Deadmau5

.. really. In the garden this afternoon when I was mowing the lawn... poor little fella.

he must be all electro-ed out

Did he happen to have his new tune on him?


The one that goes braaap braaap bra brappp braaaaaaaaa

great post

snigger

poor wee mousy!

From and interview with him in a local music rag...



...

lol.. Surely he didn't say that??? If he did then he's the most self-deluded tard since Ingrosso discovered a CD of obvious drum loops.

Here is the full interview


WHERE’S THE CHEESE?


CANADIAN PRODUCER JOEL ZIMMERMAN HAS HAD MORE COLUMN SPACE DEVOTED TO HIM THAN ANY OTHER ELECTRONIC ARTIST OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS FOR HIS WORK UNDER THE DEADMAU5 MONIKER – THAT’S ‘DEAD MOUSE’ TO THE NOOBS AMONG YOU.

On the surface Joel Zimmerman is in one of the most enviable positions of any act in electronic music at the tail end of 2008. Already this year he has won four Beatport awards (including best single for ‘Not Exactly’), topped the Beatport charts with release after release, and become the highest ever new entry into DJ Mag’s Top 100 Poll by charting at #11 in this year’s popularity contest.
On the flipside, he’s starting to feel the heat of the inevitable backlash. Swedish producer Marcus Schossow started a shit storm when he parodied Zimmerman’s early classics ‘Faxing Berlin’ and ‘Not Exactly’ as ‘Printing Russia’ and ‘Very Exactly’ under the Deadrat6 alias, Internet forums from In The Mix to Trance Addict (where Zimmerman has vigourously defended himself) have debated the relative merits of his productions, and he memorably told the Irish Daily Star that DJs are “like fucking lawyers: you need them but they’re all fucking cunts” shortly before being voted in the upper echelons of the same profession (for the record, Zimmerman only ever performs live).
But love him or hate him, it’s hard to argue with his impressive output since coming to the attention of most through his remix of ‘NuFunk’ by Australia’s own NuBreed in early 2007. Since then he’s collaborated with everyone from San Francisco house legend Kaskade (on the big singles ‘Move For Me’ and ‘I Remember’) to BSOD and even the unlikely alliance with Tommy Lee, DJ Aero and Steve Duda for the WTF? Project, and turned in remixes of classic anthems like Hybrid’s ‘Finished Symphony’ and Energy 52’s ‘Café Del Mar’ to mixed response along the way.
To top things off, the giant mouse costume he had custom built for his press shots has now become his trademark, meaning turning up for a performance means much more than plugging some gear in and pressing play.
“Unfortunately it’s just turned into this big uncontrollable monster thing that I have to turn up with every time now,” Zimmerman says from London in the middle of a 20-date stint through Europe. “It just started off as a bit of a laugh, and now it’s become a part of [the live show].”
In this digital age where only the most successful of producers can make a living through sales of their music alone, touring and performing is their bread and butter. And although Deadmau5 is one of the lucky few, with ‘Faxing Berlin’ and ‘Not Exactly’ racking up sales of 30,000 between them on Beatport, time spent on the road has had an impact on a prolific release schedule which has still seen him credited with 156 releases on the same site over the past two and a bit years.
“I was pumping them out like no tomorrow when I wasn’t touring and playing shows so much,” Zimmerman admits. “It started every weekend I’d go out to play shows on Thursdays and get back on Monday, so I’d really only have Tuesday and Wednesday to really sit down and work on music, so my output came to a staggering halt. Then it was like once a month that I’d get a chance to actually finish a track, and now it’s like forget it! But some time in between this tour I think I’m going to take a month off to try and work on some more tunes.”
Somehow Zimmerman has found time in the middle of his touring schedule to piece together the Random Album Title long-player, a de facto Best Of 2007/08 collection interspersed with new cuts like the melodic minimal prog of ‘Slip’ and more conventional trance of ‘Brazil’. Where most acts slave over album projects for months on end, Zimmerman is blasé when asked about the first official album to surface under the Deadmau5 moniker.
“This album is just like a quick kind of two-week job,” he says. “There were a lot of pre-existing tracks that I’ve already had, so it’s kind of like a compilation so to speak, but it falls technically as an album because it features all my own productions. Most of the tracks were already finished, so I just finished off a couple more tracks to put on there.
“It’s more of an IOU for everyone that wanted a tangible good, because for the longest time you could only get my stuff as digital. Now you can run out to your retailer and get yourself an actual tangible disc which is something really neat.”
Although the music of Deadmau5 runs the full gamut of 4/4 dance music from minimal to trance to electro and even techno, it was with the epic progressive house stylings of his breakthrough track ‘Faxing Berlin’ that Zimmerman truly made his mark. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then he would have been blushing like a bride as acts like Adam K & Soha, Glenn Morrison and Inpetto lined up to commandeer his signature throbbing strings and pads, but he’s surprisingly dismissive about the threat of copycats to his sound.
“[Being copied] just means you’re doing something right,” Zimmerman states. “It didn’t piss me off, it’s not like they were coming to my house and robbing me at gun point, you know? It pissed me off a bit, but music is music, it’s appreciated by all. I didn’t invent the eighth note, or the kick drum, right?
By the sounds of recent singles ‘Ghosts N Stuff’ and ‘Hi Friend’ featuring MC Flipside (currently on ultra-high rotation on Triple J), Zimmerman is several steps ahead of the imitators with a sound that has far more in common with electro and even fidget house.
“I’m always good to do something different every now and again just to keep myself from going crazy,” he explains. “Plus playing sets and playing other people’s music lately, I’m always thinking I’ve got to make a track that’s a bit different or more along these lines so it will mix in nicely during a set. I was on the biggest Shlomi Aber trip for the longest time, that kind of minimal, jacking techno stuff, but nobody really stands out in particular. Just a bit of everything.”
Zimmerman has held true to this anything goes ethos since he was a teenager making tunes on tracking software on an old 386 in his hometown beside Niagara Falls, with his original musical experiments evolving as he added more gear to his set-up over time.
“[My early tracks] were really glitch, really IDM, really Aphex Twin and Squarepusher sort of stuff. I don’t make as much now as I’d like to, but that’s something I’m going to save for my second album. That’s going to be a proper artist album you know, there might not be any dance music on there, just really good stuff. Stuff that I like.”
So you don’t like dance music?
“Dance music is really hit and miss because it all sounds the same to me,” he laughs. “You’ve got people going ‘this is trance, this is house, this is progressive house, oh and this is minimal house’ and I’m like ‘oh fuck, dude, it’s all electronic music to me’, you know?”
WHO: Deadmau5
WHAT: Random Album Title (Ministry Of Sound UK/Stomp)
WHERE & WHEN: Good Vibrations, Gold Coast Parklands, Saturday Feb 21

BY KRIS SWALES

Funny shit, i quite like that comment about djs being lawyers and cunts, especially true in auckland i feel...