Artist of the Week: Skrillex

Photo: Ysa Perez

In terms of whirlwind success, the career trajectory of Skrillex pretty much encapsulates what the phrase means. Seemingly coming out of nowhere in 2010 to take over the world, his harsh take on dubstep shattered speakers and dancefloors everywhere as his trademark sound became omnipresent. That sound split opinion; shrill, eardrum piercing noise that either had you going ballistic at one of his shows or contorting your face in disgust. For many, the former actually looked quite a lot like the latter.

Although his explosion in popularity was pretty meteoric, he did have previous in the music industry as singer of post-hardcore band From First to Last. He helped the band record two albums before leaving to start a solo career under his birth name, Sonny Moore, but despite recording the ‘Gypsyhook’ EP (check out the title track below) he soon scrapped those plans to record electronic music under the Skrillex moniker. The beast was born.

It was this previous fanbase that proved crucial in the development of a star. When Skrillex posted his demos to his Myspace page, an audience reared on the guitar driven sounds of his previous music were sent wild by this barrage of noise. It created the platform for his music to go stratospheric, and although his records angered many purists, particularly at a point where dubstep had fragmented into a sea of exciting sounds, there’s no denying the impact they had, especially stateside.

Skrillex helped spearhead a sudden huge demand for dance music in the country which had given birth to it in the eighties but by and large had ignored it on a mainstream level since. Dubbed EDM by the US media, it’s now become the biggest genre of music in the country, mirroring the success of disco in the seventies and sparking a series of high profiel festivals. It has ensured that our friends over the pond discover what we’ve known for ages – electronic music in fields is fun.

Although rooted in dubstep still, his sound has evolved to include electro and house. It perfectly encapsulates the visceral feel that the Americanised EDM has been about, where the groove is about an instantaneous and hard hitting impact. The rippling effect is already spilling over to Europe with heavyweight promoters like Electric Daisy Carnival and Ultra bringing their shows over, and Tomorrowland in Belgium mirroring the huge effort in production. The above DJ set is Skrillex doing his thing at the latter last year.

Since then he’s become one of the undoubted premier league draws in electronic music. Whether producing Korn or discussing the merits of the music scene as a whole with Richie Hawtin, he’s been headline material for both the planet's biggest raves and the column inches of the world's leading mgazines and wesbites (us included, naturally). Love him or loathe him, he certainly has legions of followers who can’t get enough of his sound. And the high profile collaborations keep happening, having worked with Damian Marley and A$AP Rocky recently, producing the huge ‘Wild for the Night’ with the latter.

The best place for a Skrillex fan to catch him this summer looks like being either the Leeds or Reading Festival, where he joins electronic peers Knife Party, Magnetic Man and Chase and Status, and a number of groups that appeal to his previous incarnation, Green Day, System of a Down and Nine Inch Nails among them. Both shows will have plenty of his acolytes feeling the bass as he screeches through his high volume back catalogue.

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