A-Trak

A hip hop kid on the wrong wall of the record shop

Alain Macklovitch was born in Montreal on 30 March 1982 and was in clubs before he was old enough to drink in them. He has said his first nights out were to DJ, aged around 14, tagging along with his older brother Dave and jumping on the decks at Bar Voltaire to scratch. Within a year he had won the 1997 DMC World Championship, the youngest champion the competition had produced, and the career he describes as taking off "really fast" was under way while he was still at high school.

The record shops shaped the taste that would later define him. Speaking to Cult MTL in January 2026, he traced his sound to the Montreal stores he shopped in as a teenager, where he went in for hip hop twelve-inches and breakbeats but absorbed the house and techno on the next wall without meaning to. He remembers hanging out at the shop Science while Tiga played records at the counter, and playing 514 Productions raves as a teenager on bills that also carried Daft Punk and the Beatnuts.

An early set, he recalled, was fifteen minutes of scratching at Lion d'Or when he was 15 or 16, booked because Kid Koala was unavailable. He was cutting up battle records without knowing the sources, and was embarrassed when a punter congratulated him on scratching over Malcolm McLaren. It is a story he tells against himself, but it explains the two halves of what he does now: the technical turntablist, and the crate-digger who eventually learned every source.

Kanye, Gold Digger and a label built on what the majors missed

He left Montreal in 2006, by which point he was already Kanye West's tour DJ, a job he held from 2004 to 2007 that took him to the Grammy Awards and the MTV Video Music Awards. His scratches sit on Late Registration in 2005 and Graduation in 2007, most audibly on Gold Digger, which is still the cut most people have heard him on without knowing it.

In 2007 he founded Fool's Gold Records with Nick Catchdubs and the artist Dust La Rock. The label's early roster reads now like a list of people who did not need it for long: Kid Cudi, Danny Brown and Flosstradamus all passed through, and Fool's Gold became the house style for the moment when hip hop, electro and indie crowds were sharing dancefloors. Its annual Day Off shows and the Goldie Awards, his DJ and beat-making competition, extended the brand into events.

His own records from that period include Infinity + 1 in 2009 and the Tuna Melt EP in 2012. He told Cult MTL that when what America called EDM broke around 2010, Billboard put him on the cover with Diplo and Skrillex, and that his main reaction was surprise that the United States had not already been through what Montreal and Toronto lived through in the 1990s.

Duck Sauce and the Streisand problem

Duck Sauce, his duo with the house producer Armand Van Helden, began in 2009. Barbra Streisand, released the following year, went to number one in twelve countries and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Dance Recording in 2012. The pair released the album Quack in 2014 and then went quiet.

The return has been gradual and, on the evidence, unhurried. DJ Mag reported in February 2024 that the duo came back from hiatus in 2020 with Mesmerize, followed by the Put The Sauce On It EP in 2022 and the single LALALA in 2023. The 2024 double A-side Clap Your Feet and 2 Da Face put a Chicago underground vocalist, Fuzzy Cufflinxxx, on the first track. The same piece noted that A-Trak had appeared on Defected's House Masters Remixes series in 2023, which is a reasonable marker of where his DJing had settled.

The other family business is the Brothers Macklovitch, his project with Dave 1 of Chromeo, which surfaced in 2020. In January 2026 he described it as still active alongside Duck Sauce and his solo work, and said he also has hands-on involvement with Chromeo's independent label, Juliet Records.

A second label, and a theory of curation

The newest venture is A-Trak & Friends, a house singles label that grew out of a party series of the same name. Beatportal profiled it in July 2025, and he was candid that the parties had run for five years before he acted on the idea of a sublabel. The model is the one he has always used: put established names next to unknowns and let the room sort it out.

He was equally direct about what he is signing. House music, he said, "will never go out of style", and the test is "strictly a feeling" rather than technical production. The label takes "tracks I know I'll be playing in a ton of sets", runs singles rather than albums because it is faster and "more kinetic", and exists partly as an argument against recommendation engines. "Algorithms only recommend what you're already into. They're a closed circle." A curated label, in his account, is what the trust-me factor used to be.

That posture also shows in how he talks about the generation below him. He told Cult MTL that touring after the pandemic revealed "holes in oral history and mentorship", and that while in Australia over New Year 2025 he wondered whether crowds in their early twenties knew what their own scene had been ten years earlier. Part of the reason he gave the interview was to put Montreal's 1990s club history on the record for younger readers.

Where he stands in 2026

The most recent picture comes from that Cult MTL interview, published on 30 January 2026, the day he opened for DJ Snake at Igloofest, Montreal's outdoor winter festival. He described himself as on "non-stop tour" and said there is "no off cycle for me": he prefers to be building a new project or brand identity at any given time. He named DJ Snake an old friend whose music has since diverged from his own, and said the two had "a couple things" planned together this year.

The home-town relationship is more complicated than the billing suggests. He admitted he had only played Stereo, the after-hours club with a global reputation, for the first time about a year earlier, and that opening for Dom Dolla at Piknic Électronik a couple of summers before was, he suspected, the first time much of that Montreal crowd had ever seen him play. His years at SAT and later at MURAL Festival with Fool's Gold had put him in front of a different, more electro-and-hip-hop audience.

The summer that followed was dense. Listings on setlist.fm show a two-hour slot at Smartbar in Chicago on 1 August 2026, Elements Music & Arts Festival at Pocono Raceway on 8 August, and both legs of Summer Sonic in Japan, Tokyo on 15 August at Makuhari Messe and Osaka on 16 August at the Expo '70 Pavilion. Songkick's calendar then has him in Ibiza at Chinois on 29 August and Pacha on 3 September, with Amnesia on 11 September, the Gridlife Laguna festival in Salinas, California on 18 to 20 September, a headline slot at the National Fried Chicken Festival in New Orleans on 2 October and Bora Bora Social Club in Medellín on 9 October still to come.

On the decks today

A-Trak has not released a studio album since 2009 and his current output is singles-led, so the live show is the product. What a night looks like depends heavily on the room. The club dates are long, house-driven sets, of which the Chicago Smartbar booking from one to three in the morning is typical. Festival slots in Japan and Pennsylvania are shorter and sit on dance-tent bills, while the Igloofest appearance was a support set before DJ Snake in sub-zero temperatures.

He does not travel with a fixed show. Songkick lists a support act, Dani Masi, on only one of the upcoming dates, and most of his bookings are club or festival slots where the venue supplies the bill. What is consistent, on his own description, is the mix of big names and new signings and a house backbone with electro textures, which he said in 2025 were resurging. The turntablism that made his name has never fully left the set, and he remains one of the few DJs on the festival circuit who can still credibly scratch through a routine rather than simply mix.