A judicious side-step away from the plasticky insta-rush of EDM, it finds Zimmerman rebuilding his sound around the huge collection of classic and rare synths he’s lovingly assembled in his new studio. Well, if he’s unwilling to big up his eighth album, I’ll do it for him. but i mean… hey, if you like it i wanna like it too, just dont.
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it was like… so fucking rushed / slapped together. Some stuff I put out I’m pretty proud of, and some of it is just… work.” “I’d say there are 10,000 people within this field who do s**t way better than I do, but then there are six billion people on the planet who don’t, y’know what I mean? So you try to not get stuck in your own s**t too much. “It’s hard to talk to people that I respect like that because I don’t even respect my s**t, so how are they gonna, y’know ?” This gnawing self-doubt is something he’s learning to deal with. Interactions with producers that he admires, such as Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor or Venetian Snares’ Aaron Funk, invariably leave him racked with insecurity. Zimmerman’s not affecting a shrugging, punk-rock attitude here – he really does regard his own output semi-disdainfully. It’s just the culmination of three years of s**t lying around on a hard drive.” When I tell him I enjoyed his new album, ‘W:/2016ALBUM/’ (named after the desktop folder he kept the album files in), he responds with a confused, “Huh. The first electronic artist to grace the cover of Rolling Stone, he became a figurehead for the EDM scene before ferociously turning on it, unleashing scathing – and not unfounded – attacks on what he came to view as an ego-ravaged, greed-crazed and creatively moribund movement.Įven deadmau5 himself isn’t safe from the eviscerating judgement of deadmau5. Zimmerman delights in idly tapping his finger on his career’s self-destruct button. “But watch: I’ll tweet ‘BRB drowning a bag of kittens right now – and see who gives a s**t in three days.” He does just that – likes, RTs and ‘That’s not funny’ responses flood in within seconds. I mean, it’s not exactly helping it either…” He grabs his phone.
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That’s why I’m never like, ‘Oh man, this is really hurting my career.’ Like, it’s not. “I love the predictability of it: a celebrity says something dumb at me, then this happens, then this plays out like that, then it’s all forgotten the next day – then the next dumb thing happens. “All this Twitter beef s**t, it’s just funny – to me, anyway,” he shrugs, lighting the first cigarette in a two-hour chain. Situated an hour outside of Toronto in bleakly beautiful woodland, his $5m mansion is filled with exactly the kind of kooky artefacts you’d expect of a rave kid made good: a pickled human brain, a full-sized Alien Xenomorph, a gigantic Puma Clyde shoe, a stuffed two-headed calf (real, apparently), a stuffed three-headed duckling (also real), a stuffed moose (named ‘deadmoo5’, obvs)… The Aphex Twin tracks bleeding in from the next room add to the air of surreality. “I guess I rub people the wrong way,” he sighs, blessedly unclenching a little as he leads me into his cavernous living room.
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Fan of beef? Nobody cooks it better than Zimmerman. But Zimmerman’s infamous ire isn’t reserved solely for the media: his 15 million social media followers are regularly entertained by his bruising online clashes with the likes of Madonna, Kanye West, Skrillex, David Guetta, Arcade Fire and Justin Bieber. deadmau5’s fearsome way with journalists is the stuff of legend – the few interviews he does give usually crash and burn inside 60 seconds.