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Talking to Porter Robinson about the fantastical artwork for 'Worlds Remixed'

"There's something a little darker about David's world than mine."

  • By Emily Yoshida
  • on October 5, 2015 01:00 pm
  • 

[4]
 
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Porter Robinson has put down the phone. The 23-year-old producer and I have
been talking about David Aguado, the Spanish illustrator that he has worked
with closely during the visual development of his recent tour and remix album.
I had casually asked where he lived and where he went to school, and Robinson
instantly went to Google That For Me. "It's okay, I searched already," I say,
but he can't hear me.

Artists collaborating long-distance is far from a new phenomenon, but distance
and a language barrier have separated Robinson and Aguado even further —
they've never even spoken on the phone. So it's remarkable, then, that they
have created such a cohesive visual universe for Robinson's 2014 album Worlds
and all its subsequent permutations. Robinson, a confessed Tumblr enthusiast,
originally found Aguado's work on the social sharing platform, and brought him
on as one of many artists that built the look for Robinson's lush,
anime-inspired compositions. But Aguado's work came to be the dominant
inspiration for the album — as well as its cover art.

It helps, of course, that Robinson has been singularly obsessive when it comes
to the look and feel of all things Worlds — as he describes the process of
designing his acclaimed live show and all the album art, it starts to sound
less like an album and more like a big-budget film or video game. On the week
of the release of Worlds (Remixed) I spoke to Robinson from his home in Chapel
Hill, NC about his collaboration with Aguado, finding inspiration on Tumblr and
other virtual communities, and the pros and cons of being your own art
director.

Porter Robinson Worlds Remixed artwork

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First off, having also been a former DDR-head, I really enjoyed Worlds, and I
thought it was so interesting how much nostalgia there is for that particular
sound. I think there's a whole generation of kids, maybe, who first heard dance
music, or europop, or that kind of techno construction on Dance Dance
Revolution.

That's so great — I guess there's a lot of people who know of DDR just because
it was really present in popular culture. Like, there's a Malcolm in the Middle
episode where Hal gets really obsessed with DDR. I remember that was really
exciting on the DDR PHP forums that I used to frequent. [Laughs] But the music
is still really inspiring to me, and it's something that I listen to a lot.
There are a lot of people who wonder why Japan is a pretty consistent influence
in my music, and I think it's because the reason I started writing — my intro
to electronic music was Japanese music. And now I'm following all those [DDR
artists] on Twitter and whatnot. And some of them follow me back, which is
cool.

It's one of the only things that could make me miss internet forums. Like, now
they only exist in the bodybuilding community, for some reason. I'm not a part
of that, but whenever I search for any kind of health problem, a classic-style
bodybuilding forum comes up in my results.

But there are still so many ways for people to connect over common interests —
for example, you found David Aguado through Tumblr.

Definitely — so much of my favorite art exists on Tumblr. I feel like whenever
I get stuck, I just look through my [Tumblr] likes. But I definitely love
[David's] style, because in my opinion it's really beautiful, and it definitely
evokes that fantasy vibe, which is really important to me. But it's not like
this cloying, overly beautiful — there's a hint of something real there ... I
just really admire his stuff, there's something realistic about the way he can
portray fantasy. There's some grit to it, and I appreciate it.

`"I don't have an art director. Or, I guess, I am my own art director."'

And at first, I wasn't exclusively working with him for the art. For the
release of the actual album, I commissioned several different artists ... I
wish I had been more committed to one vision, but I was afraid that if I worked
with just one artist I wouldn't be happy with everything. So the first Polaroid
series for the first release of Worlds is a little bit all over the place, but
David's parts are absolutely my favorite moments of it.

And then I went through the very very long, painstaking process of
commissioning visuals for the live show ... it was just months and months of
working, and taking calls every day, and it was sort of the closest I'd ever
been to working in animation, because even though I wasn't hand-drawing things,
I was giving feedback on in-between frames, and adjusting different rates of
motion. But it also ran a lot deeper than that. And what came out of that was,
there are tons of recurring characters and little universes that exist in the
live show visuals that are corresponding to each song. And people who look at
[the Worlds (Remixed) art] who have seen the show and everything are gonna go,
"Oh, my god, so this is the character from 'Goodbye to a World' in the live
show. And here is that same moment depicted from a different angle."

[GettyImage]

Porter Robinson performs at a San Francisco Worlds tour show. (C Flanigan /
FilmMagic)

It just makes me so happy. At first I felt like I was so wishy-washy and I
wasn't committed to one singular idea, and I feel like that was my biggest
failure. And this, I feel like, is a correction of that. It feels like it was
planned from the beginning, and that's a feeling that so many of my favorite
artists give me when I see their videos, and their cover art, and even the way
their website looks. It's cohesive in a way that's very art directed.

Tell me a little bit about how you and David worked together on the remix art.
How closely were you communicating?

