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Thursday, September 3, 2015
A-Trak: ‘It’s Cool to Be Weird Now’
A-Trak performs at the TIKTAK Festival in Amsterdam on July 18, 2015. (Clayton Woodley)
A-Trak recently spoke with Hot 97’s Ebro in the Morning show about the open-format mission behind his Fool’s Gold label and Day Off festival.
“As DJs, my partner Nick Catchdubs and I, we wanted to create a label that stood for what we play in our sets, which is not just one thing,” A-Trak told Ebro. “The whole idea of mixing up hip-hop releases and electronic releases, it just felt like it hadn’t been done at the time.”
He also said the rise of open-format DJing in the late-2000s influenced the label’s creation.
“In our DJ scene everything was mixing up again, so as a label, we went that same route of mixing stuff up again. Our events reflect that [diversity] too. And Day Off has really turned into an actual festival, it’s more than just a show.”
Though the idea of blending genres wasn’t mainstream when Fool’s Gold launched in 2007, A-Trak said that today’s fans are more eclectic than previous generations.
“I think that everybody listens to more than just one thing. It’s not like back in the day in the ’90s either you listened to Joy Division or you listened to BDP or KRS-One. Those crowds didn’t really [mix].”
Watch the interview below and check out the schedule for Fool’s Gold Day Off here.
Related: A-Trak’s ‘Heads Will Roll’ Remix Gets Flipped by DiscoTech
