Quote

I was a bit of an outsider in the hip-hop world because I was a scratch kid and people weren't necessarily trying to hear that all the time.

A-Trak

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A-Trak
Age: 42
Born: 1982
Born: March 30
Composer
Disc Jockey
Dj
Entrepreneur
Musician
Record Producer
Recording Artist
Singer
Montreal
Quebec
Alain Macklovitch
Bits
Outsider
Hear
Scratch
Kids
Scratches
Trying
Outsiders
Time
Hops
World
Hips
People
Weren
Necessarily

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It's a good feeling to have something to stand for in any part of your life. It's like personal integrity.
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A few guys will get up there with turntables as purists, to play vinyl or whatever.
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I worked with him for years. I still think Kanye [West] is one of the most important people in music in the last ten years.
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There's a bit less elbow room and latitude to take it somewhere else, at least at festivals. In the club you can do whatever you want but at festivals, especially Ultra, nowadays the crowd wants to hear our songs.
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Now I'm able to play on the main stage and play my own tracks and the crowd likes them. I feel like a lot the other DJs play a lot of the same songs, and not to knock them, but it's important to me to go up there and sort of sneak in a bunch of stuff the other guys aren't playing.
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I like getting feedback from people who show a lot of potential, and it's exciting to witness to new talents developing and bourgeoning. I always try to stay around the newest stuff, I don't like to stay with something that's kind of old or approaching it.
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I think that's becoming the key to where the whole idea of art and culture are going nowadays anyway, is the idea of curation. Knowing what you like. That's sort of the future right now. Molding something, whether it be a roster on a label, or your blog, or a song, or your DJ set.
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My ears are open to all sorts of stuff. I appreciate some of the big electro house guys.I love their music but I also like a lot of the stuff coming out of the U.K. Future garage stuff. A lot of stuff like that.
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I have a radio show on Sirius XM. I put it up as a free download on my Soundcloud and on iTunes. That's a portal for me once a month, to play songs I know aren't getting played on that station the rest of the week.
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We have to wake up early and make songs everyday. I run my record label. You work at hours where your body isn't designed to work. But it's fun.
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When I get up I still check the rap blogs before I check any kind of dance stuff.
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At the end of the day, Fool's Gold is a label that, when I hear something I like, I try to grab it for the label. There's a ton of great music coming out.
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I've talked to people who say that their music and their creative work is a much needed and appreciated escape, where they don't have to think about the state of the world they're not even thinking about themselves so much. They're not trying to express their own experiences of that day or relationship strife or anything.
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Building the scene, going out and doing shows and connecting with the fans, cultivating the fanbase in all these cities. I'm very glad that it's happening.
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