With the 10,000LB Hamburger Tour under his belt, A-Trak reflects on a new era of scratching, Kanye’s wisdom and crappy mixers

“My name’s Alain. I’m five-foot-ten and I enjoy long walks on the beach.”

That’s Alain Macklovitch, a.k.a. turntablist whiz-kid A-Trak turned tour de force DJ/producer/label head, wooing a boozed-up hometown crowd hungry for more booty-shaking treats. But there’s no music to be heard. At 1 a.m., barely a minute into his headlining set at a packed Montreal venue on a sultry summer night, A-Trak’s mixer gives in. Just like that, it goes kaput. Thankfully, the spare mixer tucked away on the tour bus finally comes in handy. An unexpected curveball for the A-Trak clan as they hit the final leg of their 10,000LB Hamburger Tour.

“It had been a long time since I had to deal with something like that,” a relieved A-Trak tells me the following week from his New York home base. “Especially at the very beginning of my set at my own show, because it’s really at the exact moment where the night is supposed to take off. Mentally I had to put myself in a space where I didn’t let it take down my stride, where I was trying to go.”

And true to form, the former DMC World Champion didn’t disappoint, packing a mighty arsenal of electro bangers and up-tempo hip hop classics, wielding his scratch magic and throbbing synthesized goodness for a crowd of spellbound partiers. We looked on as A-Trak stood up on his DJ table to conduct his feverish club symphony with a slew of wall-mounted neon lights behind him lending a holy glow to the proceedings. I couldn’t help but marvel at how he has continually defied labels, chief among them that of the gifted though esoteric turntablist.

“Most the DJs who were competing in the years when I was aren’t really active anymore. People want to discover new stuff, but if you’ve been around for 10 years like me, it’s extra work to stay interesting to a young audience because they’d rather feel as though they’re discovering something new.”

Such self-awareness may come with being thrust into the international arena as a child prodigy – he won the DMC title at 15 – and being picked by Kanye West as the rapper’s official tour DJ. But Macklovitch could have easily taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way had he not demonstrated such a firm grasp of the concept of novelty – and that once it wears off, you better have a few more tricks up your sleeve. That savvy, coupled with raw talent, an unstoppable drive and surprising humility, has paid off in spades.

When reflecting on lessons learned from the Kanye years, A-Trak speaks with a wisdom that belies his boyish exterior. “Just witnessing the amount of work, dedication, focus and planning that goes into something as big as the Kanye West machine… To make yourself continually relevant to an audience while balancing making music and touring is probably the hardest aspect of what we do, and I learned a ton from him in that regard.”

That delicate balancing act is one he’s been honing for years, he tells me, because with constant touring, “it’s all too easy to see a month fly by without doing anything on the creative end.” But they don’t really get any more prolific than this guy, who recently released the mix CD Infinity +1, continues to build his fledgling label Fool’s Gold, regularly remixes for the hottest acts around (Bonde do Role, Sébastien Tellier, Boys Noize), doggedly pursues new collaborations (like Duck Sauce, the moniker for his disco-house-delights partnership with DJ Armand Van Helden), and deejays both at mainstream parties and more specialized events.

However, as with plaid shirts, fixed-gear bikes, movie musicals and just about everything else, turntablism’s popularity is cyclical. “It’s gotten to a point where turntablism is so not part of the mainstream culture anymore,” says A-Trak. “It became such a marginal thing that it’s back to a point where anydisplay of skills is going to impress an audience.” Is it only a matter of time before scratching catches on with a whole new generation? “Totally. It even feels as though this whole current wave of music coming out of the UK, with dubstep and the dark wobbly beats, is a return almost to jungle stuff. It reminds me of the heyday of scratching, like in ’97, ’98, when it used to be tied to some of those sounds. So it kind of feels like that wave is about to come back.”

But on this hot summer night, A-Trak is spinning in the now. He gets the crowd riled up with a seamless cross-section of booty house, dark electro and old-school hip hop. And by the time his tour mascot, a fluffy stallion called Mustard – courtesy of Toys “R” Us – joins in the fun, and A-Trak drops Retro/Grade’s punchy “Moda” as a climax of sorts, the crowd has surrendered. And that ain’t no technical glitch.