It's a frigid 22 degrees Fahrenheit in downtown Toronto. Gray sky hangs low over snow-slushed sidewalks, turning everything a dismal shade of urban slate. People are masses of jacket cloth hunched against the cold as they duck in and out of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's heavy glass doors.

The lobby is warm and busy, decorated with smiling portraits of the Kids in the Hall cast and other Canadian celebs. Somewhere in the building, newscasters deliver headlines, actors film sitcoms, and pundits argue about hockey. But the scene in Studio 40 is perhaps most peculiar. A lanky man with a green Space Invaders character tattooed on his pale neck is glued to dual computer monitors. His fingers type furiously between cigarette drags. The ashes and butts collect in a ceramic bowl between an empty coffee cup and Coke can. He's the head of a makeshift command center, leading a team of 12 toward a strange digital glory. There are no windows here, no trace of the sun or snow outside — just Joel Zimmerman, his cohorts, and the ever-ominous presence of a 21-foot-tall, 22-foot-wide, moving mechanical cube.

“My wife went to Florida,” he laughs. “It's like, 'OK, cool. I'll be here in my box if you need me.'”

In about a month and a half, Zimmerman will leave this concrete cave and fly to Miami too. When he dons his famous LED-laced mouse helmet, he'll transform from curmudgeonly coder to international superstar DJ/producer deadmau5. The tens of thousands of hours split into 18-to-48-hour work sessions will culminate in a mind-blowing audio-visual experience unlike anything any raver has ever seen when deadmau5's cubev3 makes its world debut on the live stage of Ultra Music Festival Saturday, March 30.

It will stun and surprise with cutting-edge crispness and eye-popping visuals personally designed and rendered by Zimmerman. The massive, three-sided cube will tilt, rotate, and push the boundaries of what a live stage production can be. It'll be astounding, and in about 90 minutes, it'll be over.

“I need everyone to know how much of a fucking insanely stupid technological feat this is,” Zimmerman says. “I'm not just some fucking dick who gave a VJ $500 a show to monkey around with some bullshit. That's important, because we have all this tech and no one's fucking using it.”

EXPAND Joel Zimmerman, AKA deadmau5 Photo by Matt Barnes

Born January 5, 1981, in Niagara Falls, Ontario, to a visual artist and a General Motors plant worker, Zimmerman began DJ'ing in the '90s. He took his stage name from a dead mouse he found in his computer. In 2009, deadmau5 made his humble Ultra debut. That year, he rose to prominence in the burgeoning EDM scene via the jaunty electro-house hit “Hi Friend!,” the ten-minute progressive-house epic “Strobe,” and the career-defining anthem “Ghosts 'n' Stuff.” He also earned the first of his six Grammy nominations to date. The albums Random Album Title and For Lack of a Better Name had made him one of the scene's hottest rising stars, but his stage production consisted of a simple LED screen and some clever visuals.

Computer mouse clicks sounded while a loading bar flashed onscreen, giving way to a desktop littered with folders. One opened to reveal a count to five and his mouse-head logo. Zimmerman walked onstage sans helmet, saluted his fans, and took his place behind table decks. It's exactly that kind of low-budget environment that led him a year later to create the first version of what is now his signature cube.

"I wanted to do something,” Zimmerman says. “I didn't want a back LED wall and a picnic table with a black cloth on it and two CD players. Sure, it works for some people, and it's a very, very easy way to make a lot of fucking money and spend none. It's just about your business model. It's about where your passions are.”

His passions have always lain in the technical. Zimmerman’s first computer, an Atari ST, ran on DOS. He was heavy into gaming but, having been born in 1981, was a little too ahead of the professional-game-streamer generation. He went into graphic design and got his first job making coupons in CorelDRAW for a local Toronto newspaper. He applied his skills to web design and landed a gig with the full-service interactive development company WebNet Logics Inc. It was a grind, but it paid the bills while he dicked around making chiptune music for fun.

He took side jobs, one of which was designing a MySpace page for the death-pop band Orgy. It was lead singer Jay Gordon who first asked Zimmerman about the mouse head he used for a web design logo.

“He was like, 'If you ever perform live, you should wear it,' and I was like, 'Fuck you,'” Zimmerman smirks. “Twenty years later, who's the idiot now?”

Back then, deadmau5 was big in what was called the “demoscene,” an international computer-art subculture whose heroes were those who produced the most awesome audio-visual presentations in the smallest files possible. Recording sounds begets big files, but coding sounds is a different story. This is the environment in which deadmau5 honed his skills.

“I can see where the kids today trying to make music are getting lost in it, because they don't know how [Virtual Studio Technology] works,” he says, referring to the digital production software interface he and other EDM artists use. “They just know how to change a preset, hit a fucking MIDI note, and pray for number one success. Sadly, 90 percent of the industry is that, at least in EDM. I can pick that shit up because I was with it from the very start. I know it in and out. It's not a problem for me, but I can see how someone is like, 'I want to make music, but I don't want to learn all this nerd shit.' Well, then your shit is going to suck. I'm sorry. Get fucked.”