Given that its name officially stands for Remix Artist Collective, you might expect a show by the Portland, Oregon–based RAC to play out like a typical EDM set, with one or more headphone-sporting producer types manning laptops or turntables.

RAC founder André Allen Anjos would like to disabuse you of that notion. On a tour bus heading up the West Coast between San Diego and Seattle—he’s not sure exactly where he is when the Straight reaches him by phone—Anjos notes that he did indeed spend his share of time behind the decks, touring the world as a globetrotting DJ.

“It was a blast, but it gets old pretty quickly,” he confesses. “With DJing it’s a certain kind of performance. It can be very fun, but you’re also a bit limited, in a way, in terms of performance. The songs are recorded. There’s only so much effects and little things that you can do to the songs. It starts to get stale after a while.”

If you go to an RAC gig these days, you’ll see Anjos on-stage wielding an electric guitar, backed by a full live band that includes drummer Jeff Brodsky along with Liz Anjos, Troupe Gammage, and Karl Kling, all of whom alternate singing with playing bass and keyboards.

And, yes, true to the group’s name, RAC does indeed play remixes, of a sort. Anjos is a talented remixer who, instead of aiming squarely at the dance floor, prefers to bring interesting new arrangements to the material he tackles. Recent RAC set lists have included live versions of songs by Foster the People, Two Door Cinema Club, Joywave, and ODESZA.

They have also included plenty of RAC’s own tunes. Last year, Anjos released Strangers, his first album of sparkling pop originals, which included collaborations with Tegan and Sara, MNDR, Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke, YACHT, and Tokyo Police Club.

More recently, though, Anjos has focused exclusively on singles, releasing one per month since this past June. The producer indicates that he might never again make a full-length record, since he figures no one actually listened to Strangers the way he intended it to be heard.

“It was meant to be like a singular piece of music, listened to from front to back. I spent so much time sequencing it. For example, I would listen to the whole album, and I would make a note whenever I caught myself thinking about other things, or when I was distracted. I made a note of where in the album that happened so I could go back to that area and work on it or cut it—basically, trim the fat.”

We are, however, living in an age of self-curation, where listeners are happy to trim the fat themselves. Anjos seems to have made peace with the idea that all the painstaking sequencing in the world won’t change the habits of modern music fans, who are just going to make their own selective playlists anyway.

“I just spent so much time working on that, and most people just listened to the singles,” he says with a resigned tone. “So I was like, ‘You know what? If that’s how it is, then I’m just going to embrace that. I’m not going to fight it.’ ”

RAC plays the Commodore on Thursday (November 26).