New Music /

A-Trak

Nat Liechti interviews A-Trak, a former winner of the DMC championships at just fifteen years of age: At thirteen, Alain Macklovitch used his Bar Mitzvah money to purchase turntables and a mixer. He practiced ‘about three or four hours a day’ and two years later, took out the DMC World DJ Mixing Championships as DJ A-Trak. ‘I was just really determined to give it a shot, practicing hard and having a blast’, he explains. ‘I never thought about what was going on too much, I just made sure I was on top of my game and enjoyed the ride’. Ten years on and his DVD, Sunglasses is a Must, has just been unleashed, detailing his meteoric rise from child turntable champion to Kanye West’s tour DJ — and in between, learning a few tricks off the best in the business. ‘My relationship with guys like Q-Bert and the Skratch Piklz, that’s probably what I re-evaluated the most when I revisited those scenes making the DVD. It made really grateful to those dudes’, he confesses. ‘I remember when I first met them, they were my heroes and for them to embrace what I was doing and take me under their wing … it made those experiences even more memorable’. Nowadays, the Canadian splits his time between his hometown of Montreal and his adopted city of New York. But of late, he can be found more often than not on the road with West — a career-defining move that happened by way of a chance encounter. ‘We met at a record store in London in 2004, which was just a bit after the College Dropout album came out. I was doing an instore, and he saw me do one of my Jay Z routines and was really into it’, he recalls. ‘He needed a DJ for his next tour, so he hired me and everything stemmed from there’. Proving that he’s not the kind to simply sit back and rest on his laurels, A-Trak has been filling what little spare time he has with study, currently working on a biology degree at the University of Montreal. He also co-owns label, Audio Research, along with his brother (who is incidentally, one-half of electro-synth duo, Chromeo) Dave 1. A solo album has been slated for release in the future, with A-Trak describing it as an attempt to bridge the gap that exists between hip-hop and turntablism. ‘Yes, I’m about halfway into my first album. It’s a production album so don’t expect to hear me rap on it’, he laughs. ‘The focus is on my tracks — not just beats but the music that you can build starting from turntables. A lot of my music is scratch-based, in the sense that I’ll make beats that incorporate a lot of sounds that come from my turntables, but it definitely doesn’t stop there. I’m trying to see where I can take this kind of music and I’m trying to go in the directions that I enjoy as a DJ, whether it is raw, hard-hitting rap bangers or uptempo party anthems’.

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