Canadian DJ A-Trak first came to the world’s attention when he won the prestigious DMC World Championships at the tender age of 15. From such auspicious beginnings, he went on to win the International Turntable Federation World Championships in both 1999 and 2000, the 1999 Vestax World Extravaganza and, with Miami based DJ Craze, the DMC Team Championships in 2000. While these early days saw him cement his reputation as an expert beat-juggler, recent years have seen him move away from the world of turntablism: over the past four years he’s travelled the world as Kanye West’s on-stage DJ; in the last year he’s remixed artists as diverse as Architecture in Helsinki and Digitalism as well as setting up Fool’s Gold Records with Nick Catchdubs. A quick look at his friends on Myspace will show the direction his career has taken of late: tours with the likes of MSTRKRFT, Boys Noize and the Ed Banger DJs have shown he’s much more interested in rocking the party than anything else. All that said, his early achievements were so momentous that they continue to follow him through his career. So, talking to him before his recent set in Crawdaddy, I decided to ask the man where he stood in relation to the scratch world in which he has his roots. “Pretty far,” was his initial response, “because the scene itself became really stale and stagnant in the last couple of years. What I always wanted to do was to keep my foundation in terms of that stuff, the turntablism and everything I come from, and bring it forward.” His sets might be more dancefloor orientated nowadays, but he’ll still use the methods he knows best to keep it all interesting. “The main point of my set is to get people to dance, and it’s definitely something I have to deal with, this phenomenon where every show I do there’s always going to be a few guys who are going to stand in the front row and look at me and wait for me to do something crazy, when I want the technical stuff to be woven into my set.” This is not a DJ who is eager to rest on his laurels, but rather one who is constantly trying to challenge himself and those around him.

A-Trak is also keen to see others do the same. When I asked him about MSTRKRFT’s decision to feature rapper NORE on their recent single Bounce, he was very enthusiastic. “I think it’s cool that they’re not doing what people expect them to do.” With his background in turntablism, as well as his more recent forays into the world of straight up blends and bootlegs, this is hardly surprising. “I love party records, I love dance records that sample hip hop vocals. One of my references for my identity as a producer today is early Armand van Helden stuff. You can tell he’s a hip hop guy with the drum sounds and the way he programs everything.” Another recent producer who’s impressing A-Trak is London’s Sinden. “It’s the fact that there’s a new sound to it, in terms of the basslines, and the whole fidget pattern and everything but there’s all these rap samples that give it an edge you know. I love doing that with my tracks, so I think it was a great idea for MSTRKRFT to do that. That’s why I wanted to remix it, cause I just thought “wow here’s a NORE acappella that’s just waiting for me to do something with it.” As for that remix, unfortunately it’s still sitting, unfinished, on his laptop.

In recent times there’s been a tendency on message boards on both sides of the Atlantic to slate and deride the work of LA-based DJ Steve Aoki. He refers to himself as Kid Millionaire, and his style of DJing isn’t as universally popular as that of someone like A-Trak. At the same time, he’s managed to surrounded himself with extremely talented and respected people, like the Fool’s Gold and Ed Banger crews. “I think the reason why you’ll see guys like myself and Busy P associate ourselves with him, first of all, Steve is a super nice guy, lovely guy, and he really loves music. As a DJ he can get the crowd going crazy – I don’t want to play after him. I play before him, because I play stuff that’s a little bit more funky. He’ll come on and play One More Time, and the crowd is… you can’t compete with that. I understand that as a music fan, or as a DJ, you can think what you think of someone playing One More Time for example, and you can have an opinion on that. I wouldn’t play that record. But Steve is a great showman, he’s got great energy, when you see him on stage he’s got this magnetic presence.” One thing that must be said is that Aoki is one of the hardest working DJs out there, with a schedule that sees him playing gigs almost every night. This work ethic has, according to A-Trak, created a scene in LA where DJs like himself and MSTRKRFT, who are neither über-mainstream nor completely underground, can play the music they make to a mainstream crowd with open ears. “People in Europe might not realise that, but Steve really helped create a scene in Los Angeles where nowadays guys like us can go and play there. LA is a really tacky city, and for a long time it would be hard for me to go and do a good show in LA, because it would either be the super slick, VIP, tacky Top 40 spots, or the ultra caricature underground scene in LA, and I’ve always between those two. Even when I was doing hip-hop I wasn’t all the way on the backpack side, but I wasn’t playing Puff Daddy songs all night either. Not only did Steve create this middleground audience in LA, but he also plays for the Top 40 audience, he plays for the high class Paris Hilton crowd, but he goes there and he plays Justice records or whatever, or Diplo records, or Fool’s Gold records. And then as a consequence of that these upscale crowds hear our stuff, and I can go there and get paid shitloads of money to play a Hollywood party but not have to change what I play all of a sudden.” The ultimate manifestation of this partnership was Screaming Bloody Murder, a joint Fool’s Gold and Dim Mak tour taking in eight cities across North America last month.

