A-Trak & DJ Mehdi
In the second half of the 2000s, Canadian turntable wizard A-Trak and the late French DJ and producer Mehdi became one of the best known and loved DJing duo. Riding high on the popularity of electro and French touch, the pair took everything they’d learned in the trenches of hip-hop culture – from selecting to scratching, sampling to producing – and applied it to both records and club sets with an irresistible flair.
In this lecture at the 2007 Red Bull Music Academy, the duo explained how and why they broke away from the restrictions of hip-hop, how they adapted to the digital age and how to rock a party and still maintain integrity.
Hosted by Torsten Schmidt So yeah, OK, this is the more official bit. Please give a warm welcome, all the way from Paris, France, and all the way from Montreal via New York, A-Trak and DJ Mehdi. [applause] It’s a little bit like Gulliver’s set up in reverse isn’t it, like when you started out and won those championships it was you on some pedestal trying to reach for the turntables and now you have to lean down like that? A-Trak It’s cruel irony. Torsten Schmidt But it was you who set it up, it was none of us. A-Trak Exactly. It’s more intimate. The candles on my rider didn’t make it. Torsten Schmidt Oh, damn. We must have over read the bit about the candles. So what else do you have on your rider then? Torsten Schmidt Ah, what’s on the rider? Hummus, nuts, cashews, preferably. Sometimes promoters get cheap and they give you the nut variety pack but all you want is the cashews. Torsten Schmidt Cashews or macadamia, anything else isn’t on. Is that what you learnt when you were on tour with Kanye then? A-Trak He has cashews. Anything less is just not a legume. This whole lecture is going to be about nuts. Yeah, nuts. Torsten Schmidt So what else can you tell us about Kanye’s nuts then? [Laughter] A-Trak How you doing Mehdi? DJ Mehdi I’m doing fine. I don’t know that much about Kanye’s nuts, I’m sorry. A-Trak So. This is an improvised lecture as you can tell already but I swear we are going to get into the rhythm of things. Torsten Schmidt How do you go from improvising into rhythm anyway because, I mean, you guys usually plan things out in what you call a routine? A-Trak Yes and no, but lately, the last few years with the schedule being way more booked up, I always think I’m going to plan stuff and I end up improvising a lot more. So Mehdi and I are doing this tour together right now. We’re doing a set together during the Fool’s Gold tour and then next week we’re going to Europe, just me and him, and then we have this whole thing mapped out that we’re going to rehearse for three solid days and come up with a whole prepared set but we’ve been improvising everything. Torsten Schmidt So what is Fool’s Gold outside of nine minutes 53 seconds of brilliant Stone Roses madness? A-Trak Is that really how long it is? Did you do your research before this interview? Torsten Schmidt Funnily enough, I think there it’s 9:53, but if I’m not totally mistaken, the song is 10:47 or something? A-Trak Torsten, you are crazy. Torsten Schmidt I never really understood that I thought it was some weird numerological conspiracy behind it, I thought you might clean it up? A-Trak Well, this is 9:56 but if it’s recorded off a 12”, maybe they played an extra three seconds after. Torsten Schmidt So the hiss might be it, in the end? A-Trak Yeah. Torsten, you scare me. Torsten Schmidt I’m sorry. I thought you got over that… A-Trak That one time I went to see you in Germany. Torsten Schmidt Now you’re scaring me. A-Trak Fool’s Gold is a label that my friend Nick [Catchdubs] and I started at the beginning of the year. I was running another label before that called Audio Research, which was ten years old when we stopped it this year. Audio Research was much more of an indie hip-hop label from the Fat Beats, Rawkus era, which we kept going, but in the last few years I got more into merging electronic music with the rap stuff that I was producing. Basically, there was a new wave of artists and songs that I wanted to champion and put out. Whether stuff that I was producing or people that were in the same scene as me that I felt Nick and I could really bring together and package with some good art work and get behind. That’s how the label started. Torsten Schmidt Are you trying to say you got bored with backpack [hip-hop]? A-Trak Didn’t we all? In a sense, I mean, it was basically a crossroads, a situation where it was like: “OK, do we try to keep Audio Research going and give it a new image or do we just start fresh with a new brand?” And I think we all really agreed that a new brand made sense. And we’re on this tour right now, the Road Rampage, running through a select run of cities. It’s going really good. Torsten Schmidt I mean for a Road Rampage you both look pretty composed. A-Trak I got a big scar all across here from last night when Mehdi hit me with a vodka bottle. DJ Mehdi We chose not to speak about this. A-Trak Yeah, forget what you just heard. There’s no scar. Torsten Schmidt What people probably don’t really know is that you, before you met Pedro Winter, were already quite an illuminate figure in the Parisian scene as well, right? DJ Mehdi Yeah, I have kind of the same way in the… I won’t say career because we’re pretty young me and Alain, despite our looks. A-Trak Our boyish good looks. Torsten Schmidt It’s all about good products when being on tour, right? Dj Mehdi Nuts. Cashews. Torsten Schmidt Good cream, good cream, yeah. DJ Mehdi Yeah, try the energy mix. A-Trak Kiehl's. DJ Mehdi And, yeah, being a hip-hop producer for quite a long time and the idea of merging electronic music and hip-hop was already there and we in Paris – who you refer to as Pedro Winter who’s also known as Busy P, the label manager for Ed Banger Records – were doing since ’97, ’98 on a very underground scale… small clubs in Paris, very small clubs like 300-, like 400-people clubs. But a lot of things made the opportunity for us to be on a larger scale also: a wider range of artists, a lot of artists who were kind of doing the same thing in small parts of the world but you could add them up. And also, I think, and maybe you won’t agree me, but I think the Neptunes, Timbaland, some of those guys were already, maybe even without knowing it, not doing it but they were merging electronic music and hip-hop in their ways and that also paved the way, basically. Torsten Schmidt Thank god for sampling laws, then. A-Trak Yeah. I mean, yeah, Mehdi definitely I think... Mehdi and I only met less than a year ago, but I knew about him for years, and actually he met... my brother and I have worked very closely and he met my brother when we were all working with Fat Beats and he was also doing stuff with Fat Beats. People that know him for his current music might not know that he was one of the most proficient or prolific hip-hop producers in France in the ’90s, so definitely when we met this year I think we saw eye to eye having done that same trajectory of going from a true-school hip-hop background in the ’90s to getting into DJing and party rocking and electro mixed with rap in today’s musical climate. Torsten Schmidt How many times do you have to read on whatever backpack sniper forum that you “sold out”? A-Trak I don’t really get much flak from the hip-hop guys. Actually, the only times I get a hard time from fans or from anyone is when, that happened just two nights ago, someone at the show was just like, “Turntablism!!!!” in the middle of a straight electro set and it’s like, I’ve been scratching over these songs and the way I’m mixing this stuff, we’re trying to get creative with it. Doesn’t have to literally be a DMC-style routine to be interesting DJing. But I think, on the hip-hop side, there’s not that many people I think, today, that are really, really holding onto… Torsten Schmidt Their nuts? A-Trak No, who are holding onto this sacred vision of what hip-hop is supposed to sound like as much as it was a few years ago. I agree with, Mehdi named Timbaland and the Neptunes, I think for a lot of us around 2001 or once the Neptunes got past using the exact same sounds in every track and made a few really, really interesting songs, and did the N.E.R.D. album and all of that… that to me really made the whole distinction between underground and mainstream in rap irrelevant. To me, anyone that still talks about mainstream and underground, except for really extreme examples, except for really extreme cases, is kind of stuck in an old dichotomy of rap and of music because there definitely was a point to me around the early 2000s where major-label rap records came back to being the best rap records. When The Blueprint came out there was nothing indie that was comparable, and the indie stuff became… Torsten Schmidt Which interestingly enough was the first time that Jay-Z did a true album as such, as one consistent theme as well. A-Trak Yeah, as opposed to a singles-based record. Torsten Schmidt Collection. A-Trak Absolutely. As that was going on, the indie world that we all bubbled in in the mid- to late ’90s and that we all loved and cherished became a caricature of itself. Torsten Schmidt Obviously, the commercial realities somehow have fused the two worlds together anyway, because overall the numbers have gone down, so the difference between 500 and 20,000 sales, is not that gigantic anymore. A-Trak Yeah, it’s just not the same reality. It works both ways. Certain indie artists are way more sustainable than the artists that are signed to majors. It used to be like, either you stay indie and you sell small numbers but you make music that you feel strongly about, or you go on the major and you make shit that’s only for 14-year-old girls. For a second, it really was that simple but now, all the styles are merging anyways. Rihanna’s making dance records and records that sound like what Madonna was doing a few years ago and she’s an urban artist. Torsten Schmidt One nation under one all-over print hoodie then? A-Trak Yeah, exactly, yeah. At the same time, Kylie is reaching out to guys like Benny Blanco who’s like too young to get into a club and produces Spank Rock records for beats, so across the board everything is merging like that. Torsten Schmidt You can pretty much consider yourself as a veteran in this game then, already. A-Trak I’m an old fart. Torsten Schmidt Yeah, old fart at? A-Trak 25. Torsten Schmidt Oh, it’s a quarter of a century. Like football players. A-Trak No, but the industry is. I’ve been doing this for 12 years. Torsten Schmidt And just for a point of reference how old are you? DJ Mehdi I’m 30 years old. Torsten Schmidt Did you, you know, ask for your state pension yet? DJ Mehdi A what? I released my first record in ‘92, 1992, so it’s been 18 years. I think we spent more time in the industry than out of it, which is… Torsten Schmidt Which is a bit of a weird feeling when you realize that you’ve been going to clubs and all that for longer than you’ve not been, right? DJ Mehdi But you know what? My wife, for example, who doesn’t really understand this whole thing, always asks like, it’s been three weeks and I’m in the States and I’ve been playing every night, sometimes twice, sometimes three times when there’s an after party or something and she’s like: “How do you still get excited?” Except the fact that it’s Chicago and last night was Vancouver it is pretty much going to be the same and you’re pretty much going to be spinning the same records and I cannot really explain, but I do get excited and I do want to do it and I’m always happy and I’m not bored, so I feel good. Torsten Schmidt I hope you’re not using her as a reference point because you want to be excited with her for the next 40 years as well, right? A-Trak I wish I’d plugged in my effects thing to put an airhorn every time Torsten does the dry humor [laughter]. I actually have at home those old-school bicycle horns, I should have brought that, too, the Mr Magoo horn. Torsten Schmidt The one you put on a bike with the little pump kind of thing? Yeah, they’re good. A-Trak I bought them at a shop in Japan at five in the morning. Torsten Schmidt You can take them off as well and you can use it as a foghorn like