A-Trak

Though he would hardly settle into an academic career, it makes perfect sense that Alain Macklovitch, known professionally as A-Trak, spent time studying physics at the prestigious McGill University in his native Montreal. His understanding of rhythm and sound is that technically precise: at 15, he won the 1997 DMC World DJ Championship, and earned a reputation as one of the most formally masterful scratch DJs in his generation. Just a few years later, he was giving lectures and publishing essays about his unique method of scratch notation. (This sort of musical adventurousness runs in the family: A-Trak’s older brother, Dave, is one half of the electro-funk duo Chromeo.) But while he continued to tour and compete as a DJ, A-Trak also got to work issuing music by other artists. In 2007 he co-founded Fool’s Gold, the label that would be home to Danny Brown, Run the Jewels and his own EDM duo with Armand Van Helden, Duck Sauce, which earned a Grammy nomination for the 2010 festival classic “Barbra Streisand”. A-Trak’s ear for hip-hop made him a go-to producer and remixer, as well as longtime tour DJ for Kanye West, while his original work helped define the sound of EDM as it came to dominate pop culture at the dawn of the 2010s.