Hey Burt, what's up with the 'stache?

[Photo by Angela Boatwright]

Between his profile-raising part-time job as Kanye West‘s tour DJ and a recent move toward the DayGlo-dipped dance kid market with the Catchdubs-co-founded Fool’s Gold imprint, A-Trak is impossible to pin down these days. Hell, the guy even released an original cut through Kitsuné—a Parisian label best known for bleeding-edge electro—last year, proving he can hang with new-school producers like Sinden and Boys Noize as well as he once did with the leaders of hip-hop’s underground. (A-Trak was one of North America’s tightest turntablists back when crab scratches and fleet-fingered transformer moves were de rigeur for DJs. He won the DMC World Championship in 1997, back when he was just 15.)

In a move that plays right into his growing popularity with sneaker freaks and Hipster Runoff casualties, A-Trak is currently on tour in support of the impeccably-mixed Infinity+1 (due out April 14 on Thrive Records). A mix album with an actual sense of peaks and valleys—rather than blunt, brutish force—it starts like a rager and ends with a couple of cleanup duty cuts on more of a laidback disco tip (Alexander Robotnick and a pulse-lowering Prins Thomas edit).

With his Saturday gig at Studio B in mind, we asked A-Trak to share five of the staples in his current DJ sets …

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A-Trak, “Say Whoa”

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A-Track, “Infinity+1 (Teaser Mix)”