Very few DJs can jump from club sets to high-profile festival performances, to Kanye West’s larger-than-life stadium shows with ease. In today’s DJ culture, A-Trak holds a truly unique place. He founded 2007’s most buzzworthy label, Fool’s Gold, with a mission to merge all aspects of club music. The manifesto for this fusion was outlined on his first official mixtape: Dirty South Dance, which set the tone for Trizzy’s very own production, each acapella or track re-edited to create something fresh. In a matter of a few months, his signature remixes (for, amongst others, Boys Noize and Simian Mobile Disco) and his original tracks (Say Whoa produced for Nike and released on Kitsune) and a collaboration with Laidback Luke (Shake it down) were gaining support from the likes of Erol Alkan, Busy P, DJ AM, Annie Mac, MSTRKRFT and Boys Noize. This year A-trak has created two critically acclaimed pace setting DJ mixes for US dance music giants Thrive (Infinity +1) and UK stalwarts Fabric (Fabric Live 45) and is about to embark on recording his debut solo record. Not bad for a kid who many viewed as a 90’s turntablism prodigy. Indeed, Alain’s career began at age 15 when he won the 1997 DMC World Championships and proceeded to take home every other DJ title known to man. He then toured the globe, first alongside Q-Bert’s Invisibl Skratch Piklz and then with Craze and the Allies. In 2004, he was hand-picked by Kanye to be his tour DJ. A near decade of youthful meanderings was captured on his acclaimed DVD Sunglasses Is A Must. Somewhere along the line, A-Trak also became a streetwear culture icon, collaborating with Nike, New Era, Kidrobot, Zoo York and pretty much every designer worth his salt. The last couple of years have seen him headlining tours with Diplo, The Rub, DJ Mehdi and Kavinsky, and of course his older brother’s band Chromeo. Add to that production for Chicago rap sensation Kid Sister and a strong, audible influence on Kanye’s Graduation album. His forthcoming solo debut is preceded by a 4 track EP collaboration with Armand Van Helden under the moniker Duck Sauce.
You’ve been A-Trak for about 20 years. There aren’t many musicians who can match your longevity. How have you been around this long?
It’s definitely important to figure out an organic, natural way to participate in the way music changes without it coming across as too much of a shift. I never want any of the progressions and moves that happen over the years to feel like a sharp turn. It has to feel natural and keep certain signifiers from the original identity, but there are definitely points in time where I take on new things or get excited about a new version of a sound or a scene. When trap music had one foot in hip hop and one foot in electronic, as a hip hop kid, I saw that as a natural progression for me. But when electronic music went from being indie to becoming a massive EDM commercial movement, finding my lane in that while keeping it natural was the most challenging.
Beginning with Napster and continuing to mega-streaming services like iTunes and Spotify, what do you think is the next step for music access?
A lot was said when Kanye released The Life of Pablo and continued to replace the versions of his songs for, like, two weeks after the release. The fact that he was still fine tuning the mixes post-release made his art a living thing. It was updated in real time for everyone around the world and I think that’s going to continue to be a possibility for artists.
Legal streaming — like Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal — has really established itself. Spotify is the new radio. Radio stations look at what charts on Spotify to know what to play on the air. I think legal streaming will stay for a long time. The record industry is showing a profit for the first time in 15 years largely because of the popularity of legal streaming. It’s changed the way people listen to music for the better.
And what of your own personal style? How has it evolved in correlation to the music?
Similar to music, style is almost always referential to a moment from the past. When I started entering DJ battles in the ’90s, I wore a lot of technical outerwear, baggy clothes, and caps. As the mid-2000s came around my sets became more eclectic and my style kind of followed suit. Hoodies, varsity jackets, and baseball caps with Bo Jackson Nikes, Nike dunks, or Jordan 3s, 4s, or 5s. Millennial streetwear was really colorful, but in some ways, the first truly A-Trak look came out of that. Throughout the years, I became more interested in developing a palette and standing for something creatively. The more you have a clear stance of who you are and what you stand for, the more you are able to play with that. Part of being an artist is having the ability to have fun with who you are. But first you have to know who that is.
What was the first record you ever scratched?
I think it was my dad’s copy of Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder. Going through that record, there were so many different kinds of sounds on there. Like anyone who discovered hip-hop, especially in the ’90s, I became more and more aware of scratching and knew it was a thing you did by moving a record back and forth. Pretty much anyone has tried to scratch a record on their parent’s player at some point. I think the surprising thing that happened with me is that where most people try it and it sounds like ass, I had it sounding like scratching right from the start. I was really lured by it. I was 12-13 and the internet only existed at speeds where you could maybe send emails or wait 20 minutes for one image to load. There definitely wasn’t info on the internet about DJing, so I would look at album covers. I was a big fan of Pete Rock & CL Smooth and their album The Main Ingredient had a huge influence on me. Pete Rock was scratching on almost all of those songs so I would listen to those scratches and try to figure out what he was doing. On the album art, there were photos of his turntables and his record collection and I remember looking at his turntable and thinking, “That’s a different kind of mat then this rubber thing my dad has.” It really felt like looking for clues.
On the album cover?