one of those hunting things? A-Trak In the alps that’s what you do. Torsten Schmidt I guess so. It’s one of those things, who said it the other day, there’s a siren plug-in for Serato now. You must have about 800 million sirens in your collection somewhere. A-Trak I have a lot of sirens. DJ Mehdi He’s the siren master. A-Trak I have a siren playlist. I don’t. It just sounded funny. Torsten Schmidt With this whole thing of the styles merging and “yadda, yadda, yadda,” discuss the A-Ha routine. A-Trak The what? With Kanye? He doesn’t do that anymore, but when we were doing the Touch The Sky tour when Late Registration came out, there was a part of the show when Kanye wanted to play other people’s hits to get the crowd riled up. When we started doing it, and we had the full set for the tour, we actually had a clock radio and he was like: “Hey, let me see what’s on the radio,” and then you play a Prince song and the crowd is like: “Oh my god, I love Prince! Michael Jackson is so good, you like him? I like him too.” Then he always caught people off-guard when the last song was A-Ha “Take On Me” and he’d do the Carlton dance and a lot of people thought it was… The crowds would cheer and then certain people would get: “Why’s he playing “Take On Me”? I think everybody likes that song but… DJ Mehdi Not everyone. A-Trak You don’t like it? Ah. Yeah, but… Torsten Schmidt When I went to first year in grammar school… I had a moment there. A-Trak I think in certain respects what Kanye does with music, and it translates with his shows even more, is kind of like a musical education side of it, where he embraces the idea that his music is for everyone. And when he goes and gets artwork by Murakami or a video with Gondry that doesn’t even come out, or I don’t know, to get this or that person to play on his records, part of it is, I think, his side of wanting to strive for what’s best. And part of it is also embracing the idea of being a pop artist and an artist that makes popular art for everyone to appreciate, and bringing that to the masses. Torsten Schmidt He’s an easy one to hate on if you want to, but nevertheless, when you go to a concert and that tour, which started with the “Touch The Sky” video and all those installations of all the whorehouses of the world and poor little Kanye lost in sin and temptation. You just got in there and it was like, “Whatever is usually happening, for the next two hours this is Las Vegas and you’re going to be entertained and I’m your Frank Sinatra tonight. That’s a notion…” A-Trak At the end of the day, I really feel right now in music, what excites me is as the industry is more and more in shambles, the quality of music is more and more of a driving force. Sure, there’s still some extremely formulaic songs on the radio and what have you. But it’s just… for the simple fact that even if you’re an indie artist and you can put something up on iTunes and you can have placement right next to a major artist, the side of the industry that’s becoming more democratic because the big companies don’t know what to do any more. That makes a climate where good music can prevail a lot of times and I think that’s what’s fun with music right now. Mehdi was talking about how do you not get bored by playing similar sets every night in clubs that look the same and crowds that crowdsurf the same and pictures that go up on the site that look like Cobrasnake’s and everything being very similar every night, but I know that for me, there’s something about music right now that’s giving me a spark that I haven’t had in a while. Part of that comes from the fact that... I feel like music is stagnant and exciting at the same time. It got so stagnant in the past year, there’s so many DJs that are playing exactly the same selections, and as much as I like using Serato, Serato made it so easy for everyone to have a set that has a little bit of electro a little bit of Baltimore club, a little bit of, you know, all these… You have the obvious selection from each genre and mix it all together in no particular order and get it from the same blogs and you have so much of a situation where the mass of DJs were playing the same stuff that for me, suddenly now, this tour is the ultimate example of that, and working with Mehdi is exciting, too, for me it pushes me to figure out a way to stand out from that mass again. It’s not, from a DJs perspective, simply a question of: “Hey, I’m going to play this genre of music because I’m discovering it.” At this point everybody’s discovered it so it’s like: “How can I play it in a way that’s distinctly me?” And that’s a really dope challenge, and to find a balance between that challenge and just putting on a good party at the same time, that’s what I’m really enjoying right now, because you can get lost in that too and get super crazy and technical and it would be distinctly you, but the crowd would be like, “What?” So, to be a good entertainer and to develop your identity in the climate where everyone has access to everything, that’s one of the most exciting things about music right now for me. Torsten Schmidt Culturally speaking, that’s a pretty interesting paradigm shift because on the one hand you have this whole minority, this mainstream of... All these minority subgenres become the new mainstream and everyone is just putting the three distinctive tracks of each genre. Then in the same way as in the discotheques we hated when we first started going out, it’s like the similar system of the lowest common denominator kind of things because it’s always looking for the big-bang effect and pretty much for novelty kind of stuff. A-Trak Yeah. I don’t know, it’s fun. Just seeing rap and electronic merge together... when you’re a DJ and you come up and you learn about what DJing was like before you and you read about the music scene in the early ’80s and where the art scene and the whole kind of Soulsonic Force-style of rap that’s electro at the same time... that whole world where it’s like the artwork was crazy and then this artist used to hang out with that artist and they made that crazy punk record but then the next record was rap, shit like that. It’s starting to feel like that again. That’s what’s kind of encouraging, I think. Torsten Schmidt Within all these types of music, what do you actually like? In other words, do you like stuff? A-Trak You like stuff? I think I listen to... I try to pick and choose in almost every genre, but what I listen to the most is still rap and electro, and then a certain selection of classics that I love. Everybody has their personal couple of albums of ’70s shit that they just really like and ’80s shit that they just really like, and that’s pretty much what you’ll find me listening to in my down time. Torsten Schmidt What is the difference between some old Dead Head following Jerry Garcia for 5,000 miles and us praying every morning to the holy Street Sounds compilation? A-Trak Huh, what? Torsten Schmidt I mean when you had those rock dudes that really got on our nerves when we were growing up, who were just like, “Oh, the Dead, Led Zeppelin…” A-Trak I still love Zeppelin, yeah. Torsten Schmidt At the same hand you get the feeling that, I don’t know, certain Hashim “Al-Naafiysh” records or some Street Sounds compilation or whatever have similar status and we’re just getting to... we’re just exchanging Jimmy Plant for someone else, but it’s exactly the same boring mechanism. A-Trak Yeah, but then you mix… that’s getting mixed with updated sounds, and I think it’s that lineage that’s interesting. To be able to listen to a Newcleus record and like a SebastiAn record and be like, “That came from this, but this is also interesting because it adds a certain grittiness.” Torsten Schmidt The last album you did was one of the ones where even the most notorious naysayers were like, “You can do something with those influences and still make it sound now.” DJ Mehdi That’s the challenge. That’s the challenge for me, which is interesting because I’m not a singer and I’m not a rapper. So, I have to find a way to make interesting music instrumental and hip-hop at the same time. Like, when, after DJ Shadow and stuff and Krush and all those records, hip-hop instrumental records weren’t dance music records, so that’s an idea I was looking at but I’ve just started. It wasn’t my first album, it was my first album with this in mind and it was also the first album for our label Ed Banger Records, so a lot of things, we were just trying to do stuff and we were still excited about doing anything, but we weren’t ready to have an established thing, you know? It was more playing and finding new ideas and that’s why I still feel like we’ve just started, that’s why I’m touring a lot, that’s why I’m explaining a lot. I never say no to an interview just to explain that this is something we haven’t started but I am starting it for myself and I am still studying how to make instrumental hip-hop music that is more danceable and enjoyable. An album you could actually listen to without having to have chorus, verse, chorus, verse, OR radio singles and I think it also goes –something we haven’t mentioned – with the fact that you don’t have to pay for music any more, and the fact that when you do an album and you do these 13 or 14 tracks, you spend a lot of time getting them in the right order, thinking that anybody is going to listen to it in that order when everyone is going to shuffle his iPod or just browse into iTunes and pick the three tracks that they know. People just download and you’ve been thinking about this interlude between two songs that will be just the right link between song #7 and song #9 and you go to Limewire or Soulseek you don’t get the interlude so it fucks up your whole plan. It’s just… who knows, how do you listen to an album, which track, whatever, singles, stuff like that? We’re still experimenting with all this stuff and in that regard I had a lot of fun doing this record. I also needed a single or whatever, but it’s the first time in this industry that I actually did anything that I wanted to because I had no rules. Having no commercial pressure, having no major-label pressure and Ed Banger Records being still burgeoning and still very, very young at the time, I mastered my album almost two years ago, we were just having fun basically and that’s what I love. And I will speak only for Ed Banger Records but inside our own label which is growing up, I’m still fighting for this spirit to prevail and not videos, singles and big hits and stuff. And Pedro, Busy P and So Me, the guy who does all the art work, we are very much on the same page for this. It’s something that we really want to keep alive, doing 12”s, although nobody really buys 12”s anymore. Just doing fun things just because it’s fun and because it’s stylish, and because we like to without any economic plan that is very tight. We lose a lot of money. A-Trak But it’s for the sake of building a brand at the same time. And I think Mehdi was talking about the challenge and the difficulties of making instrumental songs when you come from a hip-hop background. When we first met, I remember having a long conversation with him about that because I faced the exact same challenges when I started producing more in the past few years. When you come from a hip-hop background, when you make a track, all you really make is a loop and someone helps you turn it into a song and then you might make a few change-ups once they put their vocals on it to spruce it up a bit. But most of us who are making the kind of music that we make don’t really have musical training, and we have to teach ourselves about song structure. But when you’re at a point in music like it is today, where all these genres are merging and what have you, there’s not even any rules for that, so it’s fun. You can make your own rules, but it’s challenging because there’s not even that many obvious examples to turn to sometimes to figure out how to make this demo into a song. And then for the next song to be a different approach and not to fall into formulas. But when it works, that’s what can make some of these records really unique. So, I can really relate to what he was just saying. Listening to guys like Shadow a few