Skrillex is the face of dubstep, but his music reaches beyond the genre

Dance music is not about getting on a desert island and being by yourself. It’s a fun thing you enjoy with friends.”

For Sonny Moore, the 26-year-old producer who records as Skrillex, that’s how simple dubstep success is. In a few short years, since 2010’s My Name Is Skrillex, Moore has ascended to the uppermost reaches of his genre, transcending dubstep and pushing the boundaries of electronic music. And he hasn’t forgotten the part about dancing with friends, as his latest release, Recess — the first full-length of his career — proves. It’s a varied set that mixes elements from previous decades to achieve a robust sound that’s dancier than ever.

Ahead of Saturday’s Skrillex show at Cricket Wireless Amphitheater, we called the artist at his Los Angeles home.

The Pitch: You released Recess in March on the Alien Ride app. Why an app?

Moore: All my releases, including Scary Monsters and Bangarang, have never actually had any marketing prior to release. It’s always been dropped the day of. Essentially, I was going to do that with Recess again, but the idea behind Alien Ride, before it was even a video game, was that I wanted to make an app just to leak my record. That was the whole purpose in the first place. I think it’s cool when records leak. Most record labels obviously don’t like that, but I thought it was a cool way to release it. Nobody knew when it was coming or what was coming. The idea was to download this free app [Alien Ride] and have a video game and a countdown timer on it. It started the countdown three days out and had a folder that said, “Secret Folder.”

So I think a lot of people speculated it was something, and it spread itself. We had 200,000 people download the app in the first week. It was just word-of-mouth. We started it in places like the Skrillex Reddit forums, some fan pages — I gave it to some people. It didn’t have any marketing outside of that, and it was kind of a fun, organic way that wasn’t overhyping my record, that let people figure it out for themselves.

You have a compound in L.A. that houses OWSLA, your label, your production studios and space for younger artists to come in and produce. What led to that setup?

Since late 2009 or 2010, when I got my start, electronic music started to have a place over here in the States. My success was due to people like Benga or Deadmau5 or Neuro. These are artists who were really cool, that took notice of me, and were shouting me out because they liked my tunes and they liked how I produced my music. I never saw that in the band world. It just blew me away, how much camaraderie there was behind the scenes. I’ve always been a fan of doing music because it’s fun. It’s about keeping my ear to the ground and continuing to support the things that inspire you.

So when I started the label, I had these dudes, Zedd and Porter Robinson, who I found on the Internet. We were touring together and playing together, so I ended up producing their music, which is awesome. It’s actually a dream of mine to have my own label, not only for things I can release but so that I can have a close team for my releases and create an environment and a vibe that is different than the industry. It’s about creating your own industry.

How do you see new talent contributing to or creating that industry?

The new kids that are making beats are naturals. I’m so excited and amazed to see all these new collectives and record labels popping up on the independent tip, and how quickly the bigger artists will hear something and support it. And that’s why I went into this business. I didn’t expect to make any money on record sales, which naturally happened anyway. I think a lot of kids aren’t really in it for the record sales. They just want to play and tour.

Also, the market just moved. Rather than trying to force people to sell records, dance music creates something that you can’t get from a record: a live atmosphere, the show and the event. That’s where I think the business and money side of it is, and where people get their inspiration for making tunes and making people dance.

With that said, you don’t necessarily need a mainstream platform if you’re not really there to sell a million records. It’s easy for kids to put a SoundCloud and get noticed — if they’re good and if it’s quality.

I think the fans are now inclined to discover stuff themselves. Like, back when MTV was only showing music videos and you could actually discover music. I think the Internet is like that. You can get lost in YouTube or SoundCloud and just find stuff for yourself.

What do you think the next level is for electronic music?

I think more and more people are seeing that there’s more to it than an EDM scene. The things that tie together myself, Warpaint and A$AP Rocky are the same, and that sort of speaks for itself. There is this magic that happens behind the scenes that brings artists together who are young and creative and who have the same vibe and similar style, even if the music is different. With music in general, even if you are playing in a band or not, everyone is using the electronic platform to treat music — no matter what genre it is — which I think is really exciting.