David Satori and Evan Fraser met studying World Music Composition at CalArts, which is about as specific an academic pedigree as bass music gets, and they built Dirtwire in 2012 around instruments most electronic acts don't touch — banjo, kamale n'goni, jaw harp, guimbri.
Mark Reveley, the trio's third member, spent time traveling through West Africa and India studying traditional music before joining, and he's the one who plays the whamola, a one-string bass of his own invention — the resulting sound has been called "swamptronica" often enough that the label's basically stuck, a genre built specifically because no existing one covered what these three actually play.