A-Trak – Infinity + 1

Album Reviews • Thursday April 16th, 2009 • 10:31 am

A-Trak’s new mix album, Infinity + 1, is a lovingly crafted dance party that makes most DJs look downright slothful. In a genre whose express purpose is to provide booty-shakers with enough bass hits and bleeps necessary to lubricate the otherwise awkward social interaction that is grinding, Infinity + 1 is the rare album designed to outlast Friday night’s bad decisions and Saturday morning’s hangover.

Not that we should expect less from A-Trak. Née Alain Macklovitch, A-Trak exploded onto the international DJ scene in 1997, when, at age 15, he became the youngest-ever winner of the DMC World DJ Championships — arguably the biggest competition in DJing. The Canadian wunderkind has since won 4 other world championships, including the other two which some argue are the biggest. This guy is to turntablism what Tiger Woods is to golf; but unlike Tiger Woods, he’s also Kanye’s tour DJ and the brother of that hirsute clown in Chromeo.

Infinity + 1 showcases, for just under an hour, what A-Trak does best, in the DJ’s primordial state—Lord of the Dance. A-Trak seamlessly stitches together sections of music that, in less competent hands, would be utter Frankensteins: Kid Sister’s goofy club-holler “Life On TV” is grafted to Sebastien Tellier’s minor-key euro-club jam “Kilometer” so plausibly that you’d think the two artists were roommates. Combining a flair for remixing with a well-tuned ear, A-Trak teases out surprising commonalities between tracks, and bridges even disparate material by emphasizing bass lines, inserting drum elements, and occasionally flexing his turntablist muscles to puree tracks entirely.

The result is a delicious dance floor smoothie which elevates diverse, unknown source material into a vision which conjures the darkness and strobes of a top-echelon, high-glamour gala. Nearly any DJ can take a collection of hits and make them bang (witness the sad immortality of 80s-nights); A-Trak’s real gift is the way he makes even B-list musicians shine. Many of his hypest mixes on Infinity + 1 start with sound-alike acts — “Solid Gold” is sung by some lesser early Beth Gibbons, and “Shadows” sounds like a discard from the Joy Division back-catalog, just to name two—and end up as club-bangers, even if the lyrics are, like “Solid Gold,” about larceny-prone golden foxes.

Nearly always, the risks taken by A-Trak pay off, and the few that don’t — nothing can save Little Boots’ clumsy lyric on “Stuck on Repeat” — quickly fade into the background. But, DJ-ing has grown up a little since 1997, and while sophisticated crate-digging and beat-matching used to qualify as cutting-edge, they do so no longer. A-Trak’s agility with the crossfader and the synth-bass have earned him an enduring place in the DJ world; after 11 years on top, however, I wonder whether he’s still capable of pushing the envelope.

Ultimately, for Infinity + 1, it doesn’t much matter. The album is 60 minutes of fluid, skilled mixing that often delights and never grates. Cop this and heat up your next house party without the expense of a real DJ.

Tagged as: Dance, electronic, montreal