DJ A-Trak Interview

[Music]
welcome to watchmojo.com i’m your host
layla tonight i go one-on-one with Kanye
West’s supporting DJ a-trak
[Applause]
when I when I was first DJing and I was
doing like the more technical stuff like
if I want to do something live I would
practice it for like literally for three
weeks at home like every day three weeks
in like my comfort periods but now it’s
like I do gigs all the time I rarely
have time to even practice strictly
DJing and I’m play with Kanye where
everything moves really fast and how has
working with Kanye West sort of impacted
your solo performance see you will go
they could you get me yo you know seeing
him in the studio and seeing the face of
which he works and um seen the amount of
effort that it takes to get to the kind
of visibility he has you know I think
has rubbed off on me is this wouldn’t
extend and even yeah being part of his
so I think forced me to learn how to
perform for an audience that isn’t
necessarily the backgrounds in the
tempeh djing that I’m from you know like
I was used to DJing for people that went
to an 8-track show
and then you put me in front of a Kanye
audience especially the first store i
did with him we open for usher so it’s
like a basically teenage girls they
don’t know what a scratch DJ is and he
really wanted to showcase me so I still
I had a solo and I had and my solos were
very technical the solos I was used to
doing took for granted that my audience
had seen other DJs and had certain
reference points but you put that in
front of like a crowd that doesn’t
really know what the hell I’m doing in
the first place and then they were just
like what and then I had to like
simplified but simplified in the ways
that didn’t really hurt my integrity
that was still comfortable with when did
you discover that D doing was more than
a hobby for you I answered my first DJ
battle when I had only been DJing for
maybe like a year and a half and I won
the first time that one the first one
that I answered me straight that the
world finals from that point on as soon
as I wonder the local competition going
up against guys that you know we’re
doing this for years and were way older
than me that’s you know what told me and
also convince my parents that like this
thing was serious the first couple years
of my that my career was really all
about the more technical side like
turntablism and losing doing VJ tricks
and in that realm those literally
there’s like actually there’s patterns
and techniques that you can just learn
and you know you can teach the guy how
to do a scratch and then you know you
got to practice it every day for hours
and hours and then you’ve mastered what
I do as a DJ now when my career isn’t
really bad anymore I mean that I know
how to do that because it’s where I
started for for the first few years but
um what I work on now was a lot more in
terms of you know doing DJ sets like the
company the compositional side of it
when I do a DJ set figuring out new ways
to bring in the techniques that I know
into that context without it being in
the forefront
if you make something look easy and it
sounds the way people think it should be
sounding then they think it’s good you
know and then whether or not it actually
is easy or hard that’s your that’s your
end of the bargain and I happen to make
some of my things kind of hard to pull
off and that’s my that’s for me to deal
with when I do my stuff like I just want
the audience to see and hear it and be
like yeah like he’s got it kind of thing