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."
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.
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