Deadmau5

Zimmerman has been a computer geek since early adolescence, when his uncle gave the family what Zimmerman refers to, lovingly, as a “crappy 486.” “It was amazing at the time,” he says of the primitive PC. “I started making blips and bleeps with basic tracking programs.” Growing up in Niagara Falls, Ontario, the middle son of an artist mom and an auto-worker dad, Zimmerman took some after-school piano lessons, but from the moment he laid hands on the 486, he says, “electronic music was in the cards for me.”

His mother, Nancy, recalls that, as a kid, “Joel kind of isolated himself and was even ostracised, because he was a little weirdo, a little nerd. He liked the kids who had the same interests as him, but when he started with computers, that was the end of that. They’d come over and see this blue screen and say, ”˜This isn’t fun, Joel, let’s go ride our bikes.’ He wasn’t social, and he still isn’t. He lives in his computer.”

In high school, Zimmerman wore parachute pants, had spiky yellow hair and wore necklaces he’d fashioned out of the bouncy balls that fill toddlers’ playpens. He went to raves, even though his tastes tended toward Nine Inch Nails and other heavy industrial acts. “My friends were going, so I was like, ”˜Fuck it, I’ll go see some cool music,’” he says. He wasn’t some hippieish, Peace-Love-Unity-Respect type. He doesn’t even do drugs. After he’d tried LSD once and weed a handful of times ”“ freaking out miserably with each experience ”“ a doctor diagnosed him with something called neurocardiogenic syncope and recommended that he forswear drugs entirely. “My brain and my heart don’t communicate the way they’re supposed to,” Zimmerman says. “Drugs can make it worse.”

Which means something oddly poignant: Zimmerman will never experience his music the way 99 per cent of his audience does. His ability to appreciate dance music from a sober, often ironic distance, though, is the hallmark of his career. After high school, he moved to Toronto, where he rented a basement apartment for $750 a month and became the in-house producer for a local dance label called Play Records ”“ a job that paid $800 a month. “I had a $50 food budget,” he says. “My apartment smelled like piss from the guy’s bathroom upstairs. That was fun.” (He came up with his name when a mouse crawled into a computer he was fixing and fried; the mouse-head logo was originally a shadow-testing model Zimmerman designed while rendering 3D graphics.)

His breakthrough hit was an ironic-distance tour de force. Produced with his pal Steve Duda in 2006, ”˜This Is the Hook’ is a house track, Zimmerman says, “about how simple it is to make a house track.” As the drums pound and the synth line chugs, a computer voice leads a guided tour of the clichés on display: “Now it is time for the breakdown”¦ Let’s filter the high-hat”¦ Let’s filter the chords”¦” Calling themselves BSOD (an acronym for Blue Screen of Death, a Windows-themed joke), the pair posted the song on Beatport.com, a dance-music version of iTunes, where it went to Number One. “We were like, ”˜What the fuck?’” Zimmerman says. “I figured that if I took this more seriously I could actually make something of it.”

Today, Zimmerman balances his cynicism-flecked sense of what tricks work and a genuine sonic adventurousness. “You don’t think of electronic musicians as necessarily having great senses of rhythm ”“ they just punch a bunch of buttons,” says Tommy Lee. “But Joel’s beats are crazy.” Adds Patrick Moxey, president of Deadmau5’s label, Ultra Records, “There’s almost a sense of humour with his music. The sounds take all these unexpected twists and turns. It’s not a formula ”“ it’s alive.”

So it’s funny that Zimmerman, so adept at soundtracking communal experiences, is so anti-social. More precisely, he’s post-social: While he crafts his tunes in solitary confinement, he likes to AIM with his mom, text with Evans, update his Facebook status, videotape himself and Professor Meowingtons horsing around, and post the clips to YouTube. Last year, he fell in love with Minecraft ”“ a low-fi, multi-player online “sandbox game” in which there is no objective but to build stuff. He devoted a server to hosting games, naming it Mau5ville and inviting Minecraft players to log on and go wild. “When I go on, people just follow me around, watching what I’m doing,” he says, incredulous. “I never get recognised on the street, but in Minecraft, I’m mobbed. I had to designate areas that only I can enter, just so I could play in peace.”