A-Trak

Alain Macklovitch (born March 30, 1982), known by his stage name A-Trak, is a Canadian DJ, record producer, and record executive.

Alain Macklovitch was born on March 30, 1982, to Lison, a professional translator, and Elliot Macklovitch, a professor of linguistics and machine language researcher, in Montreal, Quebec.

He grew up in the Montreal borough of Outremont.

His older brother, David "Dave 1" Macklovitch, is one-half of the electro-funk duo Chromeo.

Ethnically, he is Moroccan Jewish on his mother's side and Ashkenazi Jewish on his father's. While his family was 'casually Jewish,' Macklovitch had a bar mitzvah.

When he was 18 years old, his mother took him and his brother back to Morocco to connect with their roots.

A-Trak began his interest in music around the age of ten, listening to Beastie Boys, Cypress Hill, and other early 1990s hip hop artists on cassettes his brother would bring home.

Wanting to find his own instrument to create music on, he experimented with scratching records on his parents' turntable and quickly became fixated on becoming a good turntablist, finding mentors in local Montreal DJs Kid Koala and DJ Devious.

A-Trak, who had been involved in the Montreal turntable and hip hop scene for a year or so at this point, was hailed by the international community as a highly technical and accomplished turntablist during the height of the scratch DJing in the 1990s.

The group was part of the Montreal underground hip hop scene in that late 1990s and began releasing their music through Audio Research Records in 1997.

In 1995, A-Trak, with brother Dave 1 and hip hop artists Troy Dunnit, Eclipse, and Logik, formed the hip hop crew Obscure Disorder as an after-school project.

A-Trak rapidly rose to prominence when he won the DMC World DJ Championship in 1997 at the age of 15, making him the youngest and first Canadian winner of the competition.

Between 1997 and 2000, he competed as a DJ internationally.

A-Trak was the first DJ to win all three major DJ competition titles (DMC, ITF and Vestax), as well as the first DJ to win five World Championships.

Also in 1997, A-Trak and his brother Dave, along with creative director Willo Perron, founded the Montreal-based record label Audio Research.

The crew performed as a competitive turntable team from around 1998 until 2000.

After leaving the competitive DJ scene, A-Trak was interested in DJing for touring artists.

A-Trak deejayed at clubs and festivals and released DJ mixes.

A-Trak played the first Coachella Music Festival in 1999.

He came to prominence in the late 2000s as an international club DJ and remix artist, known for incorporating highly technical turntable skills and scratching into his genre-spanning work.

In the early 2000s, he studied physics part-time at McGill University in Montreal.

While he retired from competition in 2000, he continued to showcase his turntable skills in important DJ forums.

He was also a member of the DJ crew The Allies alongside frequent collaborator DJ Craze, as well as DVLP, Infamous, Spictakular, and J-Smoke; they released an album D-Day in 2000.

After leaving behind his more backstage role as a touring turntablist, A-Trak would become one of the poster boys of the electronic dance music boom of the late 2000s/early 2010s, both due to his original music and highly popular remixes, as well as his keen curation sense and prowess as a music executive of his successful label.

The group released a series of singles until they split up in 2002.

A-Trak was an honorary member of the pioneering, and now defunct, DJ crew Invisibl Skratch Piklz.

In 2004, Kanye West recruited A-Trak as his tour DJ.

They first met earlier that year when A-Trak was playing a show at a tiny record shop in London where Kanye West came to support John Legend who was also playing in the same show.

For the following three years, A-Trak worked closely with West, including at performances alongside the rapper at MTV specials, the Grammy Awards, multiple MTV Video Music Awards, and worldwide stadium shows; this included West's first two headlining tours which ran almost continuously from March 2004 until April 2006.

A-Trak also recorded scratches on West's second and third studio albums Late Registration (2005) and Graduation (2007) and was an influence on the overall sound of the latter.

A-Trak's most notable Kanye West credit is for the scratches on the 2005 single "Gold Digger."

In Spring 2006, A-Trak embarked on his first headline tour, titled the Sunglasses Is A Must Tour.

It was also around this time that A-Trak began more seriously producing music.

He is also president of the record label Fool's Gold, which was founded in 2007, and is credited for developing the careers of artists such as Kid Cudi, Danny Brown, and Flosstradamus.

Near the end of 2007, A-Trak split with Kanye West to pursue the founding of his record label.

Since 2010, he has been a fixture on the international EDM music festival circuit and has noted that he is one of the few popular DJs who uses turntables and scratching in his live sets.

Audio Research released a series of turntable and hip hop records and compilations, mostly as 12" records. The label was officially dissolved in 2011. In the late 1990s A-Trak developed a notation system for scratching. He gave a lecture about it at the Skratchcon 2000 conference and published an article in Tablist Magazine.

Among other collaborative projects, he is part of the DJ duo Duck Sauce with Armand van Helden and was nominated for a Grammy in 2012 for their song "Barbra Streisand".

A-Trak's professional career has spanned over two decades and is built off his early success as a World Champion turntablist as well as Kanye West's original tour DJ.

He was named one of the 50 Most Important People in EDM by Rolling Stone and has been called the Global Ambassador of DJ Culture, appearing on the covers of Billboard and Complex magazines.