DeadMau5 brought his dazzling "Cube V3" tour to Milwaukee's Wisconsin Center

Piet Levy | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

DeadMau5 had people dancing for a good hour at the Wisconsin Center Saturday when it was time to do a shot.

But the EDM A-lister born Joel Zimmerman didn’t throw back Jack Daniel’s or Bacardi. He downed a cup of NyQuil.

Both NyQuil and DayQuil were both unofficial sponsors, he joked later in the concert. But despite feeling sick, DeadMau5 didn’t let that sink his show, energetically performing for two hours and 10 minutes at the Milwaukee convention center, illustrating why he became one of the most popular DJs of EDM's last crucial decade.

Piet Levy

He had a lot of help Saturday. The tour, dubbed “Cube V3,” is named after the third iteration of his signature stage design, and it was an impressive display. DeadMau5 largely performed behind three transparent sides of a cube that projected splashy, sci-fi visuals and was rigged with LED lights. The cube itself would tilt down at a 45-degree angle and pivot around DeadMau5 behind his station — sometimes wearing his mouse helmet with glowing green eyes and agape mouth — letting fans and star get a good look at each other.

That was on top of the lighting rig and screen behind DeadMau5 and the cube, and a sound system so powerful you could feel the music vibrating through your clothes and chest.

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But DeadMau5 didn’t take the production, or himself, too seriously, lending the show a hint of winning, cheeky irreverence.

At one point, the cube projected texts from DeadMau5 in a cheesy Comic Sans font, and the videos including the famous and funny calculating GIF, and animations of a dancing cow and ostrich with DeadMau5 heads and floppy tongues. He also humorously pointed out an awkward, Spinal Tap-style moment ahead of the encore, when the rebooted cube very slowly rotated back into place.

.@deadmau5 said he was sick at his Wisconsin Center show Saturday - figuratively and literally. Check out our photos and review @journalsentinel https://t.co/AgGvJWpSaV pic.twitter.com/NznredjFBt — Piet Levy (@pietlevy) December 15, 2019

In addition to the stage production, DeadMau5 for about 20 minutes had an old-fashioned singer in electro pop artist Lights, who came on stage to sing “Drama Free,” “Raise Your Weapon” and a remix of Morgan Page’s “The Longest Road.” Carefree but confident, singing charged vocals and whipping her long bright red hair, Lights managed to draw attention away from the wild light show, with fans taking a break from the dancing for some cathartic singalongs.

But the greatest special effect was DeadMau5 himself. His progressive house mixes never coasted on predictability — he sparingly used crowd-baiting bass drops to spike the energy Saturday, not to run down the clock like some of his contemporaries — and his beats often mixed hard-driving bass with ethereal beats, an often hypnotizing combination. At times, you could hear elements of New Order and '90s Daft Punk, but DeadMau5 provided enough imagination to those elements to make it his own, and he turned one single beat into its own showstopper, accelerating the BPM so that a throbbing, staticky warble resembled hip-hop record scratching, then a helicopter, then an alien rocketship ripping through Earth's atmosphere.

"I was sick, literally and figuratively," DeadMau5 quipped near the end of the night, before parting the stage with the final words of "I'm going to go to bed."

Hopefully, he feels better soon, but even under the weather, DeadMau5 showed that live EDM rarely gets better than this.

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The takeaways

In addition to that NyQuil, DeadMau5 was nursing a bottle of Miller High Life in salute to the hometown crowd, clinking bottles with Lights on a couple of occasions.

Looks in the crowd: some fishnet stockings and lots of DeadMau5 headbands. One guy had a face mask and cape that lit up, and another dude wore a shower cap. And this being the holiday season, a few fans took advantage. One guy was dancing with a Christmas light necklace and swinging it around, while another wore a DIY DeadMau5 hat made from cardboard boxes covered in Christmas wrapping paper.

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Contact Piet at (414) 223-5162 or plevy@journalsentinel.com. Follow him on Twitter at @pietlevy or Facebook at facebook.com/PietLevyMJS.