Sonny Moore, a.k.a. Skrillex, beeps to top of electronic dance music scene

Norfolk — Sonny Moore, the 23-year-old better known as Skrillex, wears his hair in long, inky knots. Traces of lunch form a crusty archipelago down the front of his shirt. To see the world through his eyes is to spend countless hours staring at a laptop through a pair of black-framed glasses — lenses smudged cloudy with fingerprints.

And his computer is a mess, too.

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“Each song has, like, 50 versions,” he says, searching for a particular project file in Ableton Live, the software program he uses to create the sounds that have helped define America’s current electronic dance music boom.

He cracks the files open like Easter eggs and out come dragons: riotous digital beats and cartoonish belches of bass powerful enough to cast a spell on the hyper-stimulated children of the Internet.

Electronic dance music — or EDM — has never been more popular in America than it is right now. The music of Deadmau5, Bassnectar and other producer-DJs like Skrillex has managed to penetrate Middle America in a way that late-’90s electronica and the fragmented U.S. rave scene never did. Now, EDM festivals are popping up all across the country and drawing massive crowds — and Moore has become the literal face of the movement. You can find him triumphantly smirking on the latest cover of Spin.

He’s two weeks deep into a sprawling 51-city tour that will bring him to places such as Syracuse, Asheville, Spokane — towns not traditionally associated with dance-floor futurism. (He performs in the District at Fur on Thursday.) But for a generation of Web-addled teenagers in desperate need of recession-era escape, Skrillex’s arrival couldn’t have come sooner. “Everybody is coming out to these things,” Moore says. “Girls that like to dance, metal dudes . . . hip-hop dudes . . . ravers. Everybody, man!”

But along with that quick embrace has come an equally rapid backlash. Skrillex’s breakout 2010 EP, “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites,” earned Moore the immediate scorn of the dubstep purists — fans of the dizzying, bass-centric British music that Moore has mutated into new, juggernaut forms. Meantime, some bloggers have mocked his hair as mercilessly as his music.

But Moore, who endured a tumultuous family life and has been on the road since he was 16, dismisses the naysayers. “It’s just someone’s opinion,” he says.

Hunting for beats

Backstage at his Tuesday gig in Norfolk — hours before fans arrive — Moore is planted on a couch, furiously clicking away at his computer as he hunts for that missing beat.

He opens a file, hits play, lets the bass serrate the greenroom silence, tweaks the levels, hits save, closes the file, opens a new file, hits play.

He spends nearly all of his waking hours making music this way — like a crazed painter darting around his studio adding a brush stroke to one canvas, a dab to another. He’s currently at work on more than a hundred songs, some of which have nearly a hundred individual tracks.

He probably sees Ableton’s ­candy-colored grids in his sleep. Only, “I can’t sleep, man,” Moore says. “I can’t sleep until I’m about to pass out.” He compares working himself toward exhaustion on a daily basis to life on a farm: “If you miss one day, your crops will go bad, your chickens will get sick. And it’s every single day of your life.”