A-TRAK at Rebel (11 Polson), Saturday (January 21), doors 7 pm. $20. ticketmaster.ca.
A-Trak has compiled a new box set called In The Loop: A Decade Of Remixes, which looks back at the Montreal-raised DJ/producer’s musical evolution since the early days of his Fool’s Gold record label. The compilation is also an intriguing snapshot of how the DIY bloghouse era of the mid-00s eventually shifted into the mainstream EDM boom.
“Part of what’s interesting to me about this compilation is that it starts at a time before EDM existed,” A-Trak explains from his Los Angeles home. “It starts at a point when electronic music was tied to the indie scene more than anything else.
“If you go back to 2006, the major labels were crumbling from the effects of the download age, and there was a lot of cross-pollination between adjacent genres. Indie bands got into electronic music, and electronic music then started having more musical elements like guitar riffs, bass lines and distorted sounds.
“Producers who came from a hip-hop background started getting into a more uptempo, club-focused approach to production. A lot of the experimentation that happened in those years laid the groundwork for the explosion of electronic music a few years later that came to be known as EDM.”
The EDM fad not only transformed the sound of dance music, but also the industry itself. The festival circuit took the place of the traditional club scene, and big companies like Live Nation invested heavily in the trend. It’s become increasingly evident over the past couple of years that the culture is going through another significant shift.
“We’re definitely in a transition phase. To me, one of the clearest indicators has been a change in tempo. Ask anyone in the music business, from radio people to producers and DJs. A few short years ago, the majority of electronic tracks were between 126 to 128 bpm. Now everything is between 100 to 110. Everything is slowed down, and it’s no longer dominated by that heavy 4/4 kick drum.”
A-Trak’s 13-track collection covers a lot of musical ground, so we asked him to choose his personal top-three faves.
BOB MOSES Tearing Me Up, 2015
“I loved the original, but it presented some challenges. Their version has a 6/8 time signature, which is kind of a shuffle, but I decided early on that I wanted my remix to follow a 4/4 time signature, because I wanted to use hip-hop-style breakbeats. I had to manually move syllables around in the vocal part to make it sit on the beat properly. I remember sitting through a flight doing a lot of precision mouse work on the laptop.”
BOYS NOIZE Oh!, 2008
“[Alex Ridha] had lost most of the original sounds due to a damaged hard drive. Usually when you do a remix, you get all the musical elements separated so you can pick and choose bits. All he had was a talkbox robot vocal and a hi-hat. The talkbox was kind of the hook of the song, though, so it was just enough to work with for a remix. I ended up taking the full final track and chopping up little sounds and sampling, basically treating it like I’d found some old record and was remixing from that.”
YEAH YEAH YEAHS Heads Will Roll, 2009
“I worked on this for a really long time and I’m not sure why. I refused to let go of it until it sounded just right. Usually people do a remix in a few days or a few weeks, but I spent six months endlessly tinkering. I finally sent it in, but their label said they had no use for it any more because they’d already moved on to the next single. Meanwhile, I was on tour with a couple of great DJs and gave it to them, and they went home to their countries and kept playing it. Eventually the label came back to me and said they’d heard people were playing it and wanted to pick it up after all. It ended up taking off way more than anyone expected. It made its way slowly but ended up being my biggest remix, even though it almost wasn’t released.”
benjaminb@nowtoronto.com | @benjaminboles
