Music Moments

The Records That Made Me With A-Trak

In 1997, 15-year old Alain Macklovitch from Montreal became the youngest winner of the DMC World DJ Championship. Devoted to a love for hip-hop, A-Trak found himself scratching hip-hop in the turntablist rooms at electronic raves.

A-Trak nods to Daft Punk’s ‘Homework’ as a timeless choice for Heavy Rotation.

“There’s something about Daft Punk that, even though I only cared about hip-hop [back then] . . . because it was literally with the same grain as a Pete Rock beat, it was in a language I understood.”A-Trak

Jason Bentley and A-Trak gearing up for an unforgettable conversation at the Listening Studio.

As the featured guest for Wrensilva’s The Records That Made Me listening event, his influences displayed on the studio shelves include hip-hop legends A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, The Pharcyde, Madlib, Pete Rock, and The Diplomats. A-Trak is a DJ who does his own homework, and rigorously trained his dexterity to catch particular sounds and samples from the songs he scratches.While spinning “Distortion To Static” by The Roots on the M1 record console, he geeks out about its crisp drum track. “That tracking snare is like KAH!” he says, excitedly gesticulating the whack of a drum. “That’s what a snare should sound like . . . It’s not just that I like the beats and the attitude, it’s all the way to how every drum sound sounds.”

Among the crowd of ravers chewing on pacifiers were a then-obscure house music duo named Daft Punk, whose recent release, ‘Homework,’ was inspired to emulate the west coast G-Funk Era layering a Roland TB-303 bassline synthesizer under a woozy, distorted synth riff. Unbeknownst to him at the time, 
A-Trak was playing shows with the same people who would later become his idols.

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