“This is just the beginning. I got here because I’m a real musician.” 

So says Israeli renegade Asaf Borgore (otherwise known as plain old Borgore), who enters the Top 100 for the first time this year, as a reflection of him being one of the key artists in the explosion of dance music across the US, the country that he now calls home. Playing the main stage of the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas was just one of his high points in 2014.

While he was associated during his rise with the thunderous sounds of dubstep, he’s since evolved well beyond what anyone would have expected, with a mishmash of sounds that takes in electro house, trap and beyond. It’s there in all its messy glory on his ‘#NEWGOREORDER’ album, that dropped this year. “It's a funny comic agenda but at the same time, pretty serious,” he says in his own words of the album. “We used [A Clockwork Orange actor] Malcolm McDowell as the voice of my '#NEWGOREORDER'. I wrote him a script, and it’s both a semi-funny and semi-serious agenda for life.”

It’s an approach he says is played both for fun, as well as having a serious side. He’s certainly not afraid to have a bit of fun, with his music, his gigs and his image, though he claims there’s a subtext to it. “I think I’m using my music to subliminally pass serious criticism on our society.”

He has some detractors, culminating in Buzzfeed naming him as ‘The Most Hated Man in EDM’ this year. However, he insists the controversy doesn’t weigh him down.

“I laugh at it. My first unofficial album was ‘The Filthiest Hits…So Far’, so obviously I’m not afraid of criticism.”