I Went To A Skrillex Takeover At Moog, and I Totally Get EDM Now.

I wasn't particularly looking forward to this one, to be honest.

In a review of last year's Sonar Festival in Barcelona, I admitted that I'd been preparing to present Sonny Moore's appearance at the festival as exhibit A in my case for the entire festival having jumped the shark. In the end though, I had been at least partially won over. Won over not by his music, which inspires almost total indifference in me ('Scary Monsters & Nice Sprites' aside of course, that's a cast-iron guilty-pleasure "choon!" that will forever be synonymous with giddy half-cut trips to the cinema to see Spring Breakers yet again), but by the endearing sight of a by-all-accounts delightful little man in a Barcelona football shirt standing atop his spacecraft cockpit-style DJ booth, leading the crowd through a gloriously cheesy intro of a dubstepped-up version of Queen's 'Barcelona', and then launching [them] into a strain of saucer-eyed, pogo-hopping delirium.

But that was in the balmy, anything-goes midst of a Catalan summer that just kept on giving, and Moore had played at a point in the proceedings when I was in such a "festive" mood, that I may well have been equally impressed if he'd just stood at the lip of the stage shaking a can of beans for an hour and half. This, the first of four Takeover shows on four consecutive nights in four different clubs in Barcelona, was on a chilly Wednesday evening in February. I had a raging cold, and none of my friends would touch my plus-one with a barge-pole. It was clearly going to be horrible.

On the other hand, the Skrillex Takeovers concept, which had brought hot-and-cold running Skrillex to San Francisco (seven shows), Brooklyn (five) and Amsterdam (five) in the weeks before this, just seemed too weird and intriguing to miss. Especially this stop, at El Raval's Moog club; an extremely dinky premises that boasts a dance floor slightly larger than a normal postage stamp, but slightly smaller than one of those special jumbo stamps with a tourist board slogan on it. So along I went, pinning my hopes on the novelty factor and Frenadol to carry me through.

With the club still sparsely populated for Odd Parents' support DJ set (typical picks: 'Issst' by Tiefschwarz, and a heavily caffeinated remix of Kavinsky's 'Night Call') I wandered outside and talked to a smattering of fans, none of whom remotely conformed to the stereotype of an obnoxious Skrillex "bro". His arena shows in the American heartland are probably a bit different but here, polite, eager-to-talk kids were the order of the day. Typical among these was a local girl called Esther, who told me she was excited to see Skrillex in such a small venue and hoped to find him at the end and have him sign her ticket, and who then enthusiastically gathered her friends up so I could photograph them. Bless.

A couple from Manchester waiting to get in were the only non-Catalans I encountered all night. The guy said he was involved in putting on various cool-sounding warehouse parties back home. "So, eeerrr, do you actually like Skrillex?" I asked. "Yes," he said unequivocally. "We're quite evolved musically, so…" and with that they were ushered through the door. Somehow I managed never to see them again inside, leaving what to me will always be one of the great unfinished sentences hanging in the air. Full of nicotine and Paracetamol, I ducked back inside in time to see the floor morph from that of a particularly sedate off-season Moog mid-weeker into a scrum of outstretched smart phones, as Moore bounded into the DJ booth and began playing.

There had been much speculation that Moore might be planning something a bit different for this show, with the idea that a house set was on the cards seeming to gain particular traction. In the end though, his selection would have sat well at any major EDM festival; serrated, zipping fare by the likes of Oliver, Alvin Risk and Jack Beats giving way to a torrent of his own material as the night progressed. 'Bangarang', 'The Summit' and 'Rough Neck' all drew rapturous crowd reactions, but, not being 'Scary Monsters & Nice Sprites', left me in Louis Theroux mode as an interested but detached observer. Interested I was though - certainly enough to ensure that the night never threatened to turn into the kind of thankless grind I had anticipated.

Beyond that, it was notable that the pleasant, obliging vibe established earlier persisted through even the most frenzied moments of the night. While I was struggling to identify a track on Shazam a guy next to me typed the title and artist into his phone, and showed me it with a smile and a thumbs-up. The air of positivity even flourished in the minutes after someone accidentally shattered the plexiglass shield between the DJ booth and crowd (the one part of Moog, the venue's promoter told me with a rueful smile afterwards, that had never before been broken). Moore, who frequently took to the mic throughout the evening, implored those close to the broken glass to be careful, as security cleared up and established a cordon so he could continue playing. "Can we still have a good time?", he inquired before starting again. "Let's go crazy, but let's take care of each other too!" To which the only reasonable response is "Awww, bless".

As the club gradually emptied at the end I talked to a local DJ who played in Moog's inexplicably open-for-business upstairs room, which I looked in on on three separate occasions and found to be entirely empty every time. "I'll still be writing 'played alongside Skrillex' at the top of my resume first thing tomorrow though," he laughed. In a city where the major dance music festival has enthusiastically adopted Skrillex as one of their own (the Barcelona Takeovers were billed as 'Sonar Presents…'), who could blame him?

Then I made what would have been a fatal mistake had I been planning a hatchet job: I went over and talked to Skrillex. I won't say that a one-on-one encounter with him is the end of all journalistic objectivity, but his is a level of warmth and charm that wouldn't be easy to just shrug off. In the couple of minutes I spent with him I was unable to ask him much, because he was too busy enthusiastically and attentively asking questions about me. Did I think it was better that they'd restricted the size of the crowd? How long had I been living here? Did I want to stay in Barcelona long-term or move elsewhere? The "by-all-accounts" part of that Sonar review shall now be stricken from the record: Skrillex is indeed delightful.

SKRILLEX SELFIE

Reviewing one of the San Francisco Takeover nights, a writer from SPIN magazine concluded that "You need [EDM] more than it needs you". I'm not totally sure how that works. It certainly doesn't need me, but despite its ubiquity I'm fairly sure that I "need" EDM as much now as I ever did: i.e. not in the slightest. I've also found that cunning lifestyle devices such as not buying records by Afrojack, and not volunteering to go and have cakes thrown at me at Steve Aoki gigs, have been almost 100% effective in keeping my EDM consumption on a scale of my choosing.

What is true, though, is that it's a cultural phenomenon that isn't going anywhere. Whether or not you, I or anyone else cares to get upset about it, and with the money hose continuing to gush and millions of young fans around the world hanging on their every move, the thought of a 32-year-old with an Innervisions fixation being onboard with their sound is unlikely to be keeping any of the scene's leading lights awake at night.

Skrillex's apparently spur-of-the-moment round of cross-continental "Takeovers", even down to the name, points up once more the reality that he and the rest of the premier league of EDM producers now possess levels of fame and wealth that mean they can do whatever they like, whenever they like. And, as depressing a thought as that is when appended to certain, preening EDM contemporaries of his, we can at least be sure that in the hands of someone as uncommonly generous, sincere and humble as Sonny Moore, that power will always be used with the very best of intentions.

Kit MacDonald is living in Barcelona, and semi-begrudgingly going to EDM nights at the behest of THUMP. He's on Twitter here: @kitmacdonald