Born (January 5, 1981) and raised in Niagara Falls, Canada, Joel Zimmerman (aka "deadmau5") has become one of the most sought-after artists on the electronic music scene in recent times. He is known for his highly entertaining live gigs, often performing wearing a large cartoon mouse head. He first started his career as co-producer of the Niagara Falls radio show “The Party Revolution” (101.1 The Planet). After gaining exposure to all the many facets of electronic music, Joel then moved on to...
Born (January 5, 1981) and raised in Niagara Falls, Canada, Joel Zimmerman (aka "deadmau5") has become one of the most sought-after artists on the electronic music scene in recent times. He is known for his highly entertaining live gigs, often performing wearing a large cartoon mouse head.
He first started his career as co-producer of the Niagara Falls radio show “The Party Revolution” (101.1 The Planet). After gaining exposure to all the many facets of electronic music, Joel then moved on to collaborate with many other artists and record labels around the world.
In 2005, deadmau5 released his first album, "Get Scraped, which had many genres and was very different from his new sound." After that, he released Vexillology, in 2006. His first mainstream album, and his third album, was Random Album Title in 2008, which went towards a progressive house sound and featured many hit songs like Arguru, Not Exactly and I Remember, with Kaskade. His next album was For Lack of a Better Name, which had more of a tech house style. After that was 4x4=12, which contains his two released dubstep songs. His album > album title goes here < shows a few similarities to Get Scraped. His latest album is "while(1<2)," released in 2014.
He has worked with a number of artists both underground and mainstream - including Melleny Melody, Orgy, Kaskade, MC Flipside, Rob Swire of Pendulum, Skrillex, Tiësto and Steve Duda.
'Deadmau5', Zimmermans' DJ name, originates from an incident where a mouse crawled into his computer and died. He then posted on an internet forum of his shenanigans, and the members began calling him TheDeadMouseGuy. 'Dead Mouse' was too long for an IRC login name, so he abbreviated it to "deadmau5".
He has also done collaborations with top names such as Chris Lake, Glenn Morrison and Wolfgang Gartner.
January 2, 2012: On his birthday, Deadmau5 began his year long residency at XS Night Club in Las Vegas, NV.
Awards/Nominations: 1) Deadmau5 was ranked #6 on the DJ Mag Top 100 DJ Poll 2009, and #4 in 2010. 2) In 2009, he was nominated for Grammy Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical ("The Longest Road" (Deadmau5 Remix) by Morgan Page featuring Lissie) 3) In 2010, he won 3 awards from the international dance music awards. 4) He has been voted #1 DJ in the world by BeatPort. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.