Porter Robinson makes music that's two parts sixteen-bit samurai and one part skull-crushing complextro. Even when he pulls back, it's still kind of in your face. From an early age, the North Carolina-born DJ learned the value of staying in attack mode. He recounts the experience of being an Internet flamethrower, trading barbs from the safety of his computer on famed insult website SomethingAwful.com. "It was a very advanced community," he says of his former career. "It was also very elitist. Me and my brother interacted on there without knowing it was one another for a while. I've definitely also gotten in Internet fights with my friends without realizing it was my friends."Not very atypical for your average millennial-born boy, no. But from there, Robinson indulged in his affinity for videogame culture even as his knowledge of the greater world was a little slower to develop. "I'd never seen a DJ ever," he says. "When I was 12 years old, the only music I really liked was Japanese video game music." As he began to hone his skills for making electronic music—he mentions a regimen that saw him slaving for 10 hours a day—the greater world began to take notice. "When I was 18 I had a song that happened to kind of like blow up on the Internet and people were suddenly asking me to DJ," he says. "It was very much baptism by fire for me."Now, he's played festivals across the world alongside artists like Tiesto and Skrillex, owning a bigger stage while keeping the same ironclad, battle-tested confidence that once served him well as a bomb-tossing teen. Yes, playing for thousands isn't quite the same as clicking "post," but one approach fuels the other. "I'm happy to be a part of it; I'm happy to go out and play beats that I think are cool," he says. "I think I've found a different way of coming into it." Who could say differently?