Digital Decay Magazine by delaneyhardt139

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02 . 2021

03. letter from our editor WHO DELANEY HARDT IS

interview with porter robinson

14. interview with anamanaguchi TALK NEW ALBUM ‘[USA],’ TACKLING A CHANGED WORLD

04.

BEAUTIFUL THINGS & WHAT THEY MEAN TO PORTER ROBINSON

A LETTER FROM

OUR EDITOR delaney hardt. Digital Decay magazine aims to give voice to new, up-and-coming artists experimenting in the vast electronic music genre. From trance and house music, to chiptune indie rock, Digital Decay sheds light on all the unique electronic music genres out there. Get up close and personal with bands and artists, learn about their journies, or understand the meaning behind popular songs. Come with us through this artistic experience as we peer into the minds of electronic music artists.

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an interview with...

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PORTER ROBINSON 4

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BEAUTIFUL THINGS AND WHAT THEY MEAN TO PORTER ROBINSON interview by Audrey Steeves

A talk with Porter Robinson about the balancing acts of personal experience and external inspiration in the creation of authentic music, nostalgia, and the present, and how they all come together in his album, ‘Nurture.’

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HOW YOU’D CONCEPTUALIZE YOUR FORTHCOMING ALBUM, NURTURE? ROBINSON:

Nurture came after this period of immense struggle in which I was deconstructing my entire sense of who I was and being a musician and wanting to think of myself as someone who my parents could be proud of. When I had this period of intense creative struggle where I couldn’t make music, I became increasingly desperate every day to write something I was proud of, and the horrible feedback loop from that was that the more desperate I became to prove that I could still make music, the more difficult it became to write anything. I was stuck in this loop.

I was incredibly self-critical and I was really hard and down on anything I was making. It was a real low point in my life that began with a creative struggle and extended into really serious emotional mental health issues. So Nurture came together because the only thing I could stomach were these very sweet sounds. My way of writing music is to find whatever is beautiful to me, and reframe it in a way that makes it with my own heart.

ER ROBINSON 6

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“I was trying to find something that is beautiful to me but my everyday experience was not beautiful, and I couldn’t tolerate writing music that sounded like that.” The sound of the album is very sweet, and it’s very pretty and it’s easy on the ears. There’s the real open pain in the lyrics, and I also tried to inject a little sense of artificiality, too. I altered my voice on almost every song on the album. I have a fake voice; I pitched my own voice up and it takes on this feminine, maybe childlike quality depending on how you interpret it. And I’m singing these duets with the high pitched version of my own voice, or doing songs solo from that perspective. So I wanted there to be a sense of beauty but tie in some pain and some corruption and artificiality.

IN THE PAST, YOU’VE SAID THAT YOU REALLY JUST WANT TO MAKE MUSIC THAT’S BEAUTIFUL, AND THAT’S SOMETHING THAt’S IMPORTANT TO YOU. DO YOU THINK YOUR YOURDEFINITION DEFINITIONOFOFBEAUTIFUL BEAUTIFULHASHASEVOLVED EVOLVEDOVER OVERYOUR YOURCAREER? CAREER?

“I think my sense of beauty is a lot more every day now.”

ROBINSON:

Definitely, I think that my initial sense of what is beautiful was really focused on fantasy and escapism, I wanted to sort of give life to the feeling of exploring the fact that there’s this imaginary infinite universe. I still cherish all of those feelings, but I think my sense of beauty is a lot more every day now. I started experiencing time dilation in a pretty heavy way, I started getting older. Months would go by, nothing would happen, time was just flying by. So I wanted to slow down and be able to appreciate the beauty that surrounds me outside of my head.

I found that imagination is great but there’s a lot of separation that occurs. I wanted to slow down a bit and kind of come to realize what was magical and beautiful and worthwhile about the world that we live in. It’s not a perspective that is super popular, there’s so much despair, sometimes rightly so, but I also think it’s worthwhile to appreciate what’s beautiful because we’re all gonna die! We get to experience being alive and occupying a human body and living in this world where there’s music to be experienced and nature to go see and relationships and love.

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PORT DO YOU STILL FEEL LIKE YOU USE YOUR OWN HAPPINESS AS A MEASURE OF YOUR PRODUCTIVITY AND THE QUANTITY / QUALITY OF MUSIC YOU’RE CHURNING OUT?

