A-Trak is the youngest DMC campion at 14, he’s worked with Kanye, setup a label that includes Kid Cudi and Danny Brown as artists, and had one of the last decade’s biggest Dance hits. Could he be the last DJ?
* A-Trak plays Jaeger next Frædag
What is it to be a DJ in 2024? It used to be about an extensive and unique record collection; a talent for cultivating mood and euphoria through a selection of music; a skill for programming records through beat matching; and finding that third song as you blend two other songs. At the height of what is DJs popularity today, none of these things seems to matter when everything is about the celebrity of the DJ. It’s about how many followers you have on instagram and how good you look on a go-pro, with the “art” of DJing lost to the sync button and the allure of the craft maimed through millions of youtube tutorials.
Everybody can DJ and everybody does. It demeans some of the allure of what a DJ could be, but there was a time when this was different. There was a sense of mystique and unattainable skill involved. It was a record blending seamlessly into another with music that you could only hear in that specific context. There was no way of knowing what the DJ was doing, and even if you did, the chances of you acquiring the same music was remote.
At its most extreme you found the turntablist DJs, courting the Hip Hop scene. Their acrobatic skills behind a set of decks were something more akin to musical gymnastics than art. It required a whole other set of skills and training. It was a dexterous talent combined with inherent natural rhythm and melodic ear.
We have all tried it; “scratching” your dad’s Pink Floyd records to the chagrin of your whole family. It never sounded like those Hip Hop records you admired and the deep gash it left in the record would often result in disciplinary repercussions, and rarely in anything musical. There were some people that could evoke melody, rhythm and even a whole song from those otherwise “noisy” interactions with a record player, and there were a few people that could do that from the start. A-Trak was one of those people and he has been in a league all his own since he was a teenager.
“I think the surprising thing that happened with me,” he told DJ Booth magazine, “is that where most people try it and it sounds like ass, I had it sounding like scratching right from the start.” This was before he became A-Trak and he was still going by Alain Macklovitch scratching records like Stevie Wonder’s Keys of Life while decoding the techniques from Hip Hop albums like Pete Rock’s Main Ingredient or movies like Wild Style. ”I would watch the movie and pay close attention to all those scenes of Grandmaster Flash DJing while noticing the crossfader and even just how to hold a record and drop the needle, the physicality of it all. I was 12 or 13.”
Fast forward 30 years, and A-trak is one of the most accomplished DJs around, not merely for his skills as a scratch DJ, but for his ability to crossover between musical genres, which parlayed that into a career that covers everything from Hip Hop to House music. He’s worked with the likes of Kanye West, had a billboard charting Dance hit, and established one of the most successful labels in Fools Gold, putting out records from Danny Brown, Kid Cudi, Run the Jewels and of course his Armand van Helden collaboration, Duck Sauce. It all started with his first DMC championship at the age of 15 in 1997; an international turntablist exhibition showcase and competition.
In 1997, DJing was still equally split between those turntablist DJs associated with Hip Hop and Dance music DJs known for their beat matching progressive mixes through genres like House and Techno. Back in the late eighties when these two things were a bit more fluid, DJ’s like Jeff Mills (neé the Wizard) were incorporating turntablist techniques like scratching and beat-juggling in mixes covering everything from Funk to Synth Wave. By the mid nineties there were two distinct camps, however with Hip Hop claiming the turntablist while dance music moved into something more fluid like what we experience in a Techno set today.
It was in the Hip Hop arena that A-Trak’s skills developed and where he first staked his claim. After taking the 1997 DMC title, A-Trak found himself moving in Hip Hop royalty circles. His deftness in handling a turntable were coveted by the great producers of the early 2000’s and today they have been forever immortalised on records like Common’s Be or Kanye West’s Gold Digger. It was particularly under the latter’s wing that A-Trak the artist would become fully-formed. “I think Kanye always encouraged me,” he explained in a DJ Mag interview. “Once I started working with Kanye, I became even more aware of what I was doing as A-Trak.”
