The Heart Of It

Michael Jackson, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan were all child stars. Porter Robinson could be the DJ equivalent. Indeed, he began cutting dance music at 12. The American was on the verge of becoming a global star while finishing high school, his dad chaperoning him to gigs. In 2011, he scraped into DJ Mag's Top 100 poll. This year he's No 40 – with a bullet. (And he's placed sixth in the DJ Times America's Best DJ 2012 list.) Yet Robinson, who's just turned 20, has no stage parents behind him – and, such is his determination, he's unlikely to unravel. Nonetheless, the hyper-articulate electro-houser, bound for Stereosonic 2012 (his third Aussie trek!), would make even a seasoned superstar DJ feel insecure.

The Atlanta-born Robinson grew up in the college town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he still lives with his parents when not on the road. It isn't exactly a dance music hub. “I almost never play here!” he acknowledges with a laugh. He was initially exposed to electronica via video games. Keen to recreate the sounds, Robinson used the Internet to swot up on production techniques, circulating early rudimentary tracks online for feedback. At 15, he officially issued Booming Track on Germany's YAWA Recordings as Ekowraith. Robinson caused a bigger splash with 2010's Say My Name. Remarkably, he was approached to remix Lady Gaga's The Edge Of Glory. And Skrillex, digging another Robinson revamp, that of Avicii's Seek Bromance, chose his Spitfire EP as the flagship release on OWSLA.

Robinson has learnt much from touring with the dubstep don. ”He's probably the one who instilled in me this idea that artistic integrity is of the highest priority and just kinda taught me not to pander. He's yet to do something in his career that he wasn't fully behind. Despite being insanely popular, you could never call him a sell out because he just does what he enjoys. That is integrity.”

This year, Robinson proffered his most mainstream record in the vocal Language, complete with music video, on Ministry Of Sound. It cracked the UK top ten. He's working towards an album, having resolved that his recent efforts are too “experimental” to be singles. Coincidentally, Robinson's sound has evolved into something ever more amorphous – an electro, house, trance, dubstep and moombahton stew. He's the guy who came up with the term 'complextro' – for complex electro heavy on textures. “It always sucks to self-describe – and I don't want to give people some sort of false expectation,” Robinson says of his upcoming music. “It's also important to me to let the music speak for itself. I don't think I should explain it. I mean, I would hope that the music translates. Also, it's happened to me before that I've made these lofty predictions for what I'm gonna do and then I ended up doing something completely else entirely. But I can say that the stuff I am writing right now is a little bit more sentimental and melodic and experimental and focusses more on making you feel things, as opposed to being just purely high energy. I think my last song, Language, was a step in that direction – the focus on that song is emotion. Even though it's a high energy song and it's effective in the clubs and [at] festivals, that was a secondary goal.” 

There is no stopping Robinson, who's scored residencies in Las Vegas, played Coachella and headlined his own tours. But, Gaga remix aside, he isn't clamouring to produce pop figures (Katy Perry was declined). “My time is so limited,” Robinson says. “It's really hard for me to make music at all. I'm just gonna focus on what's inspiring to me.” That said, he “wouldn't rule it out, ever”.

For all his achievements, Robinson occasionally regrets turning down the chance to attend college – a rite of passage. “I have mixed feelings about it. I got into probably the best university in my state. I worked really, really, really hard in high school and I got great test scores. I spent four years working towards this goal of being admitted to this university and I succeeded and then, over the summer before I was gonna go to school, I saw some success with my music career and I decided to pursue that because it was more important to me. I see so many of my peers who have their degrees that they've always wanted and they're working at fucking Walmart. It's just a difficult climate out there. I saw an opportunity to realise my dream and so I sprung for it.”

Robinson has missed out on other stuff. He's too young to have encountered numerous pivotal moments in dance music. Apart from Skrillex, he has supported Tiësto, who was already DJing locally in the early '90s; and David Guetta, who was DJing in the '80s. Guetta's first hip hop track dropped in 1990, two years prior to Robinson's birth. “I would have liked to have been around and gotten to experience the very, very early French disco house sound, when that was bigger,” Robinson muses. “I even missed the whole 2008 blog house thing 'cause I still wasn't going to clubs or anything – I was just a reclusive North Carolina kid. I also think I would have enjoyed seeing some of the formative years of trance, when Sven Väth was making it happen. There's a lot of history that I would have loved to have been privy to. But I do think we're living in one of the greatest times ever for dance music.”

Though Robinson's bio touts him as an EDM “saviour”, he's as surprised as anyone by the explosion Stateside – and unsure how to account for it. “To an extent, popular music in America had stagnated somewhat,” he posits. “Hip hop was no longer a novelty and it was sort of running out of steam. There was just a desperate craving for something new. I also think that 'escapes' and party-related stuff tend to thrive during economic hardship... But who knows?”

Many US DJs are amped about trap music but, while Robinson has identified “anti-pop elitism” as a pet hate, he abhors the prospect of its being co-opted – as, ironically, was dubstep. “The trap music thing is interesting. I get really excited when a new trend emerges in dance music – the novelty is really fun. I worry with trap music that hype vultures are gonna appropriate it and, instead of trying to make good music, [they'll] try to make careers out of it. That's how the hype machine can take itself down. I kinda worry for the music, 'cause it's a cool sound and I want it to survive, but it just risks overexposure. People are so cynical nowadays that, if they hear the same genre name three times in one day, they'll denounce it because it's gotten too popular. So I just hope that people are respectful with regard to that sound and don't try to appropriate it for their own careers. If you're gonna make that style, make it because you truly love it, and because it's good, as opposed to trying to capitalise on it.”

Porter Robinson will be playing the following dates:

Saturday 24 November - Sydney Showgrounds
Sunday 25 Novemeber - Claremont Showground, Perth
Saturday 1 December - Melbourne Showgrounds
Sunday 2 December - RNA Shougrounds, Brisbane