Honestly I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to shake that, I feel at my happiest when I’m working productively. I would love to be able to not have my happiness so wrapped up in my ability to make music but right now that’s how I am. On a day that my music is going well, I feel excited about what I’m working on, I feel happy and optimistic and I feel like I can do everything. And at times when I’m really creatively stuck and I can’t see my way out of it, it feels like I’m never gonna have a breakthrough or it’s even possible, I’m quite unhappy. And sometimes I’m relapsing back into this horrific depression. Fortunately, I’ve gotten a tighter grasp on it now, but, unfortunately, a lot of my sense of happiness is still pretty much derived from my work and how much I enjoy the day-to-day.

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“I “I feel feel at at my my happiest happiest when when I’m I’m working working productively.” productively.”

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DO YOU FEEL LIKE THERE’S ANYTHING TOO PERSONAL TO BE TRANSLATED INTO YOUR WORK? DO YOU FEEL THERE’S A LINE? OR DO YOU THINK THE MORE PERSONAL, THE BETTER? ROBINSON:

I think that when you’re writing music, and when you’re making any kind of art, you’re sort of curating all the things that are available to you. I throw away most of my songs. And the ones that I keep tend to tell a story in a way that’s really potent. I liken it to trying to, like, tickle yourself? It’s hard to make yourself feel the effects as strongly as when somebody else does it for you. I think I tend to write music that’s really very stimulating because I’m trying to make people feel the way my favorite artists make me feel. And so, with the lyrics I write and the way I approach music it’s always a pretty refined version of a story. I’m always going to be showing the top five percent of what I’ve made. I don’t know that there’s a way for me to be one hundred percent personal without just live streaming my life 24/7. You want to share with people the best work in the sort of idealized or really potent version of your worldview. So yes, to me there is a line, and the line would be that anything past the point of interesting or stimulating or beautiful or evocative I’m not interested in sharing. I’ll share what’s personal for me up to the point that it’s emotional for people.

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“I’ll “I’ll shae shae what’s what’s personal personal for for me me up up to to the the point point that that it’s it’s emotional emotional for for people.” people.”

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IN “SOMETHING COMFORTING” YOU WERE ABLE TO CONVEY WHAT YOU WERE FEELING VIA THE INSTRUMENTAL BUT IT WASN’T UNTIL YEARS LATER THAT YOU COULD VERBALIZE IT?

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ROBINSON:

I guess so but I was also trying to write lyrics in 2015 for it. And I just couldn’t do it. I wrote so many different choruses for that song, so many different verses. One of the initial themes for that song was about finding a way to keep another person happy. That was the initial lyric, I was singing to someone else and I was trying to keep them happy. And then I started trying to sing about what I was going through and I just couldn’t.

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ppy. ”

And I know that sounds dramatic but when I would be working and thinking about what my everyday experience was at that time I felt awful. It was just another reminder of how much I was struggling. So I had to write ten other songs, and then come back to “Something Comforting” last year, and was like now I have the skills, I have the strength and the experience of talking about these issues to address what needed to be addressed.

ROBINSON:

“Mirror” actually came together mostly in 2019. It was around the time that I was learning about the role that shame had played in my life. I came to learn that I put so much value on the negative thoughts I’d have around my own work – I thought they were protecting me from criticism and failure. Around the time of writing “Mirror”, I started regarding my own critical inner voice for what it is: mere thoughts. This song is about the freedom I felt from that realization.

WHERE “MIRROR’’ IS ABOUT YOUR INNER CRITIC AND JOURNEY YOU’VE BEEN ON, ULTIMATELY ENDING ON A POSITIVE NOTE, DID THIS SONG ALSO COME TOGETHER PARTLY IN THAT DARKER TIME AND LAST YEAR, LIKE ‘’SOMETHING COMFORTING?’’ DIGITAL DECAY

ANAMANAGU CHI It’s been six years since the release of Anamanaguchi’s last album, Endless Fantasy, but in that time, the electronic-rock outfit hasn’t been quiet. Through it all, they were slowly building their third proper full-length album, [USA]. In the midst of that, the world changed. “The general shift from Endless Fantasy to [USA] for me comes from a shift between a world shaped by TV to a world shaped by computers and the environments that come with those technologies,” says the group’s Peter Berkman.

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TALK NEW ALBUM ‘[USA],’ TACKLING A CHANGED WORLD interview by Liz Ohanesian

“We wanted to look at ourselves in our real context,” Berkman says, “and our audience in its real context.”