So I guess the real genesis of these Polaroids actually begins back in 2013,
which is when I made the original style bible and the mood board for the whole
album. The mood board was just like, 20-ish PDF pages of mostly stuff from my
Tumblr that really evoked the feeling of the record. And then the style bible
was a written document that would go on to be shown to everyone who worked on
the Polaroids, everyone who worked on the cover art, the people who worked on
the tour visuals, the people who designed my website, and the people who
directed my music videos. It was just essentially a style bible for my taste
and for the record. So that outlined really basic stuff — like, "It should be
generally pretty, and evoke the feeling of fantasy, and it should feel vast."
But it also got more specific in terms of laying things out, like, particular
kinds of surrealism that I liked. I would [talk about how] I like that kind of
dreamlike, dream logic-type surrealism. And I don't care so much for
psychedelic, druggy type, hallucinatory surrealism. So I was sort of laying out
all these rules so that there would be, I guess, fewer mistakes, and that it
would feel more consistent, because I don't have an art director. Or I guess I
am my own art director.

So this time with David working on the remix Polaroids, I think he had never
seen the tour visuals. So I took a bunch of screenshots of my tour visuals and
went, "This is Character C," — and I took all the screenshots of her — "and she
goes with this song. So do your own David Aguado-style art based on these four
screen caps and something from these visuals." And a lot of them were more
specific suggestions, like, for "Flicker" I said I wanted the girl to be
falling through the sky, because in the tour visuals and in his "Flicker"
single cover art, we always show her sitting on these cubes, and exploring this
sky world, and I just thought it would be really sick to see her falling.

So for a lot of them I gave really specific directions for what scenes should
look like, but for the most part, he just ran with the references I sent to
him, which — I was so proud that finally the references weren't something I
liked off Tumblr, but my own stuff.

Have you guys kept in touch?

I've never spoken to him on the phone; I've only ever spoken through email. And
I've never done a live show in Argentina so he's never seen my show. It's a
weirdly impersonal thing, but I feel this connection to him because even though
what he does is influenced by my music and my references, I also think there's
this cyclical effect, too — that some aspects of his style influence my music.
There's something a little darker about his world than mine, and it kind of
pushes me in that direction.

The fact that you've never spoken on the phone — it reminds me of what you were
talking about with your old forum communities, or things you've said about
MMORPGs in the past. The fact that you can work together and make these
imaginative visuals and stories and never be in the same room, much less
actually speak to each other.

Yeah, it's very 2015, I guess. The company that I worked with on the tour
visuals were called ILN — Imaginary Light Network. It's one guy, and he has
artists all around the world who will do the first frame, or build a reference
illustration; he has other people who are animators, and none of them have met
each other ever. And that blew my mind. Like, I went to New York, and I felt a
little bit naïve: I met the guy, the head of ILN, and I was like, "Where are
the offices? I want to meet everybody." And yeah he's never met any of them, he
doesn't know any of them. It's very modern, and a little sad. I had in my mind
this little community in this office where people were working together
exchanging notes, and that wasn't real at all. But you would never know it from
the result.

Porter Robinson Worlds Remixed Porter Robinson Worlds Remixed

`"I think the central seam of my music is sentimental."'

So, I don't think I've heard of an artist doing their own design board or
visual bible for an album. Cover art, maybe. I guess it must happen, but I
haven't heard of the artist personally art-directing in such an involved way.

I have definitely been like, "Okay, this is the year where I find an art
director that gets my stuff and is going to intercept everything before it gets
to me." And it never really works out like that, and I think I've given up
because I'm better off handling stuff myself. And I'm not writing off the
possibility of having somebody who works with me in the future in terms of just
taste-level stuff, because I'm sure there are people out there who would love
to have that job and who would really really get it, and I've talked to people
who seem awesome and qualified, but I'm not so overloaded and busy that I can't
make an effort of it myself.

You've talked about the whole creative process for Worlds being a huge change
for you — at the same time, Worlds was your debut album, which sets a
precedent. Do you see yourself approaching your next release with this same
all-encompassing process, or will you switch it up again?

I think no matter what, the next thing I do is going to be closer to Worlds
than Worlds was to what preceded it. Because I feel like I'm circling — I feel
like I'm always getting closer to this absolute, real, authenticity, and not
compromising. That's what I tell myself, at least, but there's also no
accounting for taste changing. I don't know, I went home after this last record
and tried to just — not phone in, but I tried to make something that sounded
like Worlds, right away. I was like, "This is working so well, and I'm so happy
with this, and I'm just going to do it again." And it has really not worked
that well. So right now I'm just searching for new stuff that I like, and — I
don't know, I've gotten really depressed at times. It's honestly been the
hardest creative experience I've ever had. The thing I can guarantee you is
that nothing is going to come out until I'm really happy with it, so it's just
a matter of time and willpower, I think. And I've kind of come to terms with
that.

When you talk about going after authenticity, does a lot of that stuff that
comes from past influences, or is there something also more timeless to it?

Yeah, I've always wondered what it would be like to make music that's not
nostalgic at all, and it's really, really hard for me to imagine. It's like — I
almost don't think I'm capable of it, because I think the central seam of my
music is sentimental. The thing that makes me want to proceed and finish a song
is when it really touches me and makes me feel something. And I think that
memories and this feeling of nostalgia is a big part of what makes me feel
anything. And I don't mean nostalgia like '80s or '90s nostalgia, I mean like
personal nostalgia. Stuff that was really important to me at a certain time of
my life. It's like the whole rose-colored glasses thing. Like the way that you
remember something is a lot better than it actually was. And that feeling is
just like — if I can look at something that I enjoyed as a child or an
adolescent in a different way, it makes me feel that stuff again.

Worlds (Remixed) is out now on Astralwerks.

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