AUSTIN, TEX.—The “Mau5” and the Plastikman, they’re not so different, after all.

Opening day of the South by Southwest music festival was bookended by two generously attended discussions in the Austin Convention Centre, a morning “conversation” with brood-rock icon Nick Cave and a late-afternoon tete-a-tete between Canadian electronic music stars Richie Hawtin and Joel “Deadmau5” Zimmerman.

Hawtin and Zimmerman might have been viewed as interlopers at the historically “rockist” SXSW even just a few years ago, but now that North America has caught up with the rest of the planet in embracing electronic dance music at a mainstream level they were easily as big a draw collectively as Cave — big enough, anyway, that their “Talk. Techno. Technology.” seminar had to be upsized to the same hall as Cave’s at the last minute to accommodate a lineup running the length of the convention centre’s upper level.

The pair was also tapped to do a tag-team DJ set of “stripped-down techno” for the Media Temple-sponsored SXSW Interactive closing party at the famed outdoor amphitheatre Stubb’s later Tuesday night, while Hawtin is to headline a special Austin edition of his ongoing “CNTRL: Beyond EDM” tour featuring Loco Dice, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, Montreal techno bricklayer Tiga, his brother Matthew Hawtin and a DJ set from Toronto’s Azari & III at the Bungalow club on Wednesday night.

The knee-jerk impulse is to view Hawtin, who’s arguably the planet’s most visible and respected purveyor of boundary-pushing underground techno music, and Zimmerman, who moves hundreds of thousands of units as Deadmau5 and sold out the Rogers Centre in December of 2011, polar opposites. As it turns out, though, the two producers actually have rather a lot in common, from a shared appetite for high-tech, eye-popping stage shows — Hawtin’s Plastikman Live multimedia freakout on the one hand and the perpetually “Mau5”-masked Zimmerman’s stadium-filling sci-fi touring spectacle on the other — on down to a shared history of managing electronic bulletin boards as youngsters in Windsor and Welland, respectively.

“Probably how we first bonded was we’re two kids — or we were two kids — who found a love of technology and communicating through technology … that took us to a place where we never imagined we’d be today,” offered Hawtin, 42, at the outset. “It’s probably because we’re both geeks. We feel pretty cool with computers rather than people sometimes.”

No argument on the geek front. Much of Hawtin and Zimmerman’s shared SXSW chat involved deeply technical ruminations on such esoterically techno-specific topics as Roland TB-303s and Juno 60s, the limitations of DJ-ing with simple stereo files, Native Instruments’ “Modern Talking” preset and the merits of downloadable plug-ins over hobbyist modular-synth patches (“Nobody else out there can actually tell the difference, but we can,” laughed Hawtin). Even they, however, had the good humour and self-awareness to admit that such geekery can sometimes be an obstacle to the simply enjoyment of electronic music.

“Do the complexities of what people expect from an electronic performance kind of bring you down sometimes?” asked Hawtin.

Zimmerman concurred that he, like Hawtin, is often guilty of being one of “the four chin-scratchers at the back” picking apart the means of production and performance instead of “living in the production and the event and the sound” like everyone else. “We’re the only people that care,” he laughed. “Everyone is really more interested in just seeing that show.”

Zimmerman also admitted to being somewhat hemmed in by his Deadmau5 persona and the expectations of crowd-pleasing big-room bangers now placed upon him.

“Not to blow smoke up your ass, but if someone had told me 10 years ago that I was gonna DJ with Richie Hawtin … well, whatever: I’m honoured,” he said. “I’ve always aspired to be a little more underground. I listen to techno, I listen to the really dubby old stuff and all of your old stuff. And I like it.”

Hawtin, in turn, urged Zimmerman to use his Deadmau5 notoriety to lead the kids and the new-gen dance-music fans down the rabbit hole.

“You’re probably the No. 1 gatekeeper for electronic music right now,” he said. “I would say that’s your responsibility, to open up the doors as wide as possible.”

As to the question of why two of the biggest names in electronic music today hail from within three or four hours’ drive of one another in Southern Ontario, they both had the same answer.

“Tim Hortons. They put something in it,” said Zimmerman.

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“I had one right across from my studio,” offered Hawtin.

“Really? I have one right across from my studio, too,” chuckled Zimmerman, quickly racing to clarify: “There’s a Tim Horton’s on every f—ing corner in Canada.”

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