Jessica Gomes - Featuring A-Trak "Ray Ban Vision"

Alain Macklovitch was born in Montreal in 1982, four years after
his lone brother, David, whose clique he grew up hanging with. David, who fronts the Hall & Oates worshipping band Chromeo today, was the first in the family to pick up playing the guitar. When the Beastie Boys released So What’cha Want in 1992, it was an epiphany for Alain and David. It was a gateway into hip-hop. Here were other white, Jewish kids. Rapping. The Beasties were redefining cool, creating a world where nerdy suburban kids could spray graffiti, hunt for obscure old jazz records in dusty bins, grab two turntables and scratch. Alain began doodling a graffiti tag on his notebooks—A-Trak—but never summoned the courage to paint it on the side of a building or a train. One day he sneaked into the basement to fiddle with his father’s belt-drive turntable. He dragged an old record back and forth under the needle—something that kind of record player is not built to do. But he was able to grab a drum fill, scratch it, release it and let it spin onward. “I had a personal connection to it,” Macklovitch recalls. “It sounded like my thing.”

His parents upgraded his equipment to save theirs. They bought him a used Technics 1200, the same turntable Macklovitch saw DJs using in videos on Yo! MTV Raps. Macklovitch would race home from school, lock himself up in the basement and work to decode and emulate the alien sounds he heard in, say, Sabotage. He sussed out how to pull off quirky moves like the Slayer, the Transformer and the Crab, just through close examination of videos and photographs in album liner notes and magazines. He was too young to see a live DJ in a club. In 1997 he entered a local DMC DJ competition, an annual event started in 1986 by the British radio show and mixtape compilers Disco Mix Club. A-Trak won the Montreal event, then took the national trophy, then flew to the finals in Italy to become the first Canadian and youngest competitor ever to capture the top prize. He was 15.

In 2004, A-Trak popped in to a London record shop for a turntable demonstration and autograph signing. He diced a Jay-Z joint into a robotic wonder. Standing in the audience was an unsigned soul singer, also on hand for an in-store performance, John Legend. He was with his mentor, Kanye West, a relative unknown on the verge of releasing his debut, The College Dropout. West approached A-Trak and invited him to become his tour DJ. “I had heard some of Kanye’s stuff. I thought he was saving hip-hop,” A-Trak says. The two would work together for three years. “DJing for him motivated me,” he explains, “It became more imperative to start pushing the A-Trak brand, pushing a certain aesthetic, having logos, working with certain artists over and over again to have a crew.”

One of those frequent collaborators would be Armand Van Helden. A-Trak and Van Helden formed Duck Sauce in 2009. The duo stumbled upon a global smash when it sampled a goofy “Whoo-ooo-ooo” refrain from a 1979 Boney M single, over which the two occasionally blurted, for no good reason, “Barbara Streisand!” The “Barbara Streisand” single sold in the seven figures—double platinum alone in Australia, a country of 22 million people. In late 2011 it was nominated for a Grammy.

Today A-Trak is constantly hopping the globe to headline massive parties. He always has his iPhone and two laptops in tow, so he can chip away at a song or handle the operations of his buzzing record label, Fool’s Gold. This spring Duck Sauce looks to push dance music forward when it drops its debut album. It’s a gospel-disco doozy. And undoubtedly it’ll inspire some kid in some basement somewhere to scratch.

Q & A with A-Trak

The first record you owned?

It was the Smif-N-Wessun album Dah Shinin’ and the single for Pete Rock & CL Smooth’s Take You There. That’s ’94. The Smif-N-Wessun had a bunch of scratching.

Your favorite beach?

My favorite places don’t have beaches. New York, Paris, Buenos Aires, Cape Town. Cape Town is beautiful. It’s the combination of the architecture with the mountains. And the people, the spirit of people there. There’s an optimism I found there that I think is great.

Your worst experience on the road as a musician?

I started this tour a few years ago. On the first date I left all this stuff on the bedside table of the hotel—my passport, my work permit. Remember, I’m Canadian. At the same time I found out the opening act for my tour was dropping out because she got pregnant.

Something from the past you wish you could bring back.

Penmanship. The other day I picked up a pen and it felt weird writing. Are we really getting to the point with typing that we have to concentrate when we pick up a pen? I used to do calligraphy when I was a kid. I don’t want that to go away.