years ago, but at the same time watching that style of instrumental, sample-based hip-hop turn into practically hotel music when it got watered down and replicated so many times. DJ Mehdi But Shadow was the exception. A-Trak Yeah, Shadow is the only one. DJ Mehdi Not the only one, but he was… A-Trak … the best one. No, of course, I’m not saying his music is hotel music but every time that someone else tried to make… when I started working on an album for myself about two years ago, maybe almost three, I don’t even know, for me it was interesting because I had all these different ideas and concepts that I wanted to infuse into my music, and on one hand I wanted to make scratch music that was enjoyable as music. I come from a background of turntablism, as you probably know, and there has been some, what I would call scratch music, meaning like tracks that are mainly executed by manipulating records as opposed to putting a sound in a drum machine or whatever. But a lot of times over the years the records that were made like that stayed extremely leftfield and extremely… I think people will almost let the producer get away with a song being just not that catchy because it’s interesting technically. But I wanted to make songs that were good songs but that have that technical element because I happen to like the textures that that would bring to production. If I scratch the hi-hat, and there’s a low frequency that comes from my record and the needle picks up on that, and there’s a little bit of static on the high end, that makes a really rich sound. And when every layer of your track is like that I really like the richness of that. So, on one hand I wanted to have that element in my production. On the other hand, if you look at it like two, three years ago, I wanted to work with a few rappers that I liked without sticking to whatever those old paradigms we were taking about in terms of who you would expect me to work with. That’s why the first song I put out was with Dipset, just to make a statement, to be like: “You might think I’m A-Trak, the scratch DJ who has a label with Fat Beats, and because of that you might expect me to only work with someone trying to sound like Tribe many, many years later – but I happen to love Dipset and here’s a song with Dipset.” So, there was that element to it and then I also wanted to have an element that works very close to what Mehdi was describing, in terms of making danceable uptempo instrumentals. And what I ended up with was a bunch of songs that didn’t really gel together, and I kind of put the whole project aside. And the party side of it, of the production that I was starting to work on a few years ago, is what I really stuck to, and now when I make a track I don’t need to have a scratch in it, just because I didn’t really need to have it any more. I don’t have that side of me that’s just like: “There has to be a scratch because that’s not how I’m trying to present myself.” The hip-hop stuff that I did that was really pure hip-hop. Like the song I did with Little Brother, for example, that to me is like a previous chapter. But the party stuff, that’s what’s really interesting to me right now, because there’s a ton of ways to get really creative with it. Torsten Schmidt So Mehdi, when you said no-one is really listening to albums in order any more, don’t you think you were on the receiving end of this as well, since you put in an effort and created some sort of a classical album approach with interludes and so forth and actual, like: “OK, I don’t care if you download three of them, I’m going to do this the way I want it to be”… DJ Mehdi Well, that’s an approach I have about life and about art every day. The way you present yourself to ten people or ten million people should be the same. If you are devoted to your art or if you believe, that’s why I love to do in-stores and stuff like that, and I also love to play big-stage festivals in front of 10 or 15,000 people and just show the same energy because it keeps me rooted where my love for music and not necessarily my ambition, if you will. I’d like to just add one point to what we were saying just before, the difficulty for us producers to have our own music. And two points, we’ve talked about the hip-hop producers that were using electronic music and stuff. There was also an influence from the electronic music field, where producers such as the Chemical Brothers, as Fatboy Slim as Daft Punk were becoming artists of their own and interpreting and performing their own songs… A-Trak … and made pop records… DJ Mehdi … and made pop records. Because without even having to have “featurings” first. And second, I thought at one point that our best producers in the hip-hop field, namely Kanye, for example, or Pharrell or Timbaland, or all those guys, even if you say Dr Dre, they had to become rappers to become pop stars. I’ve never had this in me. I never was in the position where I was like, “Oh, OK, maybe I should sing or start to write rhymes so I can have my own records.” So I had to find another path, but I thought the electronic music guys, especially Daft Punk – because I am from Paris and they are my friends – they were very, very, everywhere in Paris when they blew up. And it was very hard, even if you were deeply rooted in the backpack underground hip-hop scene, which can be the most closed circuit that you can ever do, they were everywhere. They were just so influential, being producers they were using the same records, they were using the same tools, they were using the same samplers, but they were artists of their own. They had power in their approach that we didn’t have. For me, I wasn’t going to become a rapper or a singer or whatever like Pharell or whatever, but I was just like: “Hey, there’s something here.” And Fatboy Slim also and the Chemical Brothers… A-Trak I always thought that Daft Punk had a hip-hop or close to hip-hop production, anyways. Especially, after I discovered some of the samples that they used. Some electronic music is studio wizardry, but Daft Punk’s production a lot of times is just very loop-driven and when you would just hear [the sample from “Harder, Better…”]... Torsten Schmidt …which is? A-Trak Err, what’s his name… Yeah, that’s it, Edwin Birdsong and you’re like: “Wow, it’s all here except the vocoder.” When you come up in hip-hop and you learn about production in the hip-hop aesthetic, which is extremely minimal and stripped down, you look at dance music as kind of a mystery and I still do. Even if everything I’ve produced this year is in the 120 to 130 bpm range and is meant to be played next to an electro song in a club set, I’ll still listen to electro and dance records and there will always be one thing in a track that I hear and I’m like, “I don’t know how to do this.” Daft Punk was one of those groups where you could relate to it as a hip-hop head, because you’d be like, “Oh yeah, they’re just looping stuff and doing it so well that it becomes a pop song.” Their approach of it is very sample-based. Torsten Schmidt Speaking of Daft Punk, and obviously with you representing Ed Banger to a certain degree, you got a common link in the person running it. But ideologically, the Justice approach on stage for example is slightly different than the classic Daft Punk approach, isn’t it? DJ Mehdi Yeah. I wouldn’t speak for Justice, as I won’t speak for Daft Punk either. I know that Daft Punk pretty much… Pedro Busy P said this in many interviews so I can say it: in a way, Daft Punk started Ed Banger. Not only the label, because Pedro did it or whatever, but just the spirit and the powerful French artists to come, for example here. If you know in American or in Canada, or even in England. England and France are like 20 kilometers one from the other but for us French artists to go and play in London, it’s not that often. Definitely, Daft Punk in many ways were the blueprint of what Pedro tried to do with Ed Banger after this. We are another generation, I’m almost the same age as Thomas but the Justice guys, for example, they are a bit younger and they grew up without any boundaries. There are no borders any more. For example, I know for sure that Xavier from Justice used to listen to a Busta Rhymes record or to French hip-hop records like NTM or Lunatic and Daft Punk, not without having to say, “This is what I like. I’m into house music and I don’t...” When my generation for example, if you were into Nirvana for example, you are into Tupac or Notorious BIG. That was our push. Growing up, I had another approach, me personally, and Justice are a bit younger so I guess they also have their own approach. But as far as the... How did you call it? The link? Torsten Schmidt The presentation? DJ Mehdi The link between Daft Punk and us? Torsten Schmidt On the one side, you have the people that want to totally stand back and don’t put their own human personality in it and their private life, and the others go representing themselves as iconic rock stars, almost. DJ Mehdi Oh, that’s what you meant. Once again, I couldn’t speak for Xavier and Gaspar from Justice, but as far as I’m concerned, I was a producer first, like you said at the beginning, and I’ve been used to be in the shadow for ten years. A-Trak Now you stand on speakers. DJ Mehdi Now I’m standing on speakers, but I never envisioned my act as a group, as a band, as an iconic thing, if you will. Whether younger guys, like Kavinsky, for example, or SebastiAn in lesser, but Justice is the best example. They actually think about their image and their band as much as they think about their music. I couldn’t speak for them, me I’m a little bit different and I’m a DJ first. A-Trak There’s something that happened in dance music in the last few years also in terms of audience. Me being very close to my brother, who was in the group Chromeo, I really saw… Torsten Schmidt He’s your older brother as well. A-Trak Yeah, older brother. I really saw a whole progression in what they had to do as a band to kind of connect to their audience. When Chromeo did their first album, my brother was already doing his PhD, he didn’t want to tour. He liked to make music so he made the record and he was used to always being in the background, so he didn’t grasp the concept that he had to tour in today’s musical reality in order to support and album. When Chromeo was doing their first record, like four years ago, there was barely any references and influences in music at that time for what they were trying to do because the only stuff I remember… The only stuff they were listening to that was kind of contemporary was Daft Punk and Mr Oizo and maybe one or two other people and then it was all like the ’80s Cameo-style references to their music. When their label would tell them, “You have to tour to support this album or we’re freezing the budget” they’d be like, “But Daft Punk doesn’t tour.” Now they do, but you guys got to remember, everybody’s talking about Daft Punk’s show right now and they’re like the most talked-about performance, but they hadn’t toured in ten years, right? When Discovery came out, Daft Punk’s second album came out, you didn’t see them anywhere. For Chromeo, when they did that first record, it was really, it was a tough time in music because there was no bins in the stores to put their record in. My grandmother would go to the record shop to try and support “little David’s album,” like her grandson’s album, and she didn’t know where to find it. “Do you have Chromeo?” And they would take her to the techno section which is way in the corner, and Chromeo’s like way more, you know, Hall & Oates and funk and ’80s funk than techno. DJ Mehdi I don’t really agree to this point. A-Trak No, no, but a few years ago. DJ Mehdi And I didn’t agree with Dave on his first album. A-Trak Yeah, but that’s what they were faced with. They didn’t want to tour and the industry didn’t know where to but their record and that in itself was so much more of a challenge. When you make an album, you don’t think about that side of it and then they started touring in these clubs and these venues with indie groups. Once again, today this might make sense to you, but three, four years ago, it was really odd. I remember they were touring with The Unicorns