he continues. “A proponent of pre-recorded sets might argue that you wouldn’t criticise the director of a play for putting on the same thing every night. Instead he’s made his art the best he thinks it can be and is presenting it to a crowd. But whilst I love DJing and think it’s really worthwhile, it’s also secondary to writing music for me.”
“I DON’T DO A PRE-RECORDED DJ SET BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE BORING TO ME AND I’D FEEL DISHONEST, BUT THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS THAT THE AUDIENCE HAS A GOOD TIME,”
Meaning he has very little time for people who take up DJing predominantly
record labels focused solely on dance music. It’s worth comparing to the ‘90s because back then it went big and crashed hard and everyone’s wary of that — but I do think this is different.”
as a path to fame. “Your goal should not be to be fucking famous!” he spits. “Your goal should be to present something that you love.” Although these days Porter would seem to be no stranger to the lives of the rich and famous himself, having toured not just with Tiësto but also notorious party animal Tommy Lee of Motley Crue, who now DJs as half of Electro Mayhem. However, anyone expecting scurrilous tales of excess of the sort recounted in Motley Crue’s infamous biography The Dirt will be disappointed to learn that Porter “didn’t see Tommy party once when we were on tour. He could almost be your kind old uncle buying everyone dinner and stuff” and that, despite presumably having access to amounts of free booze and willing women that would make most other 20-year-old males’ minds pop, Porter prefers to spend time resting on his bus rather than reclining with groupies in a hotel suite. “My tours are pretty mild-mannered but I just love being on the bus!” he enthuses. “When you’re flying everywhere you finish DJing at 2am and then you have to get up at 8am for your next flight. But on a bus you can just go to sleep and when you awake you’ve been magically transported to the next town.”
It’s there, in the small cities that his tour bus passes through rather than amidst the neon citadels of Las Vegas, that Porter believes the true heart of the EDM movement resides in the States. “Las Vegas is truly surreal and brings a lot of money to the table so there will always be a festival’s worth of artists playing there every night of the week,” he points out. “I’ve spent a lot of time in Las Vegas and I’ve grown to love it, but I think the real American dance music scene is going on elsewhere. A lot of Vegas clubs are 21+ and it’s more VIP rather than music-orientated. In Florida, California and New York, there are fans who know all your music and who really live for DJ culture. They put a lot more heart into the whole dance music movement.” To Porter’s mind, the current American EDM craze isn’t just a movement, but a full-blown revolution. “People want to be part of it because other music has just stagnated,” he claims. “It might also have something to do with the economic downturn, because people just want to party and escape.” He also thinks EDM has gone far beyond the last time dance music was supposedly going to break the American mainstream in the late ‘90s, when British bands like The Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy had apparently kicked the doors down, only to find them quickly slammed shut again. “It’s reached critical mass now and there are literally millions of dollars in the hands of
Of course, to kids of Porter’s generation, Daft Punk’s ‘Discovery’ – which he namechecks as his all-time favorite album — sounds like ancient history, never mind the likes of Frankie Knuckles or Derrick May who arguably began the first electronic dance music revolution in America a quarter of a century ago. Indeed, so distant does this seem to him that he struggles to see much connection at all between their music and his own, something which pits him against purists who regard EDM as an outright desecration of America’s underground dance music heritage. “You could say that dance music started in the United States and that was a form of electronic music,” he opines. “But you can’t say that electronic music began in America because that goes back through Kraftwerk to the musique concrete of the 1960s. I don’t think that Detroit techno ultimately turned into dubstep for example, because it went to Europe and became progressive house and then commercial house and then Justice happened, and then Skrillex heard what they were doing and combined it with dubstep and made it noisier blah blah blah. So the lineage of it is really so twisted and hard to trace.”
However, although he’s at pains to point out that he’s grateful to the scene for his success, there are times when Porter is discussing much of the music branded EDM that this 20-year-old sounds as vituperative as the most jaded forty-something techno trainspotter. “Dance music going mainstream has exposed it to a lot of people who would never have heard it and I’m sure love it in a genuine way,” he says. “But I cringe when I hear the word ‘EDM’ because to me the words conjure up something artless and prescriptive, and even the name ‘Electronic Dance Music’ sounds functional — like something you’d just pick off a shelf. It tells you in such a clear instructive way how to react to it — like ‘this is the build-up’ and then ‘this is the drop’ and then ‘This is where you have fun’. I don’t want my music to be just a vessel for DJs to help people party.”
In fact, as Porter describes the album he’s itching to get back to his bedroom to keep working on, he says he’s now writing music to “make people cry” instead. “I’ve kind of realized that the whole rave attitude of ‘Let’s go crazy!’ is cheap and easily won, so I’m focusing on more emotional material right now,” he elaborates. “A year ago I wanted to make big bangers but I feel like I’ve done that and now I want to explore different things, so I’m investigating different chord progressions and song structures because there are certain techniques you can use to make people feel certain things. That’s kind of creepy when you think about it, because human emotions are meant to be instinctive and intangible yet music offers a way to rationalise them in some way. I will continue to do fun DJ gigs and the last year has been the best time of my life, but there’s a part of me that also feels dissatisfied and yearns for something more substantial. I don’t know — I’m in a weird place right now.”
By which he doesn’t just mean this pub.
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