Starting out as Kanye’s touring DJ, he would eventually work on the artist’s albums Registration (2005) and Graduation (2007), before he started to make his own music. One thing that set A-Trak apart from his mentor however was his extensive knowledge of music beyond Hip Hop, including Dance music genres like House. It’s even rumoured it was A-Trak that introduced Kanye to Daft Punk, before the latter built Stronger around the legendary Daft Punk sample. Around that time House and more vaguely Dance music in America was still something just a bit twee or cheesy. “For the longest time, dance music didn’t really have a place in mass culture in America;” A-Trak told Andrew WK in an Interview Tête a Tête. “It was kind of a subculture, and in a lot of ways, was corny. Like, you heard house music at clubs with dudes who wore muscle shirts and had gel in their hair.”
A-Trak likens it to the Roxbury SNL skit; something to be ridiculed and it took people like him to legitimise it in the eyes of the American public. As somebody that came from Hip Hop with ties to artists like Kanye West, A-Trak could bridge the gap between the stylised aspects of a Hip Hop DJ and the transient euphoria of a dance floor. He not only sought to combine this in the way that he DJ’d, but also in the way he produced music, before channelling it all into the label, Fool’s Gold eventually. There was an untrodden path that laid before him between the way Hip Hop and House music was made and he succeeded in finding the shortcut between these two worlds.
“Coming from a hip-hop background, I grew up in the aesthetics of sampling. And in the classic days of hip-hop, there were all these unwritten rules about what you’re allowed to sample and what you’re not allowed to sample,” he explained in that Interview article. He could only really “produce at home if my whole record collection was there,” but things changed around the same time he established Fool’s Gold. “I started wanting to make tracks that I could actually put in my sets.” He started “integrating synth sounds” in his music, and even though he didn’t quite know how they worked just yet, it started to coalesce into something like a musical “sculpture”.
Fool’s Gold initially coincided with a move to New York and meeting Nick Barat (aka Catchdubs) who, along with Graphic artist Dust La Rock and A-Trak’s brother Dave Macklovitch (aka Dave One from Chromeo), established the label around 2006. – O yes, did we forget to mention, A-Trak and Dave from Chromeo are siblings. “We were thinking about Nervous Records,” A-Trak explained about the origins of the label in the DJ booth article. Based on “(t)hose types of NY labels from generations before us that were completely informed by the DJ’s ear were hugely influential to us,” they were looking to bring “an interesting cross-section of people under one roof.”
One such cross section was between A-Trak and Armand Van Helden as Duck Sauce, which took A-Trak from DJ and label runner to House music producer. Their lead single Barabara Streinsand was a chart topping success with a Grammy nomination. Not only did it give him the opportunity to work with a House legend, but it also provided a new outlet for the multi-faceted DJ. He could now easily be at home with a turntablist exhibition routine as he would at a House club. Often incorporating both, his House sets can and will feature some “turntable-Jazz,” undercutting the stoic beat-matching pursuits of a typical House set, without it getting corny and gimmicky. “Underground hip-hop is part of what I do.” he told DJ tech tools. “The mash-up and electro phase of the mid-2000s still pops up in what I do,” he continued. “I don’t necessarily have a favourite type of set, every set is unique.”
A-Trak and his intersection between Hip Hop and House music, informed from his early years up until today is in an on-going evolution. “Everything is part of a progression: what I’m doing now includes components of everything that I’ve done, from the mid-90s, up until now,“ he concluded in a DJ tech Tools interview. From his teenage years as a battle DJ, his earliest production credits in Hip Hop, up to Duck Sauce and Fool’s Gold and his pursuits today as producer and DJ, everything informs A-Trak’s sound as one of the most full-formed DJs today.
“I’m just as versed in hip-hop as I am in electronic music,” he told Interview. “ So I have this sort of bird’s-eye view of where this is going, and I’m also a participant in it.” He truly is the last DJ.