For good or ill, Deadmau5 is responsible for introducing the gossip pages to electronic dance music.

That is, above and beyond the panicked “rave culture is killing our youth” theme experiencing a popular media resurgence alongside North America’s delayed embrace of the machine-made sounds now referred to as “EDM.”

Deadmau5 — one of the lynchpins of dance music’s current commercial boom — has managed to boldly go where pop-courting electronic forebears like Daft Punk, the Chemical Brothers and Moby, and such au courant EDM contemporaries as Skrillex and the shamelessly crowd-pleasing Tiesto have never gone before, occasionally barging into the tabloid/TMZ orbit historically reserved for the Britneys and Beyoncés and Katy Perrys and Justin Timberlakes of the world.

That’s a bit of a coup, all things considered, for a skinny studio rat from blue-collar Niagara Falls much more likely to be recognized while wearing one of the signature “Mau5-head” masks he typically dons during performance than he would be without the high-tech disguise.

Granted, Joel Zimmerman — the blunt-spoken, 32-year-old producer behind the Deadmau5 phenomenon — owes a great deal of his celebrity currency to a whirlwind romance with reality-TV star and tattoo icon Kat Von D (née Drachenberg), which played out a bit like a serial social-media soap opera until it came to an abrupt end last month.

Deadmau5 proposed to his Kat in December via Twitter, while news of the engagement’s end in June came with a Twitter pronouncement from Von D that, “I hate to have to admit, that this relationship is indeed over.” Zimmerman then took to his Facebook page to clarify the “issues” involved in the break-up and to challenge Von D’s accusations of infidelity, concluding that he didn’t “expect to comment further, but I do believe that those who have expressed concern deserve a more complete understanding of what transpired.”

Even without all that drama, however, Zimmerman is uncommonly skilled at keeping himself a topic of conversation. He’s trash-talked such fellow dance producers as David Guetta, Afrojack and Skrillex in various publications, for instance, while his hot-tempered Twitter feed has led him to public feuds with everyone from Jersey Shore’s Pauly D to Madonna, whom he took to task last year for making a rather lame reference to “Molly” (ie. MDMA) at the Ultra Music Festival in Miami.

These flare-ups have probably got more to do with a pathological inability to self-censor than actively chasing trouble, but they have earned Zimmerman a combative reputation. And he’s fine with it. He’s been taking hits for years, many of them from critics and techno-purists who — rather unfairly — sneer at Deadmau5 for being a manufacturer of by-the-numbers big-room floor-fillers.

“Sure, but that’s the entertainment industry,” shrugs Zimmerman. “You know what I mean? It’s not like they’ve got, like, the ‘Top 100 Dental Surgeons Awards’ this year, the ‘Dental Arts Awards,’ where they’re all buying votes to get in and they’ve gotta play the game. If it doesn’t exist, it should. Give everyone a taste. ‘Top 100 Spelling-Bee Champions.’ It’s just the nature of the entertainment thing, whether you’re in film or music or comedy. . . . But it would be interesting to have a national holiday where everyone’s profession turns into a public s--- show.

“What can you do? Well, you can sit there and f---in’ bitch about it, but people get tired of that after a while and so do you, even if you’re one of those guys. And I’m not exempting myself from being ‘the guy who complains.’ But, yeah, it gets tired and then you get over it and you ultimately fall back on what it is you wanna do, anyway.”

Right now, what Zimmerman wants to do — in between cranking out new tunes with a relentless 9-to-5 work ethic almost daily through Twitter and Soundcloud — is build a bigger, shinier version of the elaborate touring set-up he brought out on the road through 2011 and 2012, an LED-lit technological monstrosity that had him performing inside a levitating Rubik’s Cube spaceship.

Deadmau5’s headlining slot at the second annual VELD Music Festival at Downsview Park on Sunday, Aug. 4, is thus a rare opportunity to catch the man’s eye- and eardrum-popping stage show in action. Work on the next incarnation of the Deadmau5 road show has lately meant a clampdown on touring but for an ongoing residency (complete with robots!) in Las Vegas at the MGM Hotel’s Hakkasan club while he and his tech team get their act together.

“I’m building a new tour,” confirms Zimmerman. “For much later, 2014. And of course it will have to manage to trump the ‘Cube’ show. I could absolutely just slap the Cube back together and ball it up, but I’m in that mentality where I want to keep one-upping the show. So obviously, the bigger the production, the more time you have to sit down with the team and iron it all out technically and financially and all these kinda things. So it’s, like, a ‘lay low, make some new music and do your residency to pay the hydro bills’ kinda thing.”

This is Deadmau5’s second year headlining VELD and his presence was undoubtedly a large factor in the start-up electronic-music gathering’s success last year.

VELD drew 46,000 people to Downsview over the August long weekend in 2012. This year, ticket sales are so strong that producer Talal Farisi of INK Entertainment, the local promotion company behind the festival, is confidently predicting he’ll see between 65,000 and 70,000 people come through the gates.

This pleases Zimmerman greatly, as he’s been on an unapologetic mission to bring electronic music to ever larger and larger masses from the beginning. It’s been a successful one, at that; Deadmau5 was the first Canadian act ever to sell out the Rogers Centre in November 2011, playing to more than 20,000 delirious hometown fans for the boffo close of his Meowington’s Hax Tour of artists signed to his record label.

VELD is “the hometown gig, kinda the unofficial (version of) what we did at the Rogers Centre,” he says. Since “you can’t rent out the f---ing Rogers Centre every week,” he’s content to let VELD “throw everyone in a f---ing field with speakers and have a free-for-all,” and become an annual fixture on the Deadmau5 touring itinerary.

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Some gripe about Deadmau5 and his ilk commercializing rave culture, but Zimmerman is coming at it from a pure place: he can wax as nostalgic as anyone else about Toronto’s 1990s rave heyday.

“After a 10-year hiatus from the anti-rave movement, I’m so glad we’re commercially viable now,” he quips. “I mean, we’ll never get that back, but Nitrous at the Science Centre was just, like, the most amazing electronic-music experience I’ve had in Toronto.

“We’re not, like, old guys on our porches with shotguns f---ing talking about the old days because it’s a totally different climate now, for sure. But I remember (with) some of the parties I used to go to, we would make the road trip all the way up to the Big Smoke to go to the thing and, dude, it was honestly like we were in Hamilton and wondering on the way up if this thing was gonna get shut down by the time we got there. So it is good to see it coming back in a more organized way, you know what I mean?”