Canadian producer Deadmau5 (pronounced “Deadmouse”) is not your garden-variety gear nerd. For a start he takes pride in his live shows; this is no shoe-gazing dude who barely acknowledges the crowd. Wearing his trademark oversized mouse head and exhorting ever more heat from the floor, Deadmau5 shows have a well-deserved solid reputation. Add in the fact that his tracks regularly pierce the top of Beatport charts and you’d think he’d be happy. Yet as we find out, he’s been experiencing the painful side of the doctor’s office thanks to illness whilst on tour, with antibiotic injections that involve his rear end. Confused? So are we.
So where are you at the moment?
Right now I’m in jolly old England.
Have you been there since the start of October?
Um, yeah, we’re doing all of October in the UK.
So how many needles in your arse have you had so far?
You like that one, eh? Fuck, that was brutal, it was so bad, it was so bad. As if he had to stick it in my butt, too. He could have probably put it anywhere, but he had to take the piss and stick it in my ass.
It’s definitely cruel and unusual punishment. How’s the tour going anyway?
Yeah, it’s going. I mean obviously it’s had its downs and y’know, that was one of them, but short of that the gigs have been nothing but amazing, if not sold out. Just off the hinges, really good. I’m very pleased.
So you’ve named your new release Random Album Title. Isn’t that a cop-out?
No, it’s an acronym. See that’s the genius, that’s the opposite of fucking the dog on that one. Actually I was gonna call it Rat and then we were like, ‘we should use some clever acronym’ and we’ve got a real weird sense of humour so it just worked out.
Fair enough, you must be happy it’s out.
Yeah, well I’m happy with the album. It’s more of a culmination of what happened this year for me. I do tend to get the odd message here saying, ‘yo, what the hell, this is all shit you’ve already put out, that don’t count.’ But in my defense it is a mix CD and I wanted a tangible product. Because I’ve never had anything like that in my whole career of making music, it’s just been all digital and no actual physical product in the hands of consumers and not just the DJs. So it’s really good to have a physical product that they can take put on their shelf.
It’s an ephemeral world we live in, with almost no physical releases these days.
Yeah exactly, I have the hardest time trying to explain to my parents what I do for a living. I’m stuck between a rock and a quiet place.
Your live shows are very visual affairs. It’s the way things are going isn’t it – two turntables or a laptop isn’t enough anymore.
Well, it kinda has been in that little world for a little while and will continue to be so. I don’t mean this in the wrong way, but that whole scene, the whole club scene is like one sixteenth of the picture I’m looking at. I feel like my favourite quote at the moment is that I’m fighting to get out of the DJ booth. I don’t not enjoy playing in clubs, I love it to death, it’s good fun and all that. But if I want to grow as an artist I’m gonna have to do different things and you can’t do much different in a 4x4 square foot area with a couple of monitors and drinks being spilled on you.
Are you looking forward to touring Australia?
Yeah, I’m stoked as hell, because me and my tour manager, we have this bet and it’s gonna be who can actually surf. Neither of us have tried it, so when we get a couple of days off we’re gonna go down to the Gold Coast and we’re gonna buy some boards. No lessons, no nothing, we’re just gonna go out like total idiots. Is this a dangerous thing? Like, no shark’s gonna come and rip my arm off, right?
Probably not. It’s unlikely.
Unlikely, I like the sound of that. [laughs]
Random Album Title is out through EQ/Stomp.