Cartoons and confetti on a weeknight sound like a child’s dream and Porter Robinson’s Worlds show at the Enmore Theatre was a dream of sorts. He moved through the new record almost seamlessly with striking visuals and festival-sized effects that made it feel like there was more than one young producer up on stage.
Porter brings a physicality to his performance that is more common among instrumentalists than electronic producers: he leans into his equipment, scrunches up his face when working the effects and sways back and forth when playing melody lines. It’s a one-man show up there and Porter was reaching for his sweat towel in between tracks. He also sung vocals live on “Sad Machine”, frank and sentimental, but almost impossible to hear under the footy crowd cheering coming from the audience.
Porter has been known to discourage audiences associating his live show with a rave. He doesn’t ask anyone to make noise, put their hands up or jump – but the crowd did just that the whole set running. In fact, Porter spoke three times throughout his set, very briefly, except for the final goodbye when he expressed his love for Sydney and said he had enjoyed himself, “I think this is my seventh time in Sydney but in a way this feels like the first time, it was so great.”
He kicked off his set with delicate Worlds track “Sea of Voices” and later moved into more club-friendly Spitfire tracks. The visuals were striking and intuitive to the music, shifting from abstract patterns and psychedelic tunnels to his characteristic Japanese anime and of course constant white strobe flashes which really rattled everyone up. The anime visuals especially gave life to the Japanese spoken samples in “Flicker”.
Even when he wasn’t singing into the mic, Porter was singing along to his tracks (mind you, so was the whole Enmore Theatre.) I can only imagine what his Splendour In The Grass set will be like, given the huge crowd sing-alongs at the Enmore, from “Loving You is Easy” (Easy) to “Fresh Static Snow” and finally his youth anthem “Lionhearted”.
Porter seems shy, he doesn’t say much or wear costume, but his live sound tells a different story. At one point, I was standing next to the speakers and beer cans were flying off the surface next to it. But despite the ruckus, it all comes down to a producer who really loves his music and is quite solemn about it – just like a newbie crowd member, he turned around to watch his own visuals of a PlayStation typing out: ‘Your mind is a world, each one of us is a place.’
