Jessica Audiffred On Psychology & Bass Music: ‘If They Cry, If They Scream of Joy, If They Sing Out Loud — It’s Up To You’

Electronic music and psychology may technically be two different career paths, but Jessica Audiffred understands as well as anyone that they’re essentially the same job.

The Mexican producer has both a psychology degree and a long list of accomplishments as a bass DJ and producer. She earned the degree years ago after her dad, incredulous that playing clubs and festivals could ever be a lucrative career, insisted she go to college. But music remained her passion, with the work — and her progressively higher-profile gigs, which include her Ultra Music Festival debut this weekend in Miami — providing ample opportunity to observe and affect human behavior.

‘Playing songs in front of thousands and thousands of people is like therapy in a way,” Audiffred tells Billboard over Zoom from her native Mexico City. “You’re dictating a crowd’s mood for the entire set. If they cry, if they scream of joy, if they sing out loud, it’s up to you.”

This kind of behavioral control is especially potent given that Audiffred has long made bass music, one of the most visceral, physical realms of the electronic music spectrum. Her entry into this world was a straight line from her adolescent love of nu-metal to a passion for music by producers including Flux Pavilion, Excision, Doctor P and Caspa and labels like Circus Records, all arbiters of the some of the hardest, wildest sounds in dubstep and electronic music at large. Her explorations of the sound initially happened entirely online, as there was no bass music scene to speak of in Mexico when she started DJing and producing the music more than ten years ago.

“At that time there was no one doing dubstep or bass” she says. “When I started DJing, I think people were like, ‘What is this? Why is she not playing techno? Why is she not playing house?’” But being different also gave her a competitive edge: “It was like being in the spotlight in a way, because there wasn’t a lot of hard music, and especially not a lot of girls playing that type of hard music.”

As her sets expanded out of her living room and into actual clubs, she also created her own label, A Records, in 2015, using it as a platform for her own tough as nails productions and similar work by other artists. When her hero Flux Pavilion mentioned her in a 2016 list of global artists to watch, the nod led to Audiffred releasing music on Flux’s Circus Records, with momentum picking up even more when a friend encouraged her to audition for a gig that would push her further into the international spotlight.

“I was just graduating from my psychology [courses]. I had nothing to lose, so I did the casting and I got the job,” she recalls of becoming the official national DJ for HP Computers and Beats Audio, a gig that opened up her world. “They took me to Miami, they took me to Boston and to all of these gigs. I’d never even really left Mexico.”

The job also gained her the attention of Excision, who invited Audiffred to remix a track of his and play it alongside him at his annual Bass Canyon festival, with the 2019 show marking her third set in the U.S. “I’ll never forget that moment,” she says. “I played it, and he heard it for the very first time and hugged me as the fireworks were going off. It was like, “Oh my god, what the f–k?”

This literal firepower gave her the juice to further expand her footprint in Mexico, where she started her own festival, Mad House, three years ago, creating the local scene she once longed for. “When I was starting I had nothing, just YouTube and my friends in our living rooms,” she says. “I’m really happy to say that after Mad House started, a lot of promoters came to do more bass music in Mexico.”

She says Insomniac Events and its Bassrush brand have been particularly supportive, putting her on their stages and helping her grow a career and business that now includes a pair of managers and representation at WME. Her U.S shows are continually getting bigger, and this Sunday (March 31) Audiffred will perform one of her biggest to date when she plays a b2b with Virginia-born bass producer Alleycvt at Ultra in Miami. In a fitting full circle moment, the pair come onstage after a b2b by Flux Pavilion and Doctor P.

She’s bumped into plenty sexism in her career, particularly in the extremely male-dominated world of bass, where she’s often been wrongly and ridiculously accused of using ghost producers. But as her music affects moods, so too has her success and general presence in the scene been effective in evolving minds. “When people see a girl producing these heavy-ass songs, it’s kind of stuck in their heads that she’s not making it,” she says. “In their brains, it can’t exist. It’s actually cringe that we’re in 2025 and people still think like that, but every year we have more successful females in the industry. I think we’re on a run.”

Audiffred is also evolving her sound. She’s been releasing her debut album, Rave New World, in pieces since last December, and when the full project is out, “I think that’s the last harsh dubstep you’re going to hear from me,” she says. “It’s not saying goodbye, because I’m not moving from bass, but I’m moving to a different type of like sound,” with her upcoming work focused on the adjacent genres of trap and future house. Indeed, most any psychologist would advise that healthy evolution happens with maturity, and so with Audiffred having achieved her initial dreams, she’s now aiming to make her sound a bit more mainstream, so she can start flexing on festival mainstages.

But the reason she “really loved making this album,” she continues, is “because it was an ode to the rave and it’s kind of speaking to the little Jessica sho was just dreaming about playing festivals and becoming a DJ. It’s an album for her — to let her know that we’re good, and that we did it with own vision and style.”

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