Play On Worlds

“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.”