The shape-shifting career of in-your-face EDM star Skrillex

Either electronic dance music (EDM) enfant terrible Skrillex  has an indefatigable new publicist or he’s actually going through a revival – an almost unfathomable thought for an artist who is just shy of 28.

But then again, Skrillex – aka Sonny Moore  – hasn’t had a typical career. He cut his teeth in traditional band culture, singing and performing with rock outfit From First to Last   across sunny California. He began to experience vocal problems and went solo – but by the late 2000s, he had dropped off the band circuit, reinvented himself and emerged as another monster altogether, pushing new, alien sounds in Los Angeles under a new alias: Skrillex.

In 2010, he released his first EP, titled (boldly, some say provocatively) My Name Is Skrillex.  It was available on his Myspace page for free, following the trend of similar bedroom DJs of his generation and musical style. From the  get-go, critics both criticised and lampooned his aggressive, distorted bass drops, which soon emerged as a new sub-genre of dubstep,  or a post-dubstep genre called brostep.  

Skrillex – who is headlining the all-star EDM event Don’t Let Daddy Know  at AsiaWorld-Expo  on  September 30  – was hailed as the pioneer of this sound, which spawned a massive following as well as similar musicians. All the while, there was a backlash against the rise of EDM, which of course involved talk of Skrillex, his status and his musical offerings – despite his music being so ever-evolving and off-the-wall that it’s difficult to categorise. He began to fall off the map a few years ago, when chat about EDM culture and its inevitable influence on the music scene began to die down, perhaps because festivals and gigs had begun to book huge EDM names and the tide, so to speak, had changed. The two events seem in conflict with each other – Skrillex didn’t stop playing high-profile gigs, but he was less favoured, with the majority of critics slamming his latest album, Recess  (2014)  – Pitchfork  magazine wrote that it sounded “far from [a] refined practitioner [of dance music]”.