Review: Deadmau5 at the Fillmore - 10/06/10
Deadmau5 brings out the party kids in droves -- and with good reason: The light show alone is enough to drag you off your couch to a dance party on a Wednesday night. And when you combine the amazing visuals with Deadmau5's signature playful, intense style, it's an experience that brings fans of electronic music flocking.
Before the Canadian mouse-headed producer and DJ took the stage, though, Colorado's own Jonas Tempel, CEO of Beatport, took to the decks to warm up the crowd for the headliner. Tempel's always enjoyable to watch and hear; his eclectic taste filters through his music, and he skips from subgenre to subgenre, rarely missing a beat.
He'll bring in electro-inspired crashing beats and meld them with haunting slide noises, a la Twilight Zone aliens, then pare everything down to a simple drumline before speeding back up and dropping in robotic wah-wahs with squeaky sirens and wails. You might hear a crashing guitar line mixed with dirty, insistent syncopated bass lines and beats, representing the dubstep area of the electronic-music world, before he moves back into house.
Tempel utilized samples from Snoop Dogg's "Just A G Thang," transitioning into hard, dirty, fast breakbeats before dropping an anthem track, complete with over-the-top female vocals. His sets are unpredictable and fun like that: He'll move from classic techno into club-nation trance and keep the audience enraptured the entire time.
The more unusual mixes are inevitably the most entertaining; toward the end of his set, Tempel played the opening guitar riffs and stanza of Metallica's "Enter Sandman." As the lyrics built into the chorus, the crowd became more engaged with the mix, and Tempel delighted the building by playing the sample through the end of the first chorus. While James Hetfield growled, "Off to Never Never Land," Tempel brought the mix into a slow R&B jam.
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