Earlier this week, we reported on all the highlights of the recent Glastonbury festival in the UK. One of our favourite moments was when Joel Zimmerman, better known to music lovers as irreverent EDM producer Deadmau5, decided to troll the Glasto crowd.
Zimmerman apparently decided there was no better moment than when headlining Glastonbury’s Other Stage to reassert himself as the EDM world’s number one troll. In the middle of his set, the mouse-eared producer decided to have some fun with this whole “DJs just press play” thing.
After hitting play on his track ‘Seeya’, Zimmerman came out from behind his decks, cracked open a beer, and sat down on stage to share a cold one with Left Shark, the now-infamous sea creature from Katy Perry’s much talked-about Super Bowl halftime show.
After trolling the crowd, EDM’s critics, and Katy Perry, Zimmerman turned his attention to his Glastonbury peer Kanye West, disputing his self-proclaimed post as “the greatest rockstar of all time” by tweeting, “Fun fact: actually, I am the greatest rockstar of all time.”
However, it appears that Zimmerman wasn’t taking the piss, he really just had nothing better to do at the time. Speaking recently to the Vancouver Sun, via InTheMix, the producer revealed just why he’s started taking a mid-set breather during ‘Seeya’.
“A lot of people were speculating, ‘Oh, yeah! He’s anti press-play DJs and that’s why he did it,’” Zimmerman told the Vancouver Sun. “Actually, it’s because I had nothing better to do up there.” As the producer explains, it all has to do with the way he performs.
“So all of my show is more or less live, right?” Zimmerman continued. “So I’m banking out all these stems and I’m playing synths and I have MIDI going, recreating the original production as the show goes. So I was working on that [‘Seeya’] segment of the show and I lost all the stems for it.”
“So I was like, ‘Fuck, man!’ I gotta play that track because it’s a good little break. But I didn’t have any of the parts or the MIDI files – anything.”
“I can’t do a harmonica solo on top of it. So I said, ‘Fuck it. I’ll play the two-track (album version) back.’ But then what can I do? I could just sit there and fist-pump and at that point, then yes, I’m a DJ.”
“So I thought, ‘Let’s just get some goofy costumes and sit down and have a beer’ — a little improv theatre. Actually, it’s really great because after 90 minutes or 75 minutes or however long it is, I just want to take a seat.”
Being a DJ is the last thing Zimmerman wants, he explains, relating his reluctance to simply stand behind the decks and ‘press play’ to his extravagant new ‘Thunderdome’ stage setup, which was months in the making and much talked-about in EDM circles.
“There are easy ways to convey your music but I like to build more of a show around it, even though a lot of the principles remain the same: That I’m playing back a lot of premeditated things and pre-produced things but I’m not doing it with two $500 pieces of Pioneer shit and a glow stick in my mouth,” Zimmerman said.
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“The way I see it: If you’re going to pay a guy upwards of $500,000 to a million fucking dollars to stand on a stage in front of however many people at ‘X’ EDM event, if you’re not putting at least 200 grand into your stage show other than an LED wall and some backline stuff, it’s just the biggest ripoff.”
That said, Zimmerman admits there’s some theatre involved in his own show, and not just when he comes out to sit down with his shark buddy. “My thing with live performance is that it’s only useful to me on stage if it’s useful in the studio,” he said.
“I’m more likely to click a mouse and draw around on a screen than I will use some obscure, esoteric control surface to do something you could just program in. It’s show pony shit, the touch screen stuff. It really is.”
“I’d rather be turning a small knob that not anyone can see, you know what I mean? As far as doing stuff efficiently, touch screen is not the way to go — it’s not ‘the future of DJing’ — but it looks cool.”
