TOP 100 DJS: USA & CANADA FOCUS

In the third of our regional Top 100 DJs roundups, we focus on one of dance music’s biggest markets. DJs and producers from USA & Canada made up a large chunk of the 2014 Top 100 DJs list.

It is perhaps no surprise that the DJs below are some of the scene’s biggest personalities, each using the EDM platform they helped forge, to create unique and breathtaking shows that are as loud and proud as the regions they represent. Let’s meet the USA & Canada’s biggest DJs...

SKRILLEX

Skrillex takes the accolade as the highest ranking DJ in the poll from the USA. To do this by playing a sound that is uniquely his own makes the achievement all the more impressive. His debut album ‘Recess’ dropped earlier this year demonstrating a complex array of styles and ideas.

Skrillex’s Mothership tour also touched down right across the USA this year although it’s from his new studio complex in his Los Angeles hometown rather than deep in an alien spacecraft that he’s really plotting the next stage of world domination. For it’s from in there that Skrillex’s Nest HQ website is disseminating the music of his OWLSA label and other like-minded souls across the world, including old hands like Riton and AC Slater, and with links to ambient electronica and nu-jazz tracks to be found on there, it’s clear Skrillex’s tastes go far beyond ear-bleeding.

STEVE AOKI

Cake-throwing, crowd-surfing electro don Steve Aoki is anything but a wilting wall flower. His unique and memorable live shows may divide opinion within the scene but his regular sold out shows at Hakkasan Las Vegas and Pacha Ibiza speak for themselves. As does his position as one of the top ten DJs in the world in the 2014 poll.

We caught up with him one week shy of the release of his two-pronged album concept, the timely ‘Neon Future’, that’s been over a year in the making. “It’s a mega-collab, with singers, musicians,” Steve says as he starts to reel off a ‘long as your arm list’ that includes the likes of Afrojack, Bonnie McKee, Will I Am, Flux Pavilion and Machine Gun Kelly.

DEADMAU5

Canadian electronic music titan Joel Zimmerman aka Deadmau5 has is one of dance music’s most exciting, and prickly characters. This year we’ve seen Deadmau5 scaling back his live gigs, in exchange for plenty more straight-up DJ performances. Back-to-back shows with fellow leviathans like Richie Hawtin and Eric Prydz have been joined by sets that embrace more of a stripped-back techno aesthetic. However we expect to see him back in the arenas again in the next twelve months as he is planning his next tour a ‘360 concept’ that he promises is bigger than anything we’ve seen from him before.

DVBBS

“When it comes down to the music and shows the chemistry is fully there, and it just feels like everything else we did growing up together,” DVBBS aka Chris Chronic and Alex Andre tell us about working together as brothers, and their relationship that’s built on trust.

The Toronto-based duo just released their anthem-kissed ‘Deja Vu’, that they collaborated on with Joey Dale & Delora, which is edging its way up the charts. And at the time of speaking with them they were scheming to shoot its video in Jamaica — “So that should be dope.”