DJ A-Trak has been touring constantly in support of his new mix album, Infinity +1. Recently called the “O.G. of blogging DJs” by his DJ tour partner Mehdi, A-Trak maintains a strong Web presence through his blog at djatrak.com and the Infinity+1 blog, where he has been posting one item a day through the album release on March 31, including exclusive song downloads.
A digital pre-release this month of Infinity +1 on iTunes in the US hit number two on the dance chart.
After our video of A-Trak and Mehdi’s recent stop in New York at Brooklyn’s Studio B, our exclusive interview with A-Trak is below. In the montage, their appreciation of a wide range of music from hip hop to electro is apparent, as are A-Trak’s well-honed scratching skills and even a surprise on-stage piggy back ride. In the interview, A-Trak discusses his drive for successful promotion of events and releases and what’s next on his horizon, including a couple of major steps in his music production career.
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A-Trak - Infinity +1 Preview [MP3]
I heard the short teaser mix for Infinity +1 and it was very effective in getting me excited to hear the full mix. Many DJs and producers don’t offer this type of promo. Tell us about this choice, and getting people interested in your new album.
A lot of it, to me, boils down to — people are exposed to so much nowadays. I think your typical music fan who’s on blogs every day kind of already has their opinion made up on something before they hear it. You need to go a little extra step to get people behind you sometimes and to get people excited. And to just grab their attention, period, because they’re bombarded with shit all the time.
And I made this mix CD and spent like a month recording it, and really fine-tuning it and editing everything, and it’s a CD that really has a sound, like it has a sonic identity to it, so I wanted people to be excited about it. But I can’t just be like, “Hey, guys. Be excited. I got a new mix CD. What!” You know, you gotta give them a little taste of what it’s about and then build some anticipation.
We’ve seen the track list for your upcoming Fabriclive mix. It’s very diverse. How do you compare it with Infinity +1?
The Fabriclive and the Infinity +1 are really counterpoints to each other. The Fabric CD was a bit of my own reaction after just completing the Infinity CD. Infinity +1 is really a home-listening type of CD. It’s very melodic. Kind of song based. The whole CD has one sound. Its like one big mega-mix–a big montage of one sound. When I finished that, I had to hand in my Fabric CD literally eight days later. I dove straight into it.
The Fabric CD is way more of a DJ mix. It’s similar to the DJ sets that I do at my show, in terms of dynamics and energy and swerving between sounds. The diversity of it might look a little schizophrenic on paper, but when you listen to it, it makes sense.
Now that these two releases are done and the U.S tour has come to a close, what’s next?
I’m going to go to Europe in April. I’m touring there for a couple weeks, and then I’m touring Asia. And just working on more music.
We’re finishing up the Kid Sister album now, finally, so that’s gonna see the light of day and it’s the first time I’ve produced an album, so that’s a big deal for me.
And then, meanwhile, I’m going to start working on my own album this year. That’s kind of the project of the year for me–to make an A-Trak album that could come out early next year. And there will be some A-Trak singles out this year.
So just more production and a whole bunch of touring.
We caught your New York set with Mehdi. At the beginning, you said that it was great to be back in New York (where you technically live, despite the constant touring). How did that night turn out?
It was great. Every time I do a show in New York I think I put a lot of pressure on myself because, you know, New York is such a unique city and it takes an extra effort to get everyone to come out and when you do get those special shows where it feels like the whole city’s there and there’s a real connection–it’s so special and something that you can … you can ride that wave for so long … and once you have a couple of those shows, you can’t really kind of accept just an OK show in New York after that. So to me, any A-Trak show in New York, I want it to be really special.
It’s a lot like the album promotion. I want people to be excited. There are good shows in New York every week. So how do I make mine extra special? I pay for my own poster campaign and cover the city in A-Trak and Mehdi posters. And its so worth it to me.
My last big show here was when I played at Webster Hall with Boys Noize in October and that was awesome. The place was like beyond sold out and the energy was crazy and I wanted that feeling again, but Studio B is a different type of club than Webster Hall, I think its a bit more of a connoisseur–like more of a music crowd, so that’s cool too. I was just happy to get the turnout that I was hoping for. I think we had 12 or 1300 people there when capacity is like 700-something. So that’s what I wanted and we got it.
It was also cool because people stayed late. It’s rare to have people stay past 3:30 at that club. We stopped music at 4:15 and people wanted more and I was like, “Yo, I gotta sleep!”
You’ve played with Mehdi a lot before. Do you guys always use a tag-team DJ style when on tour together?
It depends. We didn’t have much planned out for this show. We just flew in the day of and we kind of winged it. We generally do some sort of tag team and it just varies by how many records we each play at a time.
We did a tour together about a year ago where we would play about five or six records each. Like 15 minutes back and forth. It was cool. I liked it. But what we did this weekend was mostly two records each, and I thought it was a little bit more fun because we could kind of go into a direction together.
Sometimes, when we used to do five or six records each, he would bang it out in one direction, and I’d be like, “oh shit, well I gotta bang it out too,” and I would just do it my way. So it didn’t have as much of a common direction.
But it depends. We played together at Sonar, the big festival in Barcelona this summer, and at that one we did like 45 minutes each. And that was cool, too, because it was kind of just me and him on stage and when he’s playing I’m supporting him and vice versa, but we each kind of did the set that we wanted to show off that day. So it really depends.
The tag team seemed effective at least because it appeared that you guys were having a good time and it gave the set a lot of energy.
Yeah, that’s one of the reasons I like playing with Mehdi. We just really enjoy playing sets together and I think we have similar tastes. It’s fun to see what the other guy is going to play next and just kind of vibe off of that.
And what was also cool about that show is that we used the same mixer. When we’ve done tours together before, we each had our own mixer and our own setup and we would go back and forth between them. That night, it just so happened that the way the stage was laid out and everything, we could only have one mixer. But it’s fun, because I think that’s even more of a spectacle. It’s cooler to watch and it kind of made us interact even more, I think.
Interview by Mike at TheMusic.FM.
