2014’s Worlds stood out as a pivotal moment for Porter Robinson. The young producer left behind the sawtooth synths and chugging bass lines of his Spitfire days in favor of decidedly more melodic and harder to categorize style, and his debut album stood out as the culmination of this dramatic change in style.
Now that an official remix series of Worlds tracks has given Robinson’s fans something new to dissect, he’s sat down with Medium to discuss his creative process on each track of the original effort as well.
On “Divinity,” Robinson says:
I started the album with that song because it was the first one that I wrote that I felt was in the style of Worlds. It was the first one that had the 90 BPM, side-chained chords, sort of slowed-down but still four-on-the-floor and more emotional quality that starts the hook, which I’d say it was a big part of the sonic quality of Worlds.
On “Sad Machine,” he says:
I used a program called Vocaloid. It’s sort of like Siri. Like a text to speech software, except that you can assign notes to each syllable. If you’ve ever used text-to-speech software where you typed in words and then it says it back to you, it’s the same idea applied to singing. So I would write a lyric and I would write a melody and assign each syllable to a note.
On “Fickr,” he notes:
I took this text document that I had of several song title ideas that I had written down on my phone, and just translated them to Japanese and I decided I would cut them together and make that the rapping on the song. What it says, is “I’m just trying to find what is important to me,” which is nice, because it could have come out as something completely random.
Read the full interview to understand how Porter Robinson came up with the rest of the songs on Worlds, and listen to the full remix series in the Spotify player below.
Published: Oct 8, 2015 02:33 pm