in Canada and to me and him, it was just, we couldn’t wrap our heads around it. It was like, “Why are these kids coming to see Chromeo and The Unicorns at the same time?” But that was kind of like the beginning of this whole merging that we’re in the middle of now, where today, you have indie kids that know R.Kelly albums by heart and that think that Lil’ Wayne is the best rapper alive when, like, Lil’ Wayne’s shit is super lyrical, like, Lil’ Wayne’s rapping to me... I’m still wrapping my head around why an indie kid will listen to Lil’ Wayne, but that’s very much a reality today. Where you have people listening to dance, indie and crunk at the same time. Torsten Schmidt To continue with the real talk, the whole image… I mean you said you were happy staying in the shadows but I guess you were somehow happy with having an album with you drawn as Godzilla, right? DJ Mehdi Yeah because I had another ambition. And also because the music I was making without even thinking about it, the music I was naturally drawn to and making with my hands and my ears, like, weren’t that much appealing to the rappers I was working with anymore. And that pretty much happened to every producer I know. It’s true. At one point, how many beats can you make that go at 96bpm? Like for 10 years? At one point you’re like… If you were learning how to play the guitar. With the guitar with the six strings, you can play Django Reinhardt, you can also play Jimi Hendrix. You can go… there’s no selling out in finding some quality to some guitar player in one genre, like from Wes Montgomery to Jimmy Page. You know, I think it’s natural, I think it was natural for me, but say for example, let’s get out of the hip-hop or electronic music field. If you take a picture of Bob Marley for example in ’73 and one picture in 1980, before he died, and you got pretty much the same guy. He stayed true to what he was doing. The albums, the records he was making, the songs he was singing, were all, more or less, there’s only like 10 or 15 subjects he touched and he kept on making songs about this and we all loved it. A-Trak Lord have mercy. DJ Mehdi The Sex Pistols, for example, they could make the same song over and over and over and we would always like it because they were staying true and in another art form, in graffiti for example, or in skateboarding, or all the youth movements, there is this tendency of staying true to what you were drawn to at first, and being a bit punk about it. But there’s also, if you take a picture of John Lennon in 1963, like the same time period, ’63 to ’70, John Lennon had like 15 different phases and he was going through different stuff and what he was experiencing in life was showing in his music. It’s another way of seeing how you could evolve with your art, with your music, and the same goes for graffiti, and the same goes for, for example, I was picking about The Sex Pistols, like The Clash for an example, were doing another way of thinking with their own music and it was still punk. They were doing a hip-hop record with Futura and they were making “Rock the Casbah” and it was still interesting. And you couldn’t say Johnny Rotten was a better artist than Joe Strummer, it was just different. They had their own... so whatever. At one point, I was like how many James Brown or Parliament records can I sample again? Everybody’s doing the same thing, and we’re all going from like 92 to 98bpm and how many... Five, six, seven years you do this, and at one point you’re like, “Hey, this guy from San Francisco, DJ Shadow, was doing something different and these guys from across my street, named Daft Punk, were doing something very, very different with the same tools…” At one point I was like, “Yeah, yeah, let me try, why not?” And, it’s true, some of the people who I was working with were interested in it and we made great records, I mean good records if you may, and some of the people I were working were like, “No, no, no, I want the old stuff, I want to keep on doing the same thing.” And I’m not saying it was better or whatever, those two approaches. They wanted to do the same thing and at one point I just couldn’t do it. I was like, “I’ve done this already and now five years later I’m not into doing the same thing.” But you were saying about A Tribe Called Quest or whatever… So, I got more of a bad rep and the forums and the Internet wasn’t around at that time, but I got way more of a bad rap than you when I started to do some electronic music, when I started to be a DJ in raves and in techno and in electronic music clubs, and when I started doing remixes for electronic music bands. Way more than you. A-Trak People used to shit on me when I was 15, the DJs were like, “He’s just winning because he looks cute.” DJ Mehdi You looked cute. A-Trak I like this whole subplot that we have going on. I want to add something to what Mehdi was talking about also in terms of, you know, a lot of us that came up as hip-hop producers always had the curiosity to do other stuff and I’ve seen this in so many producers where a lot of producers have a little stash of beats that’s just kind of on the side. When you first start making them for the first year or so, you don’t really play them to more people than a few of your friends because you just figure like, “Yeah, that’s just me fucking around with non-hip-hop stuff and I don’t really know where it’s going, but I’m just kind of doing it because I’m bored with rap type of thing.” I think now with all these genres converging, like we’re talking about, a lot of us... Nick and I have conversations about that all the time where you just start fantasizing about your favorite producers and thinking, “I want to hear Mannie Fresh’s stash of shit that he’s not putting out, because it doesn’t sound like Cash Money or whatever.” It’s something that we always wanted to approach when we started the label, Fool’s Gold, was like at one point we got to just step to these producers… older, established producers, and see what’s in their vaults. Torsten Schmidt Did that Mannie Fresh, Van Dyke Parks record...? A-Trak I haven’t gotten... Mannie Fresh is hard to reach, and I haven’t really tried yet. I’m saying it’s something that we all, in the deepest of the deep nerd talk, it’s something that’ll come up, like, “Man, I know that there’s producers in hip-hop that have produced other stuff that we haven’t even heard,” you know? I think all of us just get to that point where it’s just like, like you said, how many 96bpm beats can you make? Just to come back to what I can relate to and me being close to my brother and stuff, I remember that’s how Chromeo started was... I know my brother was in a band when he was like 14 playing Zeppelin covers and stuff. He always had the playing-guitar, writing-songs side to him. I think hip-hop, for me and him, us growing up listening to classic rock and getting into hip-hop when we were teenagers was fun because you learn these boundaries and to stick with those boundaries that are really rigid in hip-hop production is kind of an exercise in style. Like, how dope can your beat be if it’s within this tempo range and it everything is sampled and the drum sounds have a certain texture that’s proper to hip-hop and everything? That’s a great challenge. Again, to go back to stuff I know, like scratching, when Q-Bert got to a point that was so advanced with his scratches that he would always scratch on the same sound and it was like, “How ill can you get with your solos if you’re only scratching on the “ah” all the time and on “fresh”?” Like, these two sounds. How musical can you get with it? Those boundaries become really stimulating for a while as an artist. Then I think after... At one point you kind of reach the end of that. I remember when Dave started Chromeo. He was like, “This is my non-hip-hop project.” He wasn’t even telling his boys in the hip-hop scene that he was doing that because... DJ Mehdi It was his non-hip-hop project, but he was surprised that his records were in the hip-hop section. A-Trak No, he was surprised they were in the techno section. DJ Mehdi Yeah, but you see what I mean. A-Trak Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but all of us had to adapt to these conceptions of genres and everything, you know? That makes me think of something else that sometimes I reflect on. I was talking about how when you produce hip-hop there’s these really tight boundaries. I think I was having a conversation with my friend XXXChange, who produces Spank Rock, and some of Melisa’s records, Kid Sister. We were talking about hip-hop production and dance production. I always felt like it’s easier for a hip-hop producer to make a uptempo dance type of song than for a dance producer to make rap beats. I’ll even go flat out and say that... Torsten Schmidt That’s what Goldie said all the time anyway. How many good downtempo tracks...? A-Trak I hate downtempo. I’m not saying that towards Goldie because I’ve heard of his temper. He screamed at my previous agent, he made her cry. She is really sweet. I’ll even say, it’s an exception… it’s a crazy exception when a dance producer can make a good hip-hop-style beat. DJ Mehdi Name one. A-Trak I don’t know. Earlier I was talking about how dance music has this whole mysterious studio wizardy side to it. Guys who make dance tracks get really involved with the fine details of all these different settings of compression and filtering basslines in and out, and doing all these weird sounds that sound like shit that comes out of a cavern, and when you try to bring that to hip-hop, a lot of the dance guys don’t know how to strip it down enough and it ends up sounding extremely overproduced. Whereas, if you’re a hip-hop guy, you know about old-school electro, you know about the old drum machines and you know about drum programming. I feel like hip-hop drum programming is harder anyways. To program drums at a slower tempo is way harder, just like beat matching is harder at a slower tempo. It’s easy to mix fast records, when you get slower you hear every detail and every subtlety of your programming is super-important. So, when you bring it up faster it’s just kind of fun. You’re like: “Hey, let me make a danceable track,” and you’re like: “I could dance to this!” Whereas the dance dudes will slow it down and they’ll still be all like with these weird Reason sounds and you’re like: “No, no stop it, stop it, no!” Give me a loop and a good drum program, and that’s all you need for a good rap beat. I always like to think about that because the dudes that have the illest drum programming are hip-hop dudes. DJ Mehdi A-Trak Premier and Dilla. DJ Mehdi … who applies to the first category of artist I was referring to. He has had the same formula for 15 years and we still love it. A-Trak He made that blueprint so he can do it for as long as he wants, exactly. But when you think about how many people, how many bedroom producers will just listen to the drum programming of someone like Premier or Jay Dee? I don’t think there’s similar examples for faster music. Maybe just because in that template there’s more room for little mistakes that make the beat good and stuff. Torsten Schmidt Somehow I give you that to a certain point but I’m pretty sure that people like Theo or Kerri Chandler would probably slightly disagree. A-Trak I’m over simplifying a bit to make my point. Torsten Schmidt Or are you just basically saying you want to play faster music because it’s more fun to play with at night and you don’t have to stay that sober and you can get away with things a lot easier? A-Trak It’s more about the way music is right now. I just feel there’s more dance music that I enjoy in 2007. Torsten Schmidt Isn’t it kind of interesting how dance music has become so much more popular but dancing as such, not? A-Trak Yeah, that’s true. DJ Mehdi That’s because it’s been a while since you’ve seen him dance. You’re going to be surprised. A-Trak I just think there used to be words that used to be really taboo that aren’t anymore. I catch myself talking about dance music and about pop in this whole lecture, in ways that aren’t ironic and aren’t pejorative at all, but a few years ago, pop was taboo and dance music was taboo. Dance was