Yea [laughs]. Also, P-Thugg, who’s in Chromeo with my brother Dave [Macklovitch], used to work at the Canadian equivalent to Blockbuster at the time and we’d borrow the VHS tape of Wild Style from him. 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, so I couldn’t get into clubs, so that’s how I became enamored with scratching.
With that love and passion, what inspired the founding of Fool’s Gold?
What I’m describing is the seed to pretty much everything I’ve done since. I went from discovering scratching to obsessively practicing it to becoming world champion within the first couple years of my official foray into DJing. Even in those early years, my brother and I started our first label in Montréal called Audio Research. Even with that project, we had already started pressing up our own vinyl and signing our friends to help spread their music. If you’re involved with something DIY, that sense stays with you forever. That was the precursor to Fool’s Gold, which came years later. Once I started doing more remixes and delving into different forms of music as my career went forward, that came with a sense of “What does this look like?” MySpace was becoming a big part of the music community and the fact that anyone could design their own page really catalyzed some of that curiosity. All of that combined with the DIY aspect and my fascination with mashups and that genre-bending at the time proved to be a perfect storm of foundational ideas for Fool’s Gold. Most people still thought that you had to get with a big record label to be seen. Just putting music out was unknown because there were still gatekeepers. It’s so different from now where anyone can just get a TuneCore account and put their stuff out, which I absolutely love. This wasn’t as accessible 11 years ago, and my friends and I knew it wasn’t that complicated to put records out. For us, it was as simple as calling up a pressing plant asking for a 12”.
I had met Nick Catchdubs at parties around NYC and through promoter Roxy Cottontail when I moved out there in the summer of ‘06. Roxy always had the illest flyers for her parties and this guy Dust La Rock was illustrating them. So Fool’s Gold was a partnership between myself, Nick Catchdubs, my brother, and Dust from the jump. In those years, it was surprising to people that we were a young label that wanted to put out hip-hop and house records. We were thinking about Nervous Records, who had Black Moon but also had Armand Van Helden’s house records. Those types of NY labels from generations before us that were completely informed by the DJ’s ear were hugely influential to us. It wasn’t weird to put out whatever kind of music we wanted to put out on the same label.
https://soundcloud.com/a-trak/work-it-out
With that eye for curation, where did the Goldie Awards come into all of this?
The Goldie Awards came about practically 10 years into Fool’s Gold. The big missing piece to this narrative was the EDM wave and how that bubble eventually burst. When we started Fool’s Gold, even the electronic scene was fringe. Around 2011 or so, EDM exploded, which propelled DJs like Calvin Harris, Swedish House Mafia, and David Guetta to superstar status. You had Skrillex on the cover of Rolling Stone. That finally brought DJs to the same level of artistic celebrity of any other kind of musician, which wasn’t the case before. Then there was something that happened on the hip-hop side where producers started to get more famous. Hearing Metro [Boomin’s] name on a record was very significant to me.
The real goal of the Goldies was to take all these incredibly skilled DJs with one hand and producers with the other hand and put them together. What I’ve done with Fool’s Gold over the last 10 years, especially on the Fool’s Gold Day Off side, has taught me how to put together an event that has an extremely diverse and influential audience and bringing an interesting cross-section of people under one roof and curate the lineup and the artwork. I felt like I was able to put something together that would circle back on my roots as a battle DJ.
I also think some people associated battles with a more classic era of boom bap, which I grew up on and love deeply, but the danger of that is that you’re not gonna get new DJs or producers who are listening to new music now if the battle scene is still tied to sounds from 10, 15, or 20 years ago. I think it was important for the Goldie Awards to embrace all new sounds and technologies so that more experimental artists feel like there’s room for them. I want battling to still sound like the playground where new sounds are being tested and experimented with.
After all the work you’ve done with Day Off and the Goldie Awards, and considering that rap and turntablism have bigger platforms now than ever, how important is it to you that these spaces be curated by people “of the culture” in an industry becoming more and more dominated by algorithms?
I’m glad you asked that question. I think it’s incredibly important now. We are led to believe by the numbers that music is expanding and booming and that the internet and self-distribution created room for everyone. But in fact, it’s extremely hard for people to break through now. The way these algorithms work, they end up creating a lot of feedback loops that over-amplify the same things over and over again. Whatever’s easily digestible and popular becomes omnipresent, and it tends to be material that’s not very challenging.
It becomes challenging for artists who are doing work that pushes the envelope and may require a little more attention and thought to get into to even be heard. Luckily, I’m in a position where I have a certain influence to share and even create a platform for people to be heard, and a lot of what I do with Fool’s Gold and the Goldie Awards has focused on that much more lately.
It’s extremely important for anyone who has a voice or influence to showcase what is interesting to them musically and bring attention to more artists who aren’t on the front page of whatever digital outlet. It would be dangerous for us to let Big Data govern so much of what we’re exposed to. We’ve seen the dangers of that politically, and in terms of artistic discovery, that also poses a huge challenge.
The only way to fight that is to craft space for human curation and for any of us, my peers or myself, who have the privilege to be able to shine a light, to use that influence to push artists that are creating the sounds of tomorrow and to push for more women on the lineups. We’re at a point now where if we don’t do that, everything’s gonna become like The Lego Movie.