Flicker - Commentary Porter Robinson

""Flicker" is definitely one of my favourite songs on the album. I wanted to combine, like - my favourite album ever is Daft Punk’s “Discovery”, and with that, I think came a real love of soul-sample type stuff, so I started working with, messing with, and flipping soul samples, and I kinda landed on this, y'know, hip-hoppy little beat and I felt like that it was incomplete with just the drums, and with the soul-sample and the phaser. I don't think this was ever- when I first wrote "Flicker" it wasn’t meant to be a Worlds song. But, um, I had an mp3 or a wav file sitting on my desktop, of- I had used a text-to-speech program. Basically, I took a bunch of song titles, and translated them into Japanese, you know, not correctly at all just using an online translation tool. And, then I used the text-to-speech on it, and I made this little robot voice say all these song titles in Japanese of songs that would, I would never, song titles that would never be seen. And then I chopped it up into a rap, and that’s where you get that 'watashi wa' little hook from. And, uh, I just thought it was a little charming little thing. After I'd written that piece, I went into the next section with the lead melody and the different chord progression, and... y'know to me, "Flicker" is one of the songs that structurally goes to a lot of different places and it’s not meant to be a pop song, it’s more of a little journey. And, uh, yeah, I think it’s a charming song, and it's one of the ones I'm proudest of."