something that we laughed at – it was fucking “I’m A Barbie Girl” and those kind of songs, that’s what I used to call dance. If you asked me what category Daft Punk was I’d be like, “Well, it’s just dope.” Now you can say “dance,” now you can say “pop” and it’s not frowned upon. DJ Mehdi This is your own case, though. I know for sure that coming from Detroit, for example somebody like Dilla, pretty much knew what dance music was. A-Trak But I don’t know if he’d have used the word “dance” is what I’m saying. DJ Mehdi Techno! Which is even worse, which was even worse in ’96. A-Trak Eminem once said: “Nobody listens to techno.” Talk about Moby, that’s the best thing. If you think Moby makes techno, then you’re just great. Why isn’t he great anymore? Sidebar… Torsten Schmidt Shall we have a little moment for Marshall? The interesting notion that underlying in there all the time, is this whole concept of progression. Progression has always been a main theme in dance music no matter if it’s house, techno, drum & bass, hip-hop, whatever… A-Trak I still don’t like drum & bass. Torsten Schmidt But isn’t drum & bass to a degree an example of a genre, which took the whole progression aspect a little bit too serious and therefore confined itself in a lot more ways than was probably healthy? With like all about the next level, the next level. And, yes, between 1990 and let’s say ’95 you saw this progression and from there and you’re just progressing in a lot smaller steps. A-Trak If anything I would give credit to hip-hop producers in that aspect of production in terms of progressing and I’m talking about rap producers. We were talking about how rap started integrating electronic sounds. Sometimes I’ll hear some obscure-ass Southern tracks with the illest synth sounds and some drum sounds that could be in an LCD [Soundsystem] beat, and I’ll listen to this and remind myself that the guy who produced this is probably 19 and I’ll be like: “Yo, does he even realize how ill he is?” Because a lot of stuff like that in rap that stays interesting, where I feel like the way synthesizers and big drum machine sounds snuck into the soundscape of rap is really dope to me because there was no pretension to it. It wasn’t like: “Man, I’m gonna make this next-level shit.” People in rap don’t talk about how great their equipment is and stuff. Not that much. The way that the synthesized sounds snuck into rap hasn’t been as pretentious as what you’re talking about in certain sub genres of rap music, of dance music I mean, where producers are actively searching for that next level. Torsten Schmidt Yeah, but the interesting thing when you’re talking about 19-year-old kids is when you’ve got people, especially in let’s say London, from the grime/dubstep sort of arena, that are definitely too young to have been raving in 1986 and all of a sudden these genres go through very similar cycles, even in the sound aesthetics and what-not and all of a sudden you find Skream doing the track which essentially could be a Plus 8 record in 1991, like a Speedy J record or... It’s very interesting how there seems to be just because of the club dynamic, certain aesthetics seem to come forward and happen forth. DJ Mehdi You quoted the London example, but it’s pretty much an exception I think. It’s actually kind of only happening in England, I think so. A-Trak Unless you have some obscure German reference that we don’t know. Torsten Schmidt Yeah, but speaking of obscure local references, obviously a lot of people usually have this notion, “You’re only speaking of London, you’re only speaking of New York,” or whatever. Neither of us here is from there. I think in the room there’s about a handful of people from London. Half of them are press, and everyone else is from somewhere else really. Can you probably talk a little bit about creating these local infrastructures to make a sufficient... DJ Mehdi It’s actually a good question. The joke you were making about Germany, for example. Germany has the biggest hip-hop scene outside of the United States. German hip-hop is bigger than French hip-hop, no matter what. Torsten Schmidt But that was different in the mid-’90s DJ Mehdi But I’ve never heard a German hip-hop record using a Kraftwerk or a DJ Hell or Gigolo or a minimal techno sound and make it their own and saying, “Hey, I’m German, this is what’s happening in Germany right now, and I’m hip-hop and I’ll make it German hip-hop,” for some reason. Maybe you know an example that I don’t know, but for some reason English people have less difficulties merging these sounds and that’s probably why drum & bass had such a good ground in England. That didn’t happen in Germany and it certainly didn’t happen in France. And when myself and a few others were trying to do this, we were very, very underground and we still are in France. Really, Justice is really the first successful record to come out of this scene and there have been many, many, many tries. A band called TTC, for example, in France was doing this since their first album, which was 1997 or something, and everybody was throwing stones at them and tomatoes and eggs and were like: “What are you doing? This is a hip-hop concert why are you playing some techno?” It was natural for them because they vibed to DJ Funk and to Daft Punk and to Public Enemy and they were like: “This is the music we like, this is how we do it.” But it’s very, very, very marginal, very underground. And TTC and all of other French people that you may not have heard of, but a lot of people have tried to do this on a more wider scale, quite pop music level. And it wasn’t possible until very, very recently when Ms Dynamite, The Streets, Lily Allen probably, I’m only thinking about recent examples, but whatever, the Bristol scene, Massive Attack, Portishead, all those guys were making interesting music and commercial music at the same time and they were merging genres without even having to explain themselves and that I don’t know if it happened elsewhere. In my experience I don’t remember it happening in Germany or in France and not even in the US. Torsten Schmidt Obviously, there’s the little language element as well. For whatever reason, people don’t like to listen to German lyrics outside of the Alsace or wherever, but yes, there… DJ Mehdi Once again, maybe I don’t know, there were other examples that I don’t think about right now but I think for some reason that the British music scene, maybe the industry, maybe the fact that it has such a long musical history and knowledge… I don’t know, maybe the schools, how you are trained to [make] music, maybe the art schools, the music schools, I just don’t know, but all those examples that’s why we love English music, British music. A-Trak I think the British music industry is exceptional. I think England is an exceptional place to make music and to listen to music. We in America don’t realize that radio in Europe is actually good. There’s some stuff that takes off in America that could never work in Europe, like satellite radio. Satellite radio works out here because commercial, actual radio stations are such garbage that there are still people who want to hear some real, good radio. But if you go to England and hear good music on the radio and you try to tell someone there’s this other kind of radio that you have to have reception from a satellite and pay a subscription but the music’s really great, they’ll be like: “Why don’t you just turn on your fucking radio.” They don’t realize that out here the channels aren’t the same. I think England is a great ground for good music to work, to reach people. Torsten Schmidt You were referring to it earlier when you said France and England are only 20 clicks away from each other, but still it’s a big deal for Parisian artists to go over there. I don’t know how many groups from Marseille have played in London but there might be a similar thing. Obviously, there is the whole language aspect and everyone in the western world speaks English… DJ Mehdi There is the language, there is also the whole kind of British music scene being that interesting and has such quick attention. It’s also a little bit, how could I say this – sorry, because English is not my first language and I have to think about it – it’s also a bit protective. A lot of French artists tried to make it in England or in America, of course, but in England especially. But the English music scene is so vibrant itself it doesn’t really need French artists that do the same thing as they already do. The first reviews I was reading for my album were like: “Yeah, this is music that could only happen in France.” They were like: “What’s the point? In England we are way past that, merging hip-hop with electro, we already did this.” And in one way you guys did. They did. So it’s also very hard. From the artist’s point of view, and it’s true for England, it’s even more true for America, you always have more strength when you are innocent about all this. When you don’t know how the English music industry and the English press and radio, how hard they are, and you just don’t want to know. If you are going to struggle to have your music played in England, or release your music in America, you better not know what is really happening because you would just give up before. When you don’t know, when it’s your first or second album, when you’re lucky enough like I was to have the opportunity to play there and to convince people, even if it’s small scale and gets bigger and bigger and bigger, you’re just lucky. Torsten Schmidt But, rather than discussing the advantages and disadvantages of being in London, I was actually more interested in how to make it in either Montreal or Paris or, god knows where, Timbuktu, Frankfurt, or any other city. Are there any lessons that you learnt or things that you would do differently now having committed one or two mistakes before? A-Trak Just in terms of as an artist breaking through to elsewhere in the world? The internet makes it so much easier. That’s the big part of it. Nowadays, when you do a show in a whole other country, most of the people that come to your show will have heard a few of your songs or your mixes or whatever, some sort of musical reference to you which wasn’t the case a few years ago. It’s easier today to break through in other markets, I think. There’s also the side of it that’s like – to come back to the reality of the path of someone like Mehdi and myself where I started – I was in hip-hop for many years and then went to other genres. When you travel you face different levels of difficult audiences in terms of what they expect you to do. In terms of hip-hop specifically, if you’re from North America and you haven’t tried to do a show in Europe and England, for example, you might not realize this, but the further away you go from the birthplace of hip-hop, the more people are stubbornly attached to the pure hip-hop aesthetic. That’s something that I had to fight. Mehdi was talking about having to fight in terms of the sound of his music, what I had to fight was the people in my audience. Going to England and doing shows where the DJs playing before me, for a while, always did exactly, exactly, exactly the same sets of mid-’90s rap. It’s something that was mind-boggling and still is to me to talk to certain DJs in Europe, where I would think if you’re far away from where a lot of these American rappers come from, you can pick from different sounds of rap and just appreciate everything. But on the contrary, a lot of the guys that I talked to will still think that Jay-Z is commercial and wack and anything on Roc-A-Fella is not good and all the majors are wack and can we please have Leaders Of The New School back and stuff like that. And you’re just like: “Dude, it’s 2007, have you listened to Jay Z’s records?” It’s so crazy to still have these conversations because Jay-Z’s like starting to lose it, to go from the progression of at first making commercial records and not everyone listened and noticed at first he was actually a good rapper. Then he made undeniably dope records that everybody really should have realized that he was the best rapper alive. And now he’s sunk to fall off a bit and you talk to these guys that are still