from an older track, 'Bass Ex Machina'. The shows carry visuals and costuming built around the narrative, and he premiered original Bass X Machina material and re-edits of existing tracks at Defqon.

Rewind is the opposite direction: a classics-only act assembled from the edits and mashups accumulated over a career, pitched as a journey back through the genre. It is the format that has been documented most thoroughly. He played it on the Magenta stage on the Sunday of Defqon.1 2025, and again as REWIND – Hardstyle Classics at Decibel Outdoor on 16 August 2025, both sets subsequently published as recordings.

The remaining two are collaborative. NCBM, the long-running project with Noisecontrollers, returned to the stage at XXlerator – Hardstyle Classics on 19 October 2024 at Park Lingezegen in Elst, a half-hour slot from 18:45 in the Mainstream Classics tent; it is now bookable as NCBM 20 × 20. Bass Shock is a touring special with Aftershock.

Code red, and a show played to an empty field

The defining event of 2026 was one that did not happen. Defqon.1 was scheduled for 25 to 28 June at Biddinghuizen, with Bass Modulators on the line-up. The festival was cancelled when the Netherlands issued its first ever KNMI code-red heat warning — an unprecedented reason to lose a hardstyle weekend, and one no amount of contingency planning covers.

Q-dance's response was to film a twenty-six-minute Endshow on the empty Holy Grounds and release it in early July 2026: orchestral arrangements over hardstyle tracks, full pyrotechnics and a fireworks finale, performed to nobody. Its soundtrack included an unreleased Bass Modulators composition, 'Sacred Flame', alongside new material from JDX and D-Block & S-te-Fan — meaning the most prominent Bass Modulators premiere of the year reached its audience as a video rather than from a stage. Defqon.1 has confirmed a return to the Holy Grounds for 24 to 27 June 2027.

Where things stand, autumn 2026

The current diary is festival-shaped rather than tour-shaped. The official site lists ADE 2026 in Amsterdam on 24 October, the Titan Xyphos Complex in France on 10 November and Creamfields Chile in Santiago on 14 November — three continents' worth of one-off bookings inside three weeks, consistent with a claimed forty-plus countries played.

Alongside the bookings, the YouTube channel has shifted towards craft: production tutorials, a remix of Aftershock, and retrospective compilations of the older catalogue. For a producer whose partner left and whose anthem premiered in an empty field, teaching the method is a reasonable second revenue line.

The obvious marker ahead is 2027, twenty years since the project started, which the agency is already selling against. On present evidence the anniversary will be marked by whichever of the five acts the promoter picks, which is the point of having built five.