Now regarded as something of an elder statesman of electronic music, dubstep heavyweight Skrillex was once a promising young upstart, bringing his vivid high-octane bangers to increasingly bigger crowds as the 2010s got going.
Born Sonny Moore, the young Skrillex transitioned from the post-hardcore punk scene into electronic music at the outset of the ’10s, with his first (MySpace-based) release under the Skrillex monicker (My Name is Skrillex) introducing the world to his new creative persona.
But it was Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, released later that year, that really laid down the gauntlet for a half-decade of cultural domination. To such an extent that, to many, he’s the first person that comes to mind when the term ‘dubstep’ is mentioned.
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By 2012 – and with earth-shaking bangers like Bangarang, First of the Year (Equinox) and the Doors-sampling Breakn’ a Sweat reverberating across clubs the world over, MusicRadar caught up with the prodigal young talent – who was seemingly always out playing live – to find out more about how he was dealing with this rapid success – and juggling touring demands with creativity…
“It’s going really cool… the last EP [Bangarang] is killing it and I’ve got a bunch of unreleased bits and pieces that I’m playing out that seem to be going down really well,” Skrillex told us.
“I’m always on tour so I’m always trying new tracks out live before they’re released. That’s more necessity than anything, because I don’t get a proper chance to sit in a studio and work on tracks like other producers do. I was only home for about four days in the second half of last year… And one of those was a show day when I was just hanging out.”
Although clearly at home basking in the energy of the audience, Skrillex also shared that his biggest touring bugbear was all the downtime when in-transit; “Sometimes it’s the flying schedule that can really f**k you up. I’ve played at festivals in Budapest, slept for an hour at the hotel then got up to fly to South Texas the next morning to sound-check at another festival. It can be really crazy. I seem to spend a minimum of eight hours a day in transit of some sort or another… that’s eight hours of your life gone.”
With all that dead time, having a portable recording setup was a must for the young talent; “I’ve got a MacBook Pro running Ableton Live with two little KRK monitors and a Focusrite Saffire Pro 14 interface. I’ve got a little two-octave Alesis controller, which I never even seem to use because I end up drawing everything in with the mouse. I’ve got a guitar too. I love Ableton Live but I use a ton of other plug-ins and soft synths along with it. I started with Fruity Loops back in the day, then Reason and then I learnt Pro Tools but I kinda hated it so I got Ableton Live, which is just so incredibly intuitive.”
One of the most interesting parts of our classic conversation though, was when he shared how devastating it was to have had two of his laptops and multiple hard drives stolen from his hotel room in Milan, Italy back in March 2011 (the year before our interview).
An entire unreleased Skrillex album was lost forever. Who knows how different Skrillex’s resulting career would have been had it been released…
“You never bounce back from that, man. It wasn’t just my album it was four years’ worth of all my other work too,” Skrillex told us. “There’s not a night that passes when that doesn’t still sting. You move forward and you make new records but I’ve honestly never been more devastated.”