like: “Jay Z, he has champagne, what the fuck?” Like, KMD didn’t have champagne. Torsten Schmidt Dealing with the Taliban is a hard thing, no matter what kind of headwear they have – dealing with hip-hop Taliban, it’s the same as going to Afghanistan. A-Trak And I don’t want to lump all of Europe into that. I’ll do some shows in regional North American markets and face the same thing also, but that’s something I have had to face. It’s just ill when you’re an artist or a musician and, in an ideal world, you would only have to worry about the music that you make and making something that you’re proud of. But there’s a whole other side of the battle that’s getting it to the right people and having your shows have the vibe that you want it to have. And when you go through certain transitions you always have to go through those phases where you just have to fight for it and people just stubbornly want the old you. Torsten Schmidt So, essentially at the same point as, let’s say Miles [Davis], who heaps of jazz critics argue killed jazz by doing fusion, which I guess for most of our generation is when records got interesting and where gazillions of samples came from, when did turntablism become too much of an Olympic sport for you? A-Trak That’s a good example. Well, for me it really happened in stages. I really don’t want to make it seem like I’ve turned my back on turntablism. A lot of the shows on this tour I’ll still do a solo somewhere towards the end of the night, just to make it the cherry on top of the sundae kind of thing. And even when I don’t literally do a turntablism solo, I still cut and stuff like that, so it’s not like I’m not interested in turntablism any more. It went from getting out of the battle scene, which was a really long time ago for me. People still ask me: “Do you still battle?” The last time I battled was in 2000. That’s a long time ago. So getting out of the battle scene and then discovering DJing in a more general sense, doing shows where I had to do a DJ set and not only be booked because I can scratch well. So getting into DJing and selection and party-rocking and crowd-reading side of it. So, from there I started feeling like it was too much of a dichotomy where either I was doing turntablism or I was mixing, but it was too separate. So from there I wanted to bring back turntablism a bit but as a tool, as a means and not an end, as one of my tools when I’m DJing. That’s pretty close to the mentality where I am at today. Except today, at this point in time, I just feel like I don’t even need to cut at every show that I do. It’s my foundation from 10 years ago. I still love to do it, it’s a passion and something that’s part of who I am and the reason why I got into DJing. But the turntablism scene itself, when I think I grew out of it, really turned me off after a while. As I was getting into more production and learning different styles of music and everything – not to come up judgmental or anything – but to go back to watching a battle and see guys do the same stuff that we were all doing a few years earlier, you see that and you go: “Huh, yeah? I wish someone would come and change it up again.” That’s the first stage of getting through it, and then you do shows and there’s guys that look like creeps, dudes that are like the comic book guy in The Simpsons who are in the front row of your show who are like this in front of your decks. You’re just like: “Is that what the scene has become?” Torsten Schmidt Just imagine what Eddie Van Halen must feel like. A-Trak I don’t know. If anything like that will bring up a certain amount of disgust in me and I got to watch myself when I feel like that because I still like to cut and I still… I don’t want to overlook it, because I still feel it’s something that I can do that some of my DJ peers can’t, but my mentality now is it’s a means to an end it’s not the end itself. For years, when I was heavy into turntablism – ’97 to 2000, 2001 – every year there were new styles and new techniques being invented, so the technical side of it was so stimulating. Technically, it was mushrooming, it was bubbling to such an extreme level that people were interested in going to see a show that only had turntablism for the whole night just because it was dazzling. It really was. If you saw a show six months ago and then went to see another one and some dude’s invented a whole other style and you were like: “This guy’s dope.” Inevitably there’s only so many things you can invent. Again, we were talking about boundaries earlier, the way turntablism has been for a long time, you take this guy out of here, this has been the limited set up and after a while you’re like: “OK, we’ve got two Technics SL-1200 MK II turntables, a Shure M-44/7 and a choice of maybe three mixers, at some point the DJs ran out of new stuff to do. It’s weird because a lot of my DJ friends kind of gave up on DJing. We were like – me and The Allies, that’s the DJs I was heavily rolling with and touring with in those years – we had this whole network of friends. So when you went to these cities you hung out with this dude who was this dope scratch DJ from that city. And then, when you start going back to that city and your boy is now working at the bank, you don’t want to knock him for getting a real job but at the same time you’re like: “Damn, are you really uninspired and is everyone else going to get uninspired?” That’s just when the technical side of it wasn’t enough to sustain the whole movement anymore. Today, to me it’s a lot more about taking that as a foundation but more than anything being a good DJ or a good producer is much more of a bigger concern. Torsten Schmidt I don’t know where Theo is, but you were just mentioning “this guy,” now you were championing an art that was heralding turntables an instrument and “yadda, yadda, yadda,” and all of a sudden, there’s this heresy of a computer coming in? A-Trak You want me to talk about bringing the computer into it? One thing that I find strange with myself when I look at my opinions objectively is that I was always the youngest dude in my circles, but I think in certain ways I was always the purist. I was the one that was really like “You can’t do that,” kind of thing. I remember when Craze first messed around with a prototype of Final Scratch – Craze is one of my DJ partners from Miami – when he first told me about the prototype of Final Scratch that he tried out, for so many reasons I was just like: “That’s wack, why would you do that? There’s no way it’s going to sound the same and are you really going to bring a fucking laptop to the club, are you stupid?” I wasn’t literally insulting him like that but I was just: “Right, you do you, I do me” – kind of thing and we were boys and he was a great DJ and I knew he would freak it in his way but I wasn’t interested in it. But the first instance where this whole technology that Serato does now that really captured me was… before Serato came out, a lot of people don’t know this, before Serato came out with their Scratch Live program, Serato is a plug-in company from New Zealand and they made a plug in for Pro Tools that was called Serato Scratch and you could load an audio file and you had to connect it in this really complicated way with your Pro Tools rig, but it simply allowed you to scratch, with a control record, a file that you loaded up on your computer. But you couldn’t apply the full song because you needed way too much RAM but that was the first thing that Serato developed. And that’s something that caught me because there were instances where I wanted to scratch on something that either I didn’t have on vinyl, or didn’t exist on vinyl, or I didn’t want to ruin my vinyl and suddenly I had a new solution for that. Then they started developing the standalone program, and I was doing beta testing for them before it came out, and even when they finished the program, it really took me a while to get used to DJing on it. There was a period of at least six months where I would bring my laptop to a club and play half of the songs off Serato and half the songs off of actual vinyl. That might make me sound like an idiot because you’re like: “Why can’t you just switch?” But this is when Serato first, first, first came out and a lot of people didn’t know about it. It was hard for me… I got past the whole corniness of working with the laptop on stage and that hurdle at that point was getting used to selecting songs off of a laptop. This new generation of DJs won’t face that difficulty because they never were trained in doing sets with one crate. But when you’re used to DJing off of vinyl, and anybody that’s been DJing for years knows this, you’re used to having 70 records to choose from for your set or whatever number. Even in the simple, primal way that you actually sift through your records in your crate, and you look at the cover and you know what song it is, you don’t have to read the title, you just know everything that you just passed. Whereas on the [laptop] you’re like: “Les Rythmes Digitales, OK, not that,” it’s just a different process of thinking about how I played my records, and I really had to get used to that and eventually I went all the way on Serato. Actually, I want to say something about that, seeing guys like Mehdi, and even when I see Mehdi I can tell he’s from a hip-hop background and a vinyl background, but there are guys who are all the way electro, techno DJs on CDJs… this past year I saw some DJs including Mehdi on CDJs freak the CDJs… like subvert the music they were playing way more than what people in America have been doing with vinyl and/or Serato and that gave me a new push of inspiration this year. So like, do more to my records when I mix them. Like just a second ago, when I was talking about for years I’ve been wanting to take the concept of turntablism where your record is simply a tool and you make what music you want to make from it, to apply that to a mix was something that was like a mission, the holy grail for me for years. But for some reason every DJ that knew – not every, but most DJs that I knew played on vinyl and Serato still ended up simply mixing song after song. And it’s really, even although I don’t personally use CDJs, it fascinated me when I first saw good DJs on CDJs really mess with like alter pitch and the looping and using them more as tools and stuff. I don’t know, there’s something as much as I love Serato and I am endorsed by them and I use it at all of my shows, I think it makes you lazy in your DJing and that’s the big danger of Serato. It makes you lazy on so many levels. The first one being sorting by bpm’s – that makes DJing a whole other experience to be able to sort your songs by bpm. Part of it is cool because it’ll make you try mixes you may not have tried because until you saw the two bpm’s match on your list of songs you might not have thought, ‘Hey, this is mixable with that’, but in reality that’s the romantic way of thinking about it. In reality you make your playlist, sort by bpms and you play it in similar bpms. That makes you lazy. There definitely was a point for me this year where I felt that I was being lazy with the way I played on Serato and wanted to get more creative with it and a large part of that was seeing a few people on CDJs. It’s just ill to me that I come from turntablism, I come from the scene where people do the most with records, in theory. You take these records, and like you were saying earlier, the turntable is a musical instrument. So how come when I see Boys Noize, who is a technical DJ from Germany – your fair land [to Torsten Schmidt] – from a whole other world of DJing… how come when I see him DJ, it inspires me more than a fellow turntablist? I saw him play on three CDJs, where every single mix he knew where the breakdown was and what’s the strategic part to bring in the next song from the previous song and again, using tools. Seeing that was like, man, like that dude is freaking his records, doing a lot with his records. Stuff like that would make me go back to my Serato set-up and be like: “How can I take that approach of DJing, that way of mixing, and apply it to the set-up that’s mine?” Which is Serato and then this effects box or whatever else