walking upstream…
deadmau5
sourcesToronto Life — "Man in the Mouse" (childhood, tracking down Trent Reznor, career origins) · MusicRadar — coverage of the same CBC interview (Tears for Fears quotes not carried in CBC's own text) · EDMTunes — transcript of deadmau5's Apple Music interview with Zane Lowe (Richie Hawtin's formative influence) · Mixmag — Testpilot signs to Richie Hawtin's Plus 8 label · Fact Magazine — review of deadmau5's "Survivalism" remix
Joel Zimmerman grew up in Niagara Falls dismantling household electronics; by five he was glued to an Atari his grandmother brought home, and by eight he was hooked on a stranger sound — the Tears for Fears CD his non-musical dad played, all 'underlying machine' and no visible hand on an instrument. He hated eight years of piano lessons and taught himself instead, tracking Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral home on cassette as a teenager and, curious about one synth patch on it, cold-emailing Trent Reznor's camp and getting an answer. He built computers for a Niagara Falls recording studio before he ever meant to make records, then made them anyway under a name borrowed from a dead rodent found in his own machine. deadmau5 is what happens when a kid who wanted to be 'in the rear with the gear' gets famous for the gear instead.
the sound in question
2008
Ghosts 'n' Stuffdeadmau5
walk the tributaries ↓
Nine Inch Nails1990s · Industrial rock / Industrial metal / Electronic rock
As a teenager, Zimmerman rushed out to grab The Downward Spiral on cassette the day it came out. 'I was like, "I want to make music like that, how do I learn?"' he told Forbes. 'That was the kind of kickoff for me.' He was curious enough about one of the album's synth sounds that he tracked down contact information and messaged Trent Reznor's camp directly — and, remarkably, got an answer. He even covered a Nine Inch Nails song at his own high school talent show. Every other act he names is a teenage taste; this is the one he credits with sending him toward the gear itself.
listen: upstream & heresource: Forbes — "Who I Am ↗
2007
SurvivalismNine Inch Nails
2012
Survivalism (deadmau5 Remix)deadmau5
listen forNine Inch Nails' 'Survivalism' builds its menace from a distorted, insistent bassline under Trent Reznor's clipped vocal. deadmau5's own official remix keeps the song's bones but strips the industrial bombast down to what Fact Magazine called 'a simple loud-quiet-loud dynamic' — a brittle drum machine clicking against that same bass figure, the vocal filtered hazy until the chorus suddenly opens up. Listen for how much of the original's tension survives with almost none of its noise.
Tears for Fears1980s · New wave / Synth-pop / Pop rock
When Zimmerman was eight or nine, his father — 'not much of a music guy' — brought home a new CD player loaded with Steely Dan, Bryan Adams, and Tears for Fears. Only one stuck. 'The one that really appealed to me was the Tears for Fears one,' he told CBC in 2024. 'There was so much accompaniment to it that just wasn't somebody beating on a drum or playing a guitar... there's always just some underlying machine behind it.' Unable to buy a synthesizer in pre-internet Niagara Falls, he spent years figuring out how that machine worked — the origin of his pull toward electronic music.
listen: upstream & heresource: CBC Arts — Q with Tom Power (Tears for Fears origin story, NIN talent-show cover) ↗
1982
Mad WorldTears for Fears
2009
Strobedeadmau5
listen for'Mad World' rests almost its entire mood on a spare, looping drum-machine pulse (a Roland CR-78) that the listener sits inside rather than dances to — exactly the 'underlying machine' quality Zimmerman describes discovering as a kid. deadmau5's 'Strobe' works the same trick at album-track length: a plain repeating synth figure, patient and mechanical, that never resolves into a chorus but instead accumulates, minute by minute, into its own kind of tension.
Richie Hawtin1990s · Minimal techno / Techno
Hawtin grew up one town over in Windsor, Ontario, and by the late '90s was already, in Zimmerman's words, 'the ringleader of all things techno' in the local rave scene — 'you could have sworn this guy was from Berlin,' Zimmerman told Apple Music's Zane Lowe in 2020, 'but he's from Windsor, Ontario.' What stuck wasn't just the sound but a shared problem: 'how do I do this on stage that doesn't involve me playing a record at the same speed of another record?' he recalled. 'He was really a moving force in my upbringing.' Hawtin later signed deadmau5's stripped-down alias Testpilot to his own label, Plus 8.
listen: upstream & heresource: Resident Advisor — "Deadmau5 ↗
1993
SpastikRichie Hawtin
2014
Sunspot (White Space Conflict)deadmau5
listen forHawtin's Plastikman track 'Spastik' is minimal techno at its most mechanical — a single hi-hat pattern and a couple of drum hits looped with almost no variation, built to be felt rather than followed. As Testpilot, Zimmerman's 'Sunspot (White Space Conflict)' — released on Hawtin's own Plus 8 label — works the same austere register: a dry, repetitive groove and a murky vocal sample, deliberately further from deadmau5's usual polished house-music sheen than almost anything else in his catalog.