image: Rolling Stone
Seth Troxler is about to tour Australia, and he’s given an interview to Henry Johnstone at Pulse Radio. When asked about the infamous Robot Heart incident, he pulls no punches:
HJ: The magic of the internet.
ST: You guys are quite magical. There was this Pulse article about me at Burning Man – I thought it was quite funny, even though it was only partially true. But I was wondering how you guys magically got the information from Burning Man to the internet so fast? That’s what astounded me.
HJ: Are you talking about the Diplo/Skrillex/Robot Heart incident?
ST: Yeah. I thought the vibe was horrible and I don’t stand for anything that Robot Heart believes in and who they are. But it was Jamie [Jones] and his friends who weren’t allowed on the bus, but he played anyway. Earlier in the night I got on the bus and the guy from Robot Heart was really rude to me…see they have a thousand DJs who that want to play there, and Craig Richards and I were like, “Yeah well we’re the ones who don’t.” And then we left, because they’re obnoxious assholes and I don’t have time for that.
Seth also has a lot to say about “Pop EDM vs the Underground”:
HJ: You’ve been quite outspoken this year in the whole ‘EDM vs underground’ debate and you believe they’re two completely different scenes. I was speaking to Sasha recently and he seems to share your view. I asked him whether or not he thought that eventually the kids in America who are into EDM will start to dig a little deeper and discover more obscure music. He wasn’t so sure. What do you think?
ST: Yeah I do think there will be a trickle down effect. Mass marketed EDM did bring in a lot of young 12 year-old kids who will hopefully one day get older and realise, wow this music fucking sucks. But they’ll also realize, OK I like dancing and I like electronic music and then they’ll find cool stuff. Or maybe they’ll find Gorgon City or whatever next level shit there is, and then hopefully give in to elitist, underground dance music [laughs].
But I do believe that our scenes are completely separate and should remain separate because our communities and end goals are completely different. To be honest I don’t think any of us want to be involved with them, even though there’s plenty of them who want to seem credible to us…but they never will be. So I’m just like, let’s stop playing games and acting like we should be involved with each other. You do your thing, we’ll do ours and we’ll call it a day. And please don’t ever mention yourselves in the context of real dance music. It would be so much better if they could just come clean and call themselves a pop act – they’re entertainers who make pop music. I didn’t get into dance music to hear it on the radio. I fucking hate the radio. The pay to play system goes against everything I stand for.
Read the entire amusing interview here.
Here’s an interview about Burning Man that Seth did with BBC’s Radio 1 in 2012.
Seth Troxler at Robot Heart in happier times, 2013