and maybe add a bit of scratching and bringing back records in the way that I know how to do it. That’s how I’m currently coming up with the style of DJing that I really want to make my own, which is what I’m really working on now. Torsten Schmidt Can you probably, since you received so much kudos for your style of DJing from him, could you elaborate a little bit about what it is you do and your motivations behind it? DJ Mehdi First, I have to say I had the same shock when I heard that this came out. You have to understand that in America it’s pretty much everywhere, where I know it’s the case in Europe and the standout in Europe is CDJs, Pioneer CDJs is just the standout, everywhere. It’s kind of a problem when a DJ shows up with Serato and you have to de-plug, sometimes the mixers are screwed in the tables and the engineer is like, “Argh,” just different. So I was obviously using vinyl and bringing some records, and the first time I came on tour in America, the first time I played here, for example in Toronto with this guy over there, Mario, I had some records I was playing vinyl and I had one very, very heavy bag of hip-hop records and one heavy, heavy, heavy bag of techno and electro records and it was just I couldn’t take it any more. If you had to do six or seven shows in five days, your records, you worry about losing them, breaking them, you just can’t take it anymore. And my other friends had the same shock. For example, my friend DJ Feadz from Ed Banger who is Uffie’s producer, he was probably the best DJ I knew and he was doing some stuff with the CDs that couldn’t be done with the vinyl, and that’s where Pioneer, I think, had the best tool because the other CD turntables were emulating what you could do with the vinyl, but CDJs were just taking it somewhere else. For example, the table is not even turning. At first I was like: “Where are you putting your hands, what are you doing? The table isn’t even turning.” He was like: “Fuck the fact it’s not turning. Try it, you will see.” And after this tour I had to go to Australia, which is even worse, and I had to switch and I made the decision to leave my records at home, to take my iPod and my computer and to burn CDs in the plane while going to Australia. I had six or seven shows in Australia and I had no records. I had a CD case, a big pile of blank CDs and I had to burn CDs in the plane if I wanted to do the shows that I had to do. So, I had to go to the CDJs and do something different because playing with turntables just wasn’t where it was anymore. So from there being influenced by Feadz and Boys Noize and techno DJs, there’s not that many hip-hop DJs that I’ve seen using CDJs, I’ve tried to still do the same hip-hop routine but add some electro stuff to it. The more and more I was being able with my technique to bridge and to put some hip-hop or some ’70s or ’80s electro or funk into some electro and reacting more easily to what the audience was trying to hear also. That went in parallel with the fact that Ed Banger was becoming more and more popular and that the audience sometimes don’t really understand that there’s not one Ed Banger sound, but there are more hip-hop and Justice are more electro, for example. And I’m not playing always electro records and I have to have more tools in my bag, if I wanted to switch from one style to the other so I found myself very happy with the CDJs and still not understanding what is happening here. But I appreciate the fact that some high-end technicians, like A-Trak, was able to change his tools in the middle [of his way] like that. If you were a guitar player once again and at one point a person went: “No, no, no guitar is over, you have to learn how to play the violin,” or whatever, you’d be like: “Whatever, my tool is the guitar, I play the guitar,” so once again there’s not one way of thinking, it’s just do what you have to do. Torsten Schmidt Coming from Paris, obviously, there has always been a bit of a connection at least in the latter part of your career with that other dirty word, “fashion.” So when did fashion become more important than music? DJ Mehdi I love this subject. I’m from the hip-hop side of it and I’m on Ed Banger which is probably the most fashionable label in Paris right now. Overseas, when I go to Japan, people receive our music through channels like Collete, which is a very fashion, high-end store in Paris and those kind of websites that play some cool music and sync it to fashion shows. Which is not the case at all in Paris. Not at all, at all, at all. People don’t understand how we are disconnected from the fashion world. Me, myself, I have way more connections with the people that are out doing the riots in the streets and in the suburbs in Paris, which are the less fashionable people in the world, than to Karl Lagerfeld or to Yves Saint Laurent or to Collette store. I mean, I encounter this misunderstanding all of the time, and people think that we are a fashionable label and that we are in fashion, and that there are connections in between our worlds, which there is not. I mean some of us like fashion, and some of us don’t. That’s pretty much it. That’s all. It’s not like being from Paris, you have to drink wine, eat cheese and like fashion. I personally don’t like fashion. I understand that people obviously think that we’re all linked, because it’s Paris and because we live pretty much the same way of life, or whatever. It’s just not the case. It’s a big, big misunderstanding. I experience every day… It’s not a problem. Could be worse. Torsten Schmidt Obviously, you live quite well off that misunderstanding. DJ Mehdi Exactly, but being at Ed Banger and us Ed Banger artists, and even Pedro to some extent, you have to cope with this misunderstanding that we are fashionable. And sometimes they don’t even understand how Pedro, which is such a fashionable guy, would play a Jay-Z record or something more ghetto like a Noreaga record in a set, and they would be like, “It’s weird, this just doesn’t match,” or whatever. Not that, but they would think, “Oh he plays it, that’s maybe because…” Whatever. They try to… it’s just not the case. It’s just different and that’s something interesting about Paris which rings a bell about the stuff you are saying about London, Paris, Montreal… I personally think that, being from Paris, I have to make, that’s how I see it, the most Parisian sound, the music that is the closest to what I live in my city to spark some interest to you guys that have another relation to your own city, and another reality. In the same way, for example Martin Scorsese or Spike Lee are doing New York movies and go to the world and say, “This is how New York is,” that’s how I feel about my music and I want to say, “This is how Paris is.” That’s how I feel comfortable coming to Toronto, New York or going to London and saying, “This is what Paris is.” For example, last night we played in Chicago and I made a slight mistake. I was like, “Hey we’re in Chicago, I’m going to play some Chicago records.” I was playing some DJ Funk and playing some whatever, whatever. I was playing a lot of Chicago records and the kids were like, “Whatever, we want to hear some Justice. We want to hear some Paris music. We want to hear SebastiAn, we want to hear Daft Punk.” We ended up playing like 15 Daft Punk songs and 10 Justice songs while we were in the birthplace of house music. I was like, “Okay, being in Chicago and trying to play Chicago music, let’s just not…” If you’re from Paris, just do Paris. A-Trak And our audiences are younger. You know we were talking about earlier, you asked me what point I came to a certain distance with turntablism. There’s also a certain distance I had to take from like the ’90s aesthetic of rap that I came up in, and that has to do with the reality that nowadays if you do music your audience is mad young. There was a point maybe four years ago or something where I looked at my crate, I was still playing vinyl and I looked at my crate, and I saw like a bunch of Tribe records and stuff like that. Thinking, realizing to the people that come to my shows now this is old-school. It was still the core of my set. To have that realization of like, “Wow, the core of my set is old-school. Do I want to be an old-school DJ?” I mean, that’s a crazy realization. Yesterday Mehdi played some Chicago house records and told me he was surprised that the crowd wasn’t really reacting, but it’s the audience is young, they don’t even know that that’s the heritage of their city. And it’s tripped out because we invited DJ Gant-Man who’s like a really kind of legendary Chicago house and ghetto type producer to come and hang out. He did some beats for Kid Sister and he’s going to do some stuff for Fool’s Gold also. So I told him, “Come through, do a little surprise set at the end.” And he’s watching me and Mehdi play in Chicago, and he’s like, “Man this reminds me of going to France in the late ’90s.” We’re playing basically house music, it’s a certain electro-this, techno-that, whatever. But it’s music that you would think that when you play in Chicago, it’s in the Chicago concept, like Chicago has such a heritage in that. And to hear one of the most important figures in Chicago in that style of music talk about Paris so many times in the conversation that evening, it just shows you that everybody has their references. For someone like me from North America that plays a lot of records in my electro sets that are from Europe. For me it’s a mind-fuck to go to Europe and meet some of the artists whose records I play a lot and realize that to guys in Europe they still have their eyes set on America a lot. You can have all these conceptions of like... When you go to someone’s town do they realize that they’re the shit? You know what I mean? So like this past year... Torsten Schmidt Classic case of grass is greener on the other side. A-Trak Yeah so like in the last year or two Paris has been hugely important in the music scene but I talk to a lot of Parisians that still have this fascination for like, “Yeah but the Americans,” and, “Yeah but the Americans.” It’s weird to hear that in the conversation. “Yeah, but the Americans are looking at you right now…” Torsten Schmidt Let’s do a reality check like when Daft Punk and Cassius and Motorbass and all those guys blew up, there wasn’t hardly a club in Paris playing this kind of music maybe apart from the Rex on Wednesdays or so. DJ Mehdi Exactly. Torsten Schmidt So what’s the story now then? Do you get like a… DJ Mehdi Now, it’s like I was telling you, we were crossing those genres like five or six years ago nobody cared and now Justice has the No 1 record in the country. But France is... Torsten Schmidt But a No 1 record doesn’t necessarily mean that you have a vibrant club scene. And I mean you see like 45 year-old, very cultured people talking on French TV about the Justice record. I mean that’s not going to talk really to 16-year-old kids in the banlieues, right? DJ Mehdi I wouldn’t know. It’s pretty hard to explain because it’s true that even when Daft Punk were selling millions of records, I’m pretty sure they sold like 600,000 records in France, which is like selling three million in America. I’m pretty sure that even at that point they were definitely the most powerful French band in the country, we still had to fight for some good music or that kind of music in regular clubs. I just couldn’t explain. I think it’s just easier for commercial clubs to play whatever is playing on the radio, and I just don’t know. It’s even funnier to think that when we started, France just didn’t care about us, and London actually took notice first, and even America, before France which was ours. And we’re still, except for Justice, the rest of us are pretty, I wouldn’t say underground but we’re pretty like leftfield, like you said, in France and I think we will remain that way. I just don’t know. Maybe it’s just not for France, this music. Which is even better because I’m here now. Torsten Schmidt Well at least you get to travel a bit, yes. I might be oversimplifying here, but I think one of the weird notions that people have to realize when they get to Paris for example, that there’s definitely dramatic differences in