From Deadmau5 To Your House

At a time when house music’s four-on-the-floor thump has become pop’s back­bone, from Lady Gaga to Usher to the Black Eyed Peas, Zimmerman has carved out his own space between the Hot 100 and the club ghetto, combining body-moving discotheque utilitarianism with over-the-top, Gaga-level showbiz theat­ricality. As Zimmerman puts it, “I’m the Gene Simmons of electronic music.” In the past year, he headlined Coachella’s dance tent, became the first electronic artist to sell out the 17,500-capacity Earls Court in London, rocked Ibiza residencies and served a high-profile gig as the MTV Video Music Awards’ in-house DJ.

Deadmau5 concerts are events. They feature not just the mouse helmet but also a massive LED rig, the centerpiece of which is an LED cube that flashes and strobes in time with musical cues, Zim­merman standing inside. And Deadmau5 s fans are a multi(sub)cultural melange who show up wearing their own homemade mouse heads: a level of goofy, performa­tive fandoni that calls to mind Trekkies. Zimmerman loves his cult. Helmet not­withstanding, he doesn’t want to be some faceless party facilitator. He wants to be a rock star. The first time I performed wear­ing the mouse head, I noticed that people weren’t dancing,” he recalls. “They were standing there watching me. I liked that.” On a January evening, Zimmerman is in the studio, working on a new song, chain-smoking Du Mauriers and chain-chugging Coke. Pale and famine-victim thin, he cultivates the look (and sarcasm-tinged crankiness) of what you could call a badass nerd: He’s heavily tattooed, with a Space Invaders alien on his neck and four pixelated hearts — the old Legend of Zelda life meter — inked across his left forearm. Through an engineer buddy, he’s become buds with Motley Criie drummer Tommy Lee, whom he hangs with in L.A., basking in their mutual gear-geekery and turning to the elder musician for guid­ance. “Anything I go through, he’s already gone through a hundred times,” Zimmer­man says. His girlfriend, Lindsey Gayle Evans, was the October 2009 Playboy centerfold. She approached him after the VMAs, declaring her fandom, and they bonded over their appreciation of Inter­net humor, quoting from viral videos like they’re Shakespearean love sonnets.

An extended, ominous riff blares over the studio monitors. For Deadmau5, com­ing up with a melody is only the beginning. He slaves over his waveforms, fussing and tinkering with filters, switches and oscilla­tor knobs until the sound is just so. “Build­ing patches from the ground up makes your shit stand out,” he says. “Dance music is stuck in this place where any kid can buy some software — or pirate it — and just use the presets.”

As the melody loops, Zimmerman, wearing a tight Moog T-shirt, loose jeans and chunky white athletic socks, adds a crunchy arpeggio and other distortion ef­fects until the riff achieves a scalding fury. Like any dance-floor maestro worth his glow sticks, Zimmerman is a technician of denial and satisfaction, his live show a fine­ly calibrated series of teasing buildups, or­giastic crescendos and sudden drop-offs. When he’s composing a song, he starts with the money shot and works his way down. “I like to get as loud and intense as possible, and then strip parts away,” he says.

This, at least, has been the Deadmau5 MO for his first three albums, party-start­ing sets of anthemic synthesizer squelch and four-four thudding that, in their fist-pumping dynamics, owe nearly as much to arena rock as they do to house and elec­tro. But for album number four — “my art­ist album,” he calls it, with rough plans to complete it this spring — he wants to switch it up. “It’s going to be an album, start to fin­ish,” he says. “Actual song-songs. Get away from that fucking club shit.” He wants to be recognized for more than delighting people on Ecstasy: “I might sing on it.”

He fires up another song. The tempo is slower, heavy rock drums replace the typ­ical kick-snare thwack and a snarling gui­tar, not a synthesizer, is front and center. In a low-effect baritone, Deadmau5 him­self sings opaque, vaguely melancholic lyrics. “My manager hates this, cause it never kicks in, you know?” Zimmerman says. “And I play it live and the people hate it, ’cause it never drops.” I ask him how concerned he is about those reactions.

“Pfft,” he says, dismissively. He panto­mimes jerking off.