Deadmau5 has candidly admitted that he doesn’t actually enjoy electronic music all that much, but the process of making it is what attracts him to the genre.

If we know one thing about Deadmau5, it’s that he’s unfiltered. Whether it’s discussing pre-recorded DJ sets or trolling Grimes for her technical issues at Coachella, he’s often doing or saying some pretty bold things.

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“I don’t really enjoy dance music,” he tells Q’s Tom Power (via CBC). “I don’t partake. I don’t pump it in my car. I don’t walk it, I don’t talk it, I don’t breathe it, I don’t get excited about it… but I love the process of making it. I like the technical challenges. I like sonic development.”

While this statement might make other creatives infuriated, the producer – whose real name is Joel Zimmerman – can explain exactly how he ended up incidentally becoming an artist, when he originally had his heart set on working behind the scenes.

As a child, his interest began when he heard Tears For Fears on his father’s CD player: “There was so much accompaniment to it that just wasn’t somebody beating on a drum or playing a guitar or a keyboard or something like that. There’s always just some underlying machine behind it,” he recalls.

As electronic music began to develop over the years, young Zimmerman ended up interning at a recording studio in Niagara Falls. He told his boss he could build a computer for the studio to record and produce dance music, and word got around that he was good at working with such tech.

As his studio career began to blossom, he set his sights on developing a career in this same environment: “I thought, ‘Wow, what a really great thing to pursue a career in, working in a studio.’ I wasn’t having these dreams of being a DJ or a producer or a creative. I wanted to be just in the rear with the gear,” he says.

Despite this, he made his own electronic music too, and began noticing a gap in the market for a DJ that didn’t actually have the word “DJ” before their name (aside from a few artists such as Daft Punk), and decided on wearing the famous mouse helmet “because everyone else was [already] themselves”. He adds, “It’s ‘DJ-this’ and ‘DJ-that’ and it’s like the name, you know what I mean?”

Check out the full interview below:

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