various parts of the city. If you go to all the inner bits where all the tourists go, the Louvre and all the beautiful restaurants and all those flats that I guess maybe 5% of us here in this room will ever be able to afford. Paris inner-city life is not exactly cheap and it’s not exactly made for young, creative people. DJ Mehdi It’s a big city. It’s pretty much the biggest city in the European Union. Not Paris as itself but the whole area is like 11 or 12 million people. As in New York, or as in Chicago, or as in London for example, it has its scenes. It’s pretty big, like some bands are very, very, very popular and they make a lot of money and you have never heard of them, and there are very rich and very poor parts of the city… as every big city, but that’s what I like about it. That’s what I love, and that’s definitely something that we are trying to do as to like diversify our music which is not always very readable if I can say, from an overseas point of view. But we definitely represent Paris in its diversity at Ed Banger, and we love this. We are very different, one from the other, but the music just connects. Torsten Schmidt On the one hand, I don’t know what the office is these days, but the old office was very much in the center of the city, but when you look at the way you portray yourselves, let’s say with the videos, you’re championing a lot of the working-class culture of the country with the cars and parking lots and stuff and the handshakes… and what is the significance of the banlieues, outside of the riots, in French popular culture? DJ Mehdi It’s very important because first, style, music, a lot of it comes from there because it’s the youth, and I think in every western country the youth plays a very important role in the culture. But as far as I’m concerned, I am from outside of Paris, I am from the banlieues, which is the suburban area of Paris, which is the poorest, and it’s just who I am and I was never in some bad trouble. I was never a thug or a drug dealer or whatever, it was just how I grew up, going to school, my family, and I wouldn’t like my music to be only one message. I wouldn’t like my music to be only dance, for example, or to be only love or to be – what did you call it – elevator music or whatever, hotel music. I love the fact that music, and it’s even more difficult when you do instrumental music, but we have the videos, when you can have one track that says: “Hey, that’s who I am, I’m from this part of the city, and this is what I’m experiencing. And I also like to dance and I also like to have sex with girls and I also like to have whatever...cashews. I also like to do all those things at the same time, but as far as I’m concerned that’s how I used image, that’s how I use my videos and that’s just who I am and I’m glad that people not from Paris could understand this. Which makes, once again, the fashion issue even funnier, I love this. Torsten Schmidt It’s slightly ironic, yes I know, but I think it’s a lot harder to be loved for the wrong reasons than the right ones, isn’t it? How can you turn that away? DJ Mehdi That’s the subject of another lecture. Torsten Schmidt Coming back to more serious things, because fashion people will be fashion people, they will be here today and somewhere else in two minutes, but your friends that you grew up with will not be able to move that quickly and, obviously, a year ago when Sarkozy was not the president but was whatever he was at the time like heading the internal department – I think that raised a lot of questions throughout the world or at least in Europe of the role both, the youth in modern society and especially immigrant youth. Can you give us a first-hand account, because for most people, I think up until that point the notion of youth was more a marketing concept or something that happened 800 years ago in 1968 or so, but the actual thing that you can really challenge the state authority was a pretty powerful moment? DJ Mehdi It’s still not finished actually in France. There is still a lot of problems of what you guys call riots, which is not even what was actually happening or whatever. It was a very serious, serious time where a lot of problems were raised and were dealt with with absurdity and sometimes even stupidity. Some young people were burning their own school and their leaders were telling them: “Don’t do this because this school that you are burning is your way out of this.” But they didn’t care because they didn’t want to understand the situation. So, it’s a very, very tough subject and it’s not something that I can explain – especially in English – that I can explain easily. So, it was an interesting – if I can say that – time and it’s still not finished and the problems that it raised will not be dealt with until 10, 15, 20 years because it’s very, very serious. The generation that suffered those problems right now will not find a solution in two or three years. It’s not going to be solved like that, because Sarkozy is our president or whatever. I would have a very hard, hard time explaining myself about this. It’s a tough subject, and once again English is not my first language, so it is very subtle and sometimes it touches an absurd point, where something that you can just not understand and you can just not make those rioters understand and they did not want to understand anymore. Some people were like: “Yeah, yeah, they don’t want to understand,” and some people were just like: “This is just stupid.” It’s a very tough subject, and it’s still not finished because the problems we were dealing with are still pretty much here and now that Sarkozy became our president it raised another kind of strength. A lot of neighborhoods are still fighting with police at the moment. Still, one or two years after. So it is a situation, definitely. Sorry, if I cannot be more… Torsten Schmidt We don’t want to press you on it. Now, you, [A-Trak], are obviously in Montreal facing slightly different issues. You nevertheless left it as well and went to New York. Why did you feel you had to leave Canada? A-Trak Well, on a few levels. It’s still hard for me, I still don’t quite call New York home. I feel like this is something I need to do right now in my life to be there, but there’s a side of it, of me leaving Montreal, that had to do with needing to be more stimulated. And a side of it that was simply the convenience of being close to certain people and the convenience in terms of – I travel so much and the actual fact that it’s easier to travel in and out of New York, compared to Montreal actually was a big factor. But, I love Montreal and I find it one of the most culturally rich cities in the world. The more I’ve traveled in the course of my career, the more I’ve realized how unique Montreal is. So, it can seem a little strange for me to say that I’ve left Montreal in search of being even more stimulated artistically, but the reality is, and I don’t know how many people in here are actually from Toronto, it’s interesting to talk about this in Canada, but I feel like in Montreal, and in Canada in general, there’s a certain comfort there, that when you’re in an industry that’s very competitive, you can reach a point where it feels like that comfort gives you a plateau. Everything that I love about Canada, socially and politically in terms of how protected we are, I feel like when it comes to situations where people are at the top of their field, the reverse of that comfort and that protection that everyone has in Canada means that it’s hard to really keep going up and up and up. I mean, it’s strange, in America the risk of getting really low in your life in terms of career is really serious. In America, if you don’t have a good situation in your life, you can reach extreme lows, but if you’re a specialist in your field, and you can talk about a heart surgeon or a scratch DJ, you can reach real highs too. So, I don’t know if it’s because life is more or less challenging in Montreal or New York. But I think I started feeling like I would come back to Montreal between my travels and kind of come back to seeing my friends and doing the same stuff all the time and go to New York for a weekend and get more done musically and career-wise than I could do in two months in Montreal. And after a while I was like: “Man, I need to live in the city for a bit and make some moves.” The amount of good art and music that you have access to in New York is really a great asset when you’re in the process of developing yourself as an artist. I’ve been doing this for 12 years but I feel like a new artist right now because I have a new label and for the first time I finally have a certain output in my production. So, I’m approaching it like a new artist. And when I go to New York I would get stimulated so much that I just wanted to spend time there. And, like I said, there are many people that I work with that are based there and so it’s really in that context. I don’t know how long I’ll be there for and I don’t know if I’ll go somewhere else after. It’s a strange thing, because for years and years up until when I actually moved to New York, I always thought I’d be in Montreal my whole life but right now I’m not. I still love it. Torsten Schmidt Did you find that your sense of home has changed dramatically through touring? A-Trak Yep, yeah, that’s another thing, absolutely. I feel that for certain people to move to another country, there’s a challenge there in making a new place your home. I’m used to living out of hotels. I’m used to being in different cities every day for a significant portion of my time. So, yeah, I do think that the lifestyle that I live as a DJ and have lived for many, many, many years now affects my conception of where home is and maybe makes it easier for me to be a bit of a nomad – even though I never really felt that that was in my personality. I’m kind of a homebody and a simple person in my comforts and habits and few close friends and stuff. I didn’t think I could just be some roaming dude or whatever, but the move to New York wasn’t that hard. DJ Mehdi I still live in Paris and I pretty much don’t want to move, I think. I’m from Paris, but I travel all the time so I get to like my city even more when I’m there and the fact is I also have a family. I’m married, I have a child and I’m also very close to my parents and my uncles and cousins and stuff. A-Trak The scene that you’re part of musically is in Paris with you, that’s what’s different with you. I didn’t have people in Montreal that I work with as much. DJ Mehdi Well, internet, BlackBerry, phone, I thought that you had the internet in Canada? A-Trak We just got it. Coming from the country of the Minitel! DJ Mehdi You connect with every country everywhere. Like those guys from Australia, there’s a big, vibrant Australian scene right now and they are the most isolated country in the world, but not if you want to send a text message. If you want to send at four o’clock in the morning, you just do. I don’t know how much the scene is important for me as far as my love for Paris is concerned. Me personally, I really want to stay close to my family. That’s why. But I do like Paris and I do like living in Paris and I do like living in France. Torsten Schmidt Do we got some questions here? Oh, we tired them out. So, without wanting to turn you into a circus horse, but is there any particular reason you set this up? A-Trak I don’t know, I think we have to leave pretty soon, we didn’t really plan anything and I just thought we might have certain examples to play, and in fact I think our rambling was self-sufficient and didn’t need examples. Torsten Schmidt So more elaborate examples will be shown tonight then, I guess. Do you know any stage times? A-Trak I mean, roughly about 11.30, 12, we might have some surprise guests, I don’t know. I’m still calling friends and possibly planning surprises and stuff. Mehdi and I will DJ from about 12, 12.30 to 1.30 or so, Kavinsky’s gonna play some hard techno after. No, he’s not. Kavinsky will play after and then we’ll probably all get back together at the end of the night. Torsten Schmidt And when will Mannie Fresh be on stage then? A-Trak He’s not on stage tonight. Torsten Schmidt Thanks boys.