Toronto, Canada · progressive-house · electro-house · techno

Deadmau5

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The mouse head outlasted every trend it was supposed to date with. Joel Zimmerman builds progressive house like architecture — long, patient, cold-edged, and unbothered by the drop.

Deadmau5 is the recording name of Joel Thomas Zimmerman, born in 1981 in Niagara Falls, Ontario, where his mother worked as a visual artist and his father at a General Motors plant. He took an early interest in electronics, pulling apart household appliances, and started making chiptune music inspired by video games before moving into dance music as a teenager going to raves. The stage name comes from finding a dead mouse inside a smelly, dismantled computer.

He came to wide attention in the late 2000s and became one of the most recognisable figures in dance music during that period, performing in an oversized LED mouse helmet and behind a cube-shaped stage rig, having by then relocated to Toronto.

His music is largely instrumental progressive house, built on long arrangements and repeating arpeggiated figures rather than the compressed build-and-drop format common to much of the era's dance music; he has also produced electro house and, under the alias Testpilot, straight techno.

In 2007 he founded the label Mau5trap, which has released work by a range of other electronic producers, and he has been an outspoken commentator on production practices within the genre. He has recorded with Wolfgang Gartner, Rob Swire and Chris Lake, formed the duo BSOD with Steve Duda, and later paired with Kaskade as Kx5 and with Rezz as Rezzmau5.

His breakthrough came with the album Random Album Title in 2008, certified gold in Canada and silver in the UK and featuring the single Faxing Berlin. Later albums such as For Lack of a Better Name and 4x4=12 produced tracks including Ghosts n Stuff, Strobe and Sofi Needs a Ladder, and his work has earned him four Juno Awards and seven Grammy nominations.

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progressive-houseelectro-housetechno