counterpart: Adelaide’s Dubstep Revival Architect

Chris — known to Adelaide’s bass music community as counterpart — is the self-taught DJ and event organiser who introduced dubstep to South Australian dancefloors, co-founded Australia’s first dedicated dubstep weekly, and has spent the better part of two decades building, losing, and rebuilding Adelaide’s underground bass scene from the ground up.

His story begins in 1996 — on a crappy pair of belt-driven turntables and a Behringer mixer, learning by ear from a Sony Walkman loaded with recordings of his peers. Techno captured him first, pulling him through the mid-nineties and into the 2000s. Then, in 2007, he found dubstep. By his own account it was the year everything changed — a sound unlike anything he’d encountered, and one he was certain others needed to hear. The bedroom era was over.

Hitting the ground running, counterpart quickly linked up with like-minded Adelaide bass enthusiasts and got to work. 2008 saw him co-found Pleasure — Australia’s first dubstep weekly — an intimate recurring event that grew into a genuine institution, drawing in the faces who would become stalwarts of the local scene. Over the years that followed he hosted and co-hosted countless international and all-local shows, earning a reputation as the man who brought the brostep sound to Adelaide ears — and infamy for one recurring complaint: it was never loud enough. By 2012, with the music shifting in directions he couldn’t get behind and a new chapter of parenthood demanding his attention, he stepped back.

The hiatus was short-lived in the grand scheme. In 2021, counterpart re-emerged into a scene that had thinned considerably since his departure. Unsatisfied with Adelaide’s diminished appetite for deep wubs and gnarly basslines, he reignited the same fire that had driven him fifteen years earlier — this time under the banner of Adelaide Dubstep Revival. Together with a tight crew of collaborators, he set about rebuilding the community, culminating in the tOASt free park parties: open-air gatherings that have since earned their own place in Adelaide bass music lore.

Today, counterpart continues to push the Adelaide dubstep cause through a growing catalogue of mixes available via SoundCloud and for download at counterpart.rocks, including the recent March 2026 set, Blends 1, and the live recording Cows with Gun Fingers. He maintains an active presence across Facebook and TikTok, and remains the central organising force behind Adelaide’s dubstep revival. In a city that has never made it easy for bass music to thrive, counterpart keeps showing up.