Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The DJ role, it's never been a big thing for me.
I really am in love with the idea of an artistic signature.
It's hard to regret making the choice that you think is right.
Electronic music was this super cool thing to me my whole life.
The one thing you can't control is what comes after what you release.
My studio was lo-fi by necessity; I was fourteen with no reliable income.
I love the idea of web design that maximises expressiveness over functionality.
I like to shower for a really long time; that's a distraction-free zone for me.
Virtual Self' combines a lot of unlike elements - trance, jungle, slowed-down breakbeats.
I'm releasing more music as Virtual Self, I'm definitely going to be touring Virtual Self.
I'm never going to stop writing music as Porter Robinson and I see 'Virtual Self' as more of a tangent.
But to me, 'Worlds' is meant as kind of an appreciation of fiction and stories and escapism and fantasy.
The warmest place I've ever been is my home here in Chapel Hill. It's an oasis of comfort and joy for me.
I want my music to be really big. I have no interest in DIY Brooklyn; I don't want to be a small indie band.
An underexplored reason why nostalgic art is worthwhile is that it influences the way the past is remembered.
When I'm making sentimental trancey fluffiness, I like to have some equally saccharine aromas filling the room.
I've got a hundred thousand things on my mind that are taking precedence over trying to make pop collaborations.
The thing that makes me want to proceed and finish a song is when it really touches me and makes me feel something.
I wanted 'Second Sky' to be my way of recommending truly good music to my audience that I think is worthy of their time.
I'm so grateful for archives like Wayback Machine, who for 15 years have been creating snapshots of almost the entire web.
Virtual Self' was me trying to paint a picture of a very foggy, distorted memory that I had of electronic music on the internet.
There's so many things that can go wrong, and if I'm merely playing and not hosting a festival, none of those things reflect on me.
I think Skrillex working with Justin Bieber - some immature people will have a huge problem with that; I'm just saying I don't care.
I wanted to do music that was a little more sentimental, emotional, and serene - completely different from the party music I was doing.
I think that my biggest influences are electronic acts. Daft Punk is probably my number 1, then Kanye West would be number 2 after that.
So, the concept was a single-stage festival, and I open and close the festival to encourage people to stay for all of the other artists.
There's a really high emphasis on having good taste in my household and having nuanced opinions. We're always critically analyzing stuff.
I wanted to have a grander vision, something that I felt like I was really fighting for and I wanted to have a real idea and be authentic.
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.
I'm not a huge movie buff and I don't watch that much television, but I've spent most of my life playing video games of one kind or another.
Writing music while caffeinated produces some interesting results. The stimulation basically amplifies my music-production-dependent bi-polarity.
My original goal was to get into the Top 100. I listened to every song in the Top 100 every day. I knew them all - this is where the gods reside.
It might be interesting to people to say that I would do something with Taylor Swift, but the reality is, it's so not on my list of things to do.
I was trying to write new music, but there was nothing I was reacting against. It turned out 'Worlds' itself became something for me to to resist.
If I could turn it on like a faucet then I think it would be kind of unearned. I feel like you need to struggle a little bit to make anything good.
When I'm writing good music and I'm caffeinated, I attribute all my success to the coffee, get really sentimental about the EDM scene and tweet a lot.
For me, the early 2000s stood for this vast, magical, electronic cyber realm - a time when the internet was so infinite, mysterious, and under-explored.
I played video games for years. I immersed myself in them. They're so beautiful. They have these gorgeous imaginary landscapes. And they were just very dear to me.
I think not having come from the DJ world was an asset to me at first because I didn't have some of the habits other DJs had, and I think in a way that set me apart.
And I'm interested in writing music that takes risks. My point is that maybe the term EDM is pinned on me and my buddies, but maybe it'll be less so if I experiment.
EDM is very functional. It's meant to make people jump up and down and go crazy and it's real good at that. I just think in terms of expression, it's very very limiting.
If you trust your instincts and it doesn't turn out right, OK. But if you compromise and defer to what somebody else is telling you and it doesn't work out, that feeling gnaws at me.
I wanted what I was doing to be really true to me and my tastes. That's what 'Worlds' was, me taking a break from what I was doing and doing something that was honest, authentic and real.
It was more than enough, but I'm completely satisfied that 'Virtual Self' got nominated for the Grammy. That is a complete victory for the project in my mind and anything else is just bonus.
I think it's important to form a connection with an audience to a point, but I also feel like there's an instructive element to what you're doing. And I think it's necessary to challenge people.
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.
Being like 14 and 15 years old, listening to trance music in my home, I just had this fantasy of going to these big clubs and going to these massives, and just hearing this gorgeous, delicate music.
My relationship with my brothers... it's almost weird. We've never fought, we finish each other's sentences, but not in a creepy way. We talk about the things that we love and share music with each other.
One thing that scares me a little bit is that I want people to like my music, but I think a lot of what I like about my own music are these references to things that people don't share nostalgia with me on.
I had a lot of self-doubt when I started. And I still do. But I had a lot of the wrong kind of self-doubt when I first started making music and first started to tour. I think I was a little bit deferential.