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DID THE MEANING OF THIS ALBUM TITLE CHANGE AS YOU WERE WORKING ON THE ALBUM? BERKMAN:

WARNAAR:

A big part of using that title and playing with labels is that it doesn’t go anywhere or change regardless of the state that it’s in. We’re always going to have [USA] tied to our name no matter where we’re playing in the world. Forever. That’s always going to be the label given to us, regardless of how American or un-American we may feel. It’s like having a passport or something. We have all sorts of feelings about the state of the country, but our passport hasn’t changed.

THERE ARE ENVIRONMENTAL THEMES ON THE ALBUM. WHAT PROMPTED YOU TO EXPLORE THOSE IDEAS?

BERKMAN:

For me, a lot of my interest in environment, human environments in general, comes from my interest in [Canadian philosopher] Marshall McLuhan, who describes all media as environments that shape perception, shape sensibilities. When you’re talking about environment, you have the word pollution, and pollution really comes from a lack of awareness, the stuff that happens when you don’t know what you’re doing. Human beings today have certainly forgotten a way of understanding the boundaries and limits of their own power to shape themselves and the world and each other.

Yes, in fact it evolved in quite a weird way. It started as a dare. Ary described it as going to get a tattoo we’re going to be stuck with and then seeing what it means later. At the time, it just felt interesting. We were questioning, “do we even still want to be Anamanaguchi in a world after this huge social division with things like Gamergate, where people we were friends with are no longer friends with each other, and all the general social tension that had been going on? Does it make sense to make Anamanaguchi music anymore?” So, it started as a dare, “let’s look at this darkness and wear it, and see what happens.

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WARNAAR:

For me, there was a lot of painting emotional environments this time; portraying a wide section of positive feelings [and] negative feelings. Happiness, loneliness, loss or connection.

“We were questioning, do we even still want to be Anamanaguchi in a world after this huge social division...?”

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ANAMA

WHAT’S GOING INTO PUTTING TOGETHER THE NEW LIVE SHOW? DEVITO:

One thing we’re paying a lot more attention to is not showing all of our cards at once; having more of an arc to the show, slowly revealing elements of the stage design and musically, having more flow. Most of our previous songs and sets were always pedal to the metal. Now, we have a lot more variance to the songs.

BERKMAN:

SILAS:

The album itself is definitely, in a lot of ways, more dynamic than things we’ve ever done. It feels like we’re being very mindful of that. We want to preserve that as best as we can. That’s what makes it more effective ... We want it all to feel more cohesive and impactful in a desired way than we’ve paid attention to in the past.

On the actual show front, something that we’re trying to do that we’ve never been able to do before is, we want to be able to play this album from start to finish. We’re not going to play the whole album start to finish at every show. We’re doing that only at these events we’ve been calling [USA Expo]s. It’s a daytime and nighttime event that we put together in order to fill a social void that comes from going to a concert. Maybe you meet up with a friend or two and then you go home after the show and listen to the music. We really want to give the opportunity for people who listen to our music to socialize with each other and hang out with us, whether that’s to play video games or inviting local restaurants or local entertainment of any kind, local artists, things like that, just to let people know what’s around them. We’re only doing this in a few specific cities right now, but that’s something that we want to do more of.

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YOU HAD THE CHANCE TO PLAY SECOND SKY, PORTER ROBINSON’S FESTIVAL IN OAKLAND, THIS SUMMER. DID YOU GET TO PLAY MUCH OF YOUR NEW MUSIC AT THE EVENT?

SILAS:

We played a few songs at Second Sky. That was actually the first or second time playing out that new stuff. It felt like the perfect environment to bring it out.

HOW WAS THE REACTION? BERKMAN:

I know exactly how the reaction was, because day one was streamed on Twitch at a time delay, so right after the set, I went back with the band into the trailer and watched the set on Twitch with my parents and all the homies, and we watched the chat roll in. I don’t know if you’re on Twitch, but the chat that plays live next to the video is not always the friendliest thing. I was so happy that the comments were overwhelmingly positive, specifically for the new stuff. It made me feel really good and confident to play it out and go full on with it.

To talk about the more immediate response of actually performing it live for people at a venue, it felt great. I love playing those songs live and it looked like people really enjoyed it. One of the songs that we played there, “Air Online,” we had worked with Porter on somewhere in the process of writing that song. There was this part that kicked through, and you could tell that the audience was like, “who’s that?”There was a cool feeling there.

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