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Music > Interview
Play On Worlds
[porter_rob] Porter Robinson
Aug 19th 2014 | Cam Findlay
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Porter Robinson might be regarded as a world-tier house DJ, but his new
direction is anything but crowd-pleasing. Cam Findlay finds out more
Porter Robinson fits easily into that niche of DJ wunderkinds that have sprung
up over the last couple of years. Often prefaced as “that guy who started
producing on pirated software on his mum’s computer at age 12”, Robinson toured
with Skrillex at age 18, and has spent the years since impressing pretty much
everyone with his on-the-ball house sound. Last year, the internationally
in-demand DJ shelved the touring cycle to spend time back home in his parent’s
house in North Carolina. He’s emerged with Worlds, an album that still harbours
skerricks of big-room house but is, in essence, something entirely different,
something fantastical.
“I guess Worlds is really about my nostalgia for video games and fictional
words and humans, all that kind of thing,” Robinson explains. “The homecoming
helped in precipitating that nostalgia. Being at home and being in that same
environment where all these things that inspired me to take these journeys in
my own head was liberating, in a way. It was kinda critical for me, when I
decided to start down the Worlds path, that I wasn’t on tour all the time and
that I was absorbing as much of that nostalgia as I could.”
The result could easily be seen as a clash between Robinson’s childhood and
present selves. Dissonant, cutting synth lines play in and out of big snare
drops, as you’d expect from electronic music designed to be played to
thousands. But inside all that is Robinson’s aforementioned sincerity and a
childlike sense of awe. Robots, 200-year wars and damsels in distress all get
their stories told; 8-bit Zelda and Final Fantasy themes jump out at you,
throwing flashing lights around the memory centres of your brain. It’s not what
anyone could’ve expected from a household DJ name, but it works, and Robinson
is clearly proud of it.
“I think for the most part, I was just following whatever made me feel
something,” Robinson says. “Oftentimes, the things that got me all sentimental
and emotional was the Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time soundtrack. I put a lot
of effort into trying to examine what it was about these things that I liked
and loved, and what appealed to me – that was kind of it. I was just following
compulsively this line of curiosity, but really just things I liked.
“It’s funny, because I think the goal of the album originally was to really
invoke this sense of fiction in people. My whole aim was to build these
fictional worlds that, well obviously, don’t exist. I’ve heard people reference
the movie Her, which is a movie about being in love with a robot girl, and
people have said Sad Machine [Worlds’ first single] is thematically similar.
But that’s a movie I’ve never seen. And then other people have been saying that
it reminds them of Portal 2, which is a game that has a similar kind of idea. I
have played Portal, the original one, but there’s so many of these
coincidences. Like, the opening vocal in that song is ‘Is anyone there?’ That’s
apparently in Portal 2, but I’ve never played Portal 2. Never, not once, I was
totally unaware of it. And the Final Fantasy references, never played that
either. To me it was so weird to see people relating it to all these different
fictional worlds, and I guess getting their own meaning out of it. It was an
album I made for myself, but to hear people say it reminds them of things I’ve
never seen or played before is crazy.”
The early reviews are largely positive, but there’s an underlying current of
antagonism to his decision to waylay the big, all-inclusive state of electronic
music right now. And when you put out an album like Worlds, you have to be
ready for it. Robinson has no qualms.
“There’s always going to be some kind of backlash. I was trying to do something
really sincere, and it’s an example of my environment and what I stand for. So
I think if you keep too many considerations in mind, like what a fan’s gonna
think, what a critic’s gonna think, you can easily throw yourself off and lose
the course. I guess after the album was done, I did expect people to say that
it wouldn’t be hard or energetic enough for what they were expecting. But hell,
when someone says something like that on the internet, a whole lot of other
people go, ‘Ah, go back and listen to your shit music,’ or whatever. That being
said, there are a lot of people out there who are really connecting with the
record and really like it, so I’ll take that.”
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