From the kind of questions that Sonny Moore finds himself answering over and over and over again, you’d think we’re living in a bygone era where rockers and techno fans didn’t mix any better than Sarah Palin supporters and disciples of Jello Biafra. Interviewers evidently have a hard time reconciling the fact that the 22-year-old electronica renegade known as Skrillex was once the teenage frontman for emo-punkers From First to Last.

“The first question is always ”˜How did you make the transition from rock to electronic music,’?” Moore relates, on the line from his Los Angeles home. “I always answer ”˜There’s never been a transition because I’ve always been making electronic music.’ The only transition was when I decided to make music on my own. Electronic music happens to be the platform where I’m able to do that.”

Like any music junkie who’s come of age in the iPod era, Moore is one of those guys conditioned to believe that there’s nothing wrong with having Daft Punk and the Dead Kennedys on the same playlist. The producer is amped on the day he talks to the Straight because he’s just been in the studio working with Korn, a band that was responsible above all for getting him hooked on rock ’n’ roll. But Moore gets just as excited when relaying how Prodigy turned him onto the idea of working with more than old-fashioned bass, drums, and guitars.

“Prodigy was the first band where I was like ”˜Okay, this is EDM, this is breaks, this is electronic music,’” he notes. “But I didn’t discover the idea of programming until I was 13 years old and discovered the Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy EP. That’s when I started working on making songs on things like FruityLoops. I’ve been making records since a very young age.”

Indeed, even though he’s barely able to legally order a drink in the States, Moore is already a veteran producer, this borne out by his work on the recently released EP Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, which finds him signed to Deadmau5’s mau5trap Recordings imprint. A follow-up to the 2010 debut My Name is Skrillex, which he released on the Internet for free, Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites positions the musicians in the same banging section of electronic music battlefield as Prodigy, Justice, and Deadmau5, his dubstep, house, grime, and [insert favourite genre here] songs typically jacked to the max with machine-gunned beats and synapses-frying synth blasts.

Despite already being able to hold his own against such heavyweights, Moore considers himself someone who is only now finding his footing as a beatmaker.

“It was only a year and a half ago where I really started to focus on sound design and making things sound good, which is a huge part of EDM,” he says. “I had the writing part down to where I could make good melodies and come up with good ideas. Now it’s a matter of making things loud and making them interesting.”

As Skrillex, Moore is obviously onto something, that being confirmed every time he looks out at his audience these days. From what he sees on the floor, the days of rockers and electronica fans being tribes divided are now officially in the past.

“Times and lifestyles have changed to where everyone is sort of coming together as one in their tastes,” he says. “The world has changed a lot since seven years ago when I was first in From First to Last. There are definitely people crossing over. But mostly I’m just happy that people are coming out.”

Skrillex plays a sold-out show at UBC’s Pit Pub on Thursday (January 13).