And it’s not just the Americans who are showing an interest. “Yesterday I was at Steve Angello’s studio. I don’t expect a guy like Steve Angello to know who I am. But he reached out. I know Angello’s records, Sega knows Angello’s records [Sega recently remixed Angello and Laidback Luke’s Be], but we don’t expect him to know us. We go and we get stuff from different scenes and we put into DJ sets and we make it make sense. That’s the way that we all DJ. Angello’s a big house guy, he’s at Ibiza every week. I don’t expect him to know who A-Trak is. So for him to be like ‘hey come to my studio, let me give you some new songs’ and stuff, I’m still tripping off that. It completely baffles my mind. I don’t expect those guys to know me.” That said, he tries to keep his feet on the ground. “I think it’s really cool that I can see Little Brother one day and Steve Angello the next day. The reason why that’s possible I think is that I really try to stay thorough with what I do, and keep my roots in hip-hop but make it interesting I hope, with the newer stuff I do and Fool’s Gold and everything. The electro guys find my hip-hop stuff interesting, and the hip-hop guys hear my Kid Sister beats and think “oh yeah he’s doing some new shit, that’s cool.” So I don’t wanna lose sight of that, I gotta stay grounded with that.”

His most important venture of late was undoubtedly his work on Jay-Z’s recent Heart of the City tour. Even for someone as talented and successful as A-Trak, recognition and understanding is always the ultimate goal. “Jay came to a lot of Kanye shows over the years, but I really remember the one show in Manchester where he came and he really kind of took me aside after the show and was like ‘yo, that was crazy.’ As much as he’s a huge star and stuff, Jay is so hip hop. I mean he comes from that era, working with Clark Kent and guys like that, and he’s just got such a thorough background in hip-hop. For him to have gone from that to where he is, and see something I do and understand the reference, and be like ‘oh yeah he’s taking the hip-hop shit, that’s where I’m from, but playing it in the Kanye crowd in front of 20,000 people, that’s cool,’ like to have him pay attention and to have that reaction, is already an incredible feeling.” A-Trak was initially asked to be Jay-Z’s tour DJ, but for several reasons he turned down the job. Undeterred, Jay’s people asked him at the very least to be one of the musical directors, and to tie in the work of the DJ with the band. “For him to reach out is crazy, and to work with him, and see him be there everyday at rehearsals. I mean Kanye doesn’t even go to rehearsals. So to work with him, and with ?uestlove being there as the musical director, just to be in that room and to have that dialogue, it’s incredible. And to go from that to playing dance parties in Europe, to Coachella, I love the way everything’s coming together and I really just want to stay thorough with what I do.” It was this determination to stay thorough that led to his initial refusal of Jay-Z. “I already had a Fool’s Gold tour booked, I had some records coming out, and I had just told Kanye I wasn’t doing his tour. Beyond simply being his DJ on stage, over the years I’ve managed to build a really good dialogue with him where we can really consult each other, it’s really a two way conversation, and that’s something I want to preserve, and for me to be like you know ‘hey Kanye, you know what, I need time to do me. I can’t do this tour, I have this Fool’s Gold thing I gotta do,’ and then if I turned around and did the Jay-Z thing…”

Another of his recent successes was the mind-bending mixtape Dirty South Dance, where he took some of the most popular tracks from the world of fuzzy electro and layered over them the sounds of mainstream hip-hop. Lil’ Jon over Etienne De Crecy; Clipse over Alex Gopher; Twista over New Young Pony Club. This venture was a way in which to open doors and introduce himself to people in worlds outside of his own. “The first time I talked to Erol Alkan, I had just finished Dirty South Dance, and I talked to him on iChat and I sent him that track that I did where I took his Klaxons remix and put a Pimp C vocal on it. That was a way for me to break the ice, like ‘hey you know what, maybe you haven’t heard of me or whatever, I’m this DJ, I work with Kanye, but listen to this thing I did with your track’. And he was like ‘Yo, that’s so cool’. And right away you can have a conversation.” In terms of how he arrived at a track selection, there’s no great mystery behind his approach. “I just tried a bunch of stuff and whatever sounded good I kept. There’s just as many that I scrapped.” Many of the tracks move beyond simple layering, and have a definitive A-Trak stamp all over them. “It was me wanting to make these tracks more like bootlegs and not just blends. Sometimes you’ll have a blend that you can play live. And sometimes you’ll get tired of having to keep the acapella and beat together so you’ll put it in Ableton and just recreate it. There’s always stuff that can be moved around to make it sound better, and you produce it a little bit. On the Erol one I added some drum sounds and re-sequenced the whole thing.”

Since he mentioned it first, I decided to bring up the contentious issue of Ableton DJing (Ableton automatically beat-matches tracks for DJs, thus bypassing a building block of any DJ’s set). “Surkin kills it. I love Surkin with Ableton. He’s so fucking good on Ableton it’s scary. He’s kind of the only one I like. Surkin’s the only guy that I’ve seen on Ableton that’s made me think, ok he’s on Ableton because what he’s doing there, no one can do on a CD or on Serato, unless they make edits of everything. I mean it sounds like a 2manydjs mixtape or something, live.” Where other advances in technology are concerned, his approach was definitively analogue up until very recently. “There’s always been this contradiction with me where I was always the youngest guy in my crew, but I was always the most traditional guy.” When his erstwhile partner Craze started working with Final Scratch, A-Trak was not impressed. “It’s only recently that I’ve kinda let go of that stuff and adopted the newer train of thought that’s just like yo, whatever works for you, if it’s good it’s good. There’s still part of me that sees people mix in Ableton and sees everything line itself up for you and it’s kinda like, that’s not DJing. But if you do it really well, and you’re gonna wow me like Surkin wows me then do it, I don’t care.”

