I don't believe there's a cap on creativity and passion.
Deadmau5
I didn't come up as a DJ, so I don't play by DJ rules.
I'm a video game enthusiast. I love video games! They were a huge part of my upbringing in their early form, when I was all about 'Dig Dug' and 'River Raid.' As they evolved, so did my music-making, and we just kind of grew up together like cool friends.
Going out and being nice to the world at large doesn't make me feel good, so I replace that with things, with technology that does get me excited and does get my brain spinning, until one day it stops spinning, and then you can bury me.
When I'm working on something and need to take a little break, I'll go down and play some video games.
If I had a nickel for every time someone asked, 'When are you doing an album?' My career is way too transparent to do say, 'Guess what - I've got 16 tracks you've never heard!'
God bless Skrillex. I love the kid, but he puts out a new video, what, every four weeks? I'm like the Dos Equis guy. I don't normally do music videos, but when I do, I go big.
I've got $130 million in the bank and a whiteboard full of cool ideas for emerging markets and technologies where we're gonna test the waters and see what happens.
I like to consider myself an all-rounder, and I'm not trying to be King of the Scene or anything. I'd like to do everything, from writing film scores to producing pop albums.
I get anxiety from a noise or some scuffling at the side of the stage. I hear stories all the time, from as minor as Dillon Francis getting smacked in the head with a flying beer can to Dimebag Darrell.
Usually, companies, when they approach other people to do VR, they're like, 'We're gonna offer a virtual reality experience' - to me, that usually means they're gonna put a bunch of 360° cameras in a room, film something, and wrap the video in a sphere so you can head-track and look around. To me, that's not virtual reality. That's 360° video.
I'm not a DJ. I play live and think we put on a show. That's it.
I like to think of 'the studio' as a laboratory where I can go in, learn tricks, apply, revise, and release. I'd figure I had about the same emotional attachment to my craft as a guy over at NASA does over... NASA stuff.
The way I see EDM right now, it's a healthy industry for sure - minimal work for maximum profit.
Creamfields is, without doubt, 1 of the highlights of year for me. I really can't wait to come back.
I do this sort of thing where, even for my own shows, I like to supply my own fingerprint of creativity. Not just ideas, technical things: offering model data, creating visuals for my stage show myself, babysitting renders, learning that technology as I go. That's what makes me feel like an artist.
I get to listen and enjoy music that is partially mine. Maybe influenced and guided. I created some simple outlines, but ultimately, I'm hearing a derivative work.
I'd like to think I wouldn't get booed off stage if I chose not to wear the head - I did gigs prior to having the head made and never had any problems. I'm aware though that, as a gimmick, it can create its own little monster as a brand.
EDM is, like... Event-Driven Marketing, I think, is the acronym there. It reminds me a lot of disco. That had some hang-time, like, 10, 15, 17 years tops... Not too many people are forward-thinking about electronic music. They're just kinda like, 'Now, now, now - do it, do it.'
I'm just a little artsy-fartsy computer dude.
I do get freaked out sometimes. I have kids hop my fence, get into my back yard, and just start screaming at me.
I have a very varied taste in music from Boards of Canada to Radiohead. So I just love making music and being in the studio.
Nothing goes full-circle with music.
I really like the grittiness of early Amon Tobin - I'm a huge fan of his old music, and I tried to borrow from it, not emulate it. I don't love my own original work.
'I Remember' was produced before the vocal. It's just another body of work in the long list of bodies of work.
I don't think anyone's career is so big that they can't know where their major synchs are or where their publishing is going.
I was just trickling releases out slowly and building the Deadmau5 brand slowly. There was never this big marketing machine behind it or anything like that.
The label does what's good for the label. Always.
Disco evolved into Chicago warehouse. Then there was techno; eventually, it evolved into EDM.
I'm exploring this world of game development and GPU and getting involved in any capacity that I can to meet talented artists and programmers and developers. That's what you're gonna need to get a high-end experience done.
Music is 80 percent fun and 20 percent work. Video games, for me, is all fun.
Everybody's all up on the EDM bandwagon now, because it's, like, another viable conduit for traditional pop music to ride for a bit so they can get out of their little stagnant pool and make a dance hit.
I am very strict on what products I want to associate myself with, and I felt that some things were just to make a buck.
With my previous record deal, it'd be like, 'OK, so I have this track then, EMI - do you know any singers, maybe? Do you have any singers on your little label there?' And funnily enough, they didn't. But I prefer finding unknown singers myself anyway.
The industry has always had a problem with the 18-to-25 market, but EDM is perfect - a unique identifier for a group in that mental and fiscal state; in their youth, but free to do whatever they want. We filled that void.
There are some guys out there who make great music who may or may not be super-emotionally attached to their work. To each their own.
I really had no aspirations for becoming a DJ, and now I find myself having to campaign to be in the DJ Top 100.
Virtual reality, to me, seems to have a number of different tiers. Entry-level-tier VR is this experience: on a phone, some simple head-tracking, and some quick and dirty, game-engine-quality stuff.
I'd be pretty saddened to hear anyone say, 'Yeah, listen to this... God, I'm awesome, the way this all sits together,' about their own work.
I love watching professionals play more than I love sitting there 20 hours a day trying be a pro myself.
I was a bandwagon jumper. If everybody in high school listened to it, so did I.
You have to have a certain amount of grit in your sound, and having real synths and talking certain elements outside your computer can help with this.
I've always wanted to go into film scoring.
I have back-and-forth feelings about everything a lot - it's not limited to my albums.
It would be cool to custom-write music for some kind of story. That'd be cool.
There are some great songs - like, I really like 'Snowcone' and 'Whelk Then' and 'No Problem.' I think I'm dissatisfied that it's not written from start to finish; it's over a year's worth of work that doesn't correlate.
