The Spin Doctor

When it comes to Vegas, Deadmau5 has a system:

"Go to the hotel, do a club, get absolutely wasted and then hit up the Chipotle by Harrah's the next day," the fast-rising Canadian DJ/producer says. "That's always been my Vegas experience, every time.

"It's bigger in my mind than it is in person," continues Deadmau5 (i.e. Joel Zimmerman). "You're flying in and you see all the stuff, and you're just like, 'Is that a model?' It's all surrounded by absolutely nothing, and then there's this little crazy town. You see it portrayed in the media and movies as being this absolute party central, taboo kind of place. Then you get there, and you try your hardest to live up to that."

In the past year or so, Deadmau5 (pronounced "dead mouse," a nickname he adopted after finding a deceased, rotting rodent in his computer) has plenty of reasons to celebrate.

He's established himself as one of the hottest, most in-demand DJs around, becoming the biggest selling artist on popular online electronic music store Beatport, being named "Producer of 2007" by trance kingpin Armin van Buuren and being celebrated by such tastemaking DJs as Pete Tong and Tiesto.

Not that Zimmerman seems all that interested in the attention.

Speaking with the dude on his many accolades of late, he possesses all of the enthusiasm of a guy organizing his sock drawer.

"I'm over it. I'm always really hard to excite anyway," Zimmerman deadpans. "All of a sudden, you're the next big thing in dance music, and it's just like, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa.' You're not going to argue it, you're not going to say, 'Wait, no, I didn't want this, just cancel the whole deal.' You've just got to roll with it. Now, the goal is transforming it into what I want it to be."

And what Zimmerman wants to be is a guy whose music isn't confined to the dance music ranks. He's made a name for himself by crafting tracks that flow beyond the traditional bounds of any of electronica's many subsets.

"One of the things that I knew that I could do was make music where it was like, 'OK, let's see if we can get this trance DJ, this house DJ and this techno DJ all to play the exact same song,' " Zimmerman explains.

And he's done that with a slippery style indebted to the heady intricacies of IDM, the immediacy of electro house and the anthemic nature of trance.

His latest disc, "Random Album Title," is both nuanced and huge sounding at once, a wild-eyed pastiche of zig-zagging beats and warped melody.

It's a diffuse sound rooted in Zimmerman's eclectic tastes growing up.

"I was one of those kids with the parents who got suckered into the Columbia House deal, 12 CDs for a penny or whatever," he recalls. "We'd be getting all these random CDs in the mail every month. I'd just kind of pop them in and have a listen, and that ranged from Steely Dan, U2, Tears for Fears, Radiohead. I think I started developing my tastes into more of the Radiohead zone, Boards of Canada, to the more obscure, Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, glitchy kind of stuff. That's something I'd emulate in my younger years."

As such, Zimmerman has become a gateway act of sorts, one of the handful of DJs who can resonate outside the electronic music community.

"At some festivals, I've been almost the only electronic act, where I've been stuck between a couple of bands and it's just kind of neat," he says. "I'll go home and check MySpace, and everyone's like, 'Wow, I don't normally listen to this stuff but you brought it and had fun.' I wouldn't go so far as to say that I'm changing lives and converting people into the four-four world of techno, trance and all that, but it's just cool that at least you're touching that."

Zimmerman will be one of the headliners of another large gathering this weekend when Deadmau5 performs at Fabulous Festival, which is being billed as one of the largest electronic music shows of its kind ever in Las Vegas.

But don't expect Deadmau5 to be a fixture of events such as this one in the future -- he's looking to spin heads more than vinyl discs.

"I guess what I'm trying to do in music and my future in live shows is to get out of this DJ booth that I've kind of been thrown in, " Zimmerman says. "I didn't grow up in the DJ world, and I don't aspire to be the number one DJ. It's a good beginning, a good starting point for me to get my music out there. But my ultimate goal is to kind of push off and do my own thing. I want reach out to all music lovers."

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.