As a human, Joel Zimmerman epitomizes the "celebs: they’re just like us!" ethos. Fans are treated to rambling, very-unedited, "lol" and emoticon-laced posts on Facebook and Twitter. His face is an angular vessel of pure emotion, nearly always dominated by an ear-to-ear grin that communicates just as much as the words that come out of it, another testament to context bringing more to the table than words. His body, a lanky vessel clad in the t-shirts, baggy pants, and ballcaps of the masses, is covered in nerdy tattoos (Space Invader, Zelda hearts, Cthulhu, Mario Boo ghost); he needn’t do more than walk into a room to tell you what his deal is. But when he transforms into deadmau5, his presentation is stripped of nearly all words.

After the mask is donned, the language that remains is sparse. The bulk of his productions are the very definition of mini-maximalism: hard beats form the foundation upon which carefully-sculpted sounds unfold sequentially until they climax in emotional explosions meant to send audiences over the edge again and again — by taking the most evocative parts of both IDM (alien melodies) and EDM (the builds and the drops), he compresses more meaning into a smaller amount of time than any of his predecessors.

To get started on a deeper dive into Zimmerman's communication evolution we need look no further than the cover of his new record album title goes here. Zimmermann, like the Aphex Twin Richard D. James, places his emotionally-ambiguous performance smile on the cover of his records, and the new one is a wacky iteration of the mau5head with a super-cute tuxedo cat breaking through. WHAT does it MEAN??? Probably nothing, but it works: it's a fucking LOLcat; if you need any more explanation you should probably hang out in some other dimension. The titles, also like James', are pulled out of thin air. "Fn Pigs," "Maths," and "There Might Be Coffee," the most evocative instrumentals on the record, might have origins in something meaningful, but they're probably just phrases that randomly associated their ways into filenames at some point in their production.

Lyrics do show up on ‘Album Title Goes Here’ but they are all blank slates; emotional containers that listeners can't drink from, but can certainly fill with as much meaning as is swimming in their own heads. Cypress Hill guests on the tech-hop "Failbait," dropping blank verses that don't say much more than "This is a Cypress Hill on a deadmau5 track." Chris James delicately sings futuristic warm-and-fuzzies all over "The Veldt," and Imogen Heap emotionally free-associates on "Telemiscommunications." Gerard Way of the post-goth Hot Topic band My Chemical Romance scream-sings on the lead single "Professional Griefers" for a sped-up and more vapid Marilyn Manson effect. Zimmerman layers Way into the song in anti-Fleetwood Mac effect, taking lyrics at face value; the human voice masquerading as another finely-honed synthesizer of emotion with no solid core lying within: "Morning Sickness / XYZ / Teenage Girls with ESP / Self correction / Mass dissection / Girls with guns on LSD," etc. And just LOOK at this video. Come on.