With the summer approaching, the one thing that’s on the mind of every music lover is which festival(s) to attend. As a DJ A-Trak gets the chance to perform all over the globe. Does he have a “festival set,” or will he playing new stuff every time? “A little bit of both. Coachella I started. Well, no. [For] Good Vibrations in Australia in February, I built a rough set, but I can still move stuff around, but I knew what I was starting with, I knew certain mixes I wanted to do but I could just move stuff around between, and Coachella I kinda updated it.” The Upper Crust tour is both a preparation for the Summer ahead of him, as well as a chance for him to prove his mettle on his own two feet. “For American DJs to play in Europe is a different reference point, and for me I’m kinda looking at it like boot camp. I’m here DJing by myself most of these parties. I mean tonight I’m with Floss[tradamus], the other night I was with Diplo, but last night in Stockholm, it’s an 800 person venue and it’s just A-Trak on the bill.” For someone who started his career on his own and then move into team battling and tag team parties, this represents a full revolution. “At this point in my career, I don’t care that I’m a world champion, I don’t care that I’m Kanye West’s DJ, all that shit, I just don’t take it for granted. I treat myself like I’m a new guy. Every night I think ‘ok, what worked tonight and what didn’t work,’ and fine tuning it, and hopefully I’ll be able to continue to come up with stuff that works for different crowds and mixes that are really unique to me. I don’t wanna play like the next guy. So every night when I play I’m like ok, cool the crowd is dancing, but did I bring something that’s different. And like did they look and they say ‘hey this is different from this guy last week/this guy next week,’ it’s always gonna be like that.” Given the lazy antics of certain turntablists recently, A-Trak’s attitude is refreshing, one which I wish more DJs would adopt.

With his constant touring, finding new music to keep his sets constantly fresh and interesting is undoubtedly a challenge. “Sometimes it’s hard to find the time to go online for an hour every day. I’m always on iChat of course, exchanging songs stuff with people. Every couple of days I’ll try to block off an hour or two and just hit the blogs and download stuff. If I do a gig with a guy after the show maybe exchange a few songs. It’s mostly when I’m home between tours that I get to really re up on stuff. ‘Cause not only do you have to get the songs you have to sit and listen to them. I might still be on iChat for half an hour and have enough time for a guy to send me a song, but am I gona have enough time to listen to it and figure out what I’m gona mix it with, that’s the part that’s not always there.” Like many DJs out there, he sees the importance of blogs in terms of disseminating new music, but as for the more thorny issue of downloading music, where does he stand? “You can’t fight it. It’s there. That’s the reality. I have a label, but I know you can’t fight it.” When most of your releases are in 12” format it’s not so much of an issue, but Fool’s Gold bravely stepped into the world of CDs with the release of the Super High Shine Edition of Kid Sister’s Pro Nails. “She’s signed to Downtown now. So Downtown wanted to do a new release. Fools Gold is the creative team behind the whole record, so, Downtown has the muscle, they have the machine, the staff and everything, but they consult us every step of the way.” Downtown were keen to find ways of infiltrating the public consciousness, to really push Kid Sister, so Fool’s Gold threw some remixes in their direction. “I got this Bag Raiders remix that never came out officially, I got this Gant-Man jackin’ house remix that everybody’s gonna love, sounds like 90s house.” An iTunes bundle also came from the Fool’s Gold side. “They’re preparing a bundle on iTunes with the video and the original version of the song with these remixes, and they made a CD, just to have that retail presence for her. So that’s the first concrete result of Fools Gold and Downtown working together for Kid Sister.” The results of these efforts have yet to be seen, but with this set of releases, and Kid Sister’s appearance on The Count & Sinden’s anthemic Beeper, her pending superstardom seems academic.

While A-Trak is ultimately very serious and thorough about what he does, that’s not to say he can’t enjoy himself on stage. “I talk on the mic a lot. Me talking on the mic, and kind of dancing on stage and acting a fool, is me saying ‘you know what, this is me this is who you came to see, this is who I am, this is who I came to see, I’m gonna say stuff on the mic that’s probably really silly and doesn’t make much sense, but it’s my personality, so you know, I’ll give you all of me, If you like it you do, if you don’t then don’t come to my show.’” A short while later Crawdaddy witnessed a rocking set featuring tracks from current favourites such as Switch and Para One as well as perennial classics from the likes of Eric B & Rakim and novelty acts such as Kriss Kross, all mixed to perfection. More important than the mixing, was the fact that everyone was dancing. “I’m a DJ, I’m here to entertain.”

Aidan Hanratty
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