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by MIREILLE SILCOTT "At the moment I am practising a lot, tightening my routine, making sure that everything is perfect. I've been practising four or five hours a day. Everything I do revolves around it. One must be very disciplined." I am sitting across a shaky terrace table, watching a spry 15-year-old boy scarf down some carrot cake and milk. And these are the words coming out of his mouth. A piano prodigy awaiting a recital, perhaps? An Olympic swimmer prepping for eliminations? A chess wiz ready to take on a precocious Muscovite? Well, not quite. The boy with the cake is Alain Macklovitch. He has big brown eyes, a toothy smile and the apparent intellect of somebody grazing 40. And he's a champion scratch DJ. The 1996 DMC/Technics mixing victor of Quebec, to be precise. And on the street, this Stanislas schoolboy and son of two linguists is known as DJ A-Trak--Montreal's hopeful in next Saturday's DMC (Disco Mix Club, founded in 1983) Canadian mixing championships, the winner of which will go to Rimini, Italy to bust beats for the title of World's Best DJ. Sitting with us are two slightly dazed men, both cake-less and a decade older than Alain: Lasalle's Danny Vincelette and Laval's Stanley Bernard, respectively known as DJ Devious and DJ Unaware, the second- and third-place Montreal finalists. All are rather edgy. DMC flyers litter the sidewalk and talk of incoming Toronto turntable heavies looms large. Devious: I'm nervous. The closer the competition gets, the more I freak. Unaware: Now the pressure's on. I turn on the radio, CKUT's going on about it, the advertisements are everywhere, everyone is talking about it... Talking about what? Putting records on a spinning wheel? In fact, yes. And then doing the most fantastic things to them. These DJs are scratch DJs, battling scratch DJs, which means that they do not just play records, gliding in and out of songs and mixes. They use records. They do not care for hits of the week or dancing booties or crowd-pleasing melodies. They care about mixing. Technique. They are dedicated to a relatively new musical principle based on the almighty word transforming: Taking something and making it something else. Placing a needle on a pressed guitar riff, snare drum or vocal and making it sound like something completely different, using turntable and mixing console manipulation. Making new music out of recorded music, composing by decomposition, live and with six competitive DMC minutes to do it in. A-Trak: I've just been working on a new scratching trick called the Crab... Devious: I'm practising new scratches. Like he said, the Crab, it's very hard. Mirror: What's a Crab? D: You hit the crossfader [mixer] with your four fingers. A: Instead of using, like, either one finger or all of your fingers put together, you use four fingers one after the other, very quickly. D: It's a sound illusion, it sounds like four cuts, like tak-tak-tak-tak. M: Oh. Umm, Okay... Scratch mixing is one of the cores of hip hop music and culture. In 1976 an early hip hop DJ from the Bronx named Grandmaster Flash took the practice of spinning the instrumental "breaks" of records to creativity's door. Borrowing technology from glitzy downtown disco DJs, he introduced the idea of listening to two records at once in a single pair of headphones. This allowed DJs to cleanly cut back and forth, and to precisely graft two sources of music to one another. One of Flash's contemporaries named Grandwizard Theodore then clicked on the notion of percussive scratching: moving a record back and forth in its groove, to add extra (manual) beats to records playing. This was the start of transforming. A: But everything is on a completely different level now. The principle of everything changes from year to year as the art advances and people figure out new ways to scratch and use the turntables. For example, the idea of making melodies by using the pitch control... U: Or beat juggling. D: Its more technical now. Every year scratching requires more skill. Skill is the operative word. The scratch DJ may be the most "untainted" and genuine of all hip hop artists, since his craft still relies on expertise. Expensive or rare records are no better than a bargain-bin children's record, as the only hierarchies in scratch culture are those of sound and dexterity. Tricks like the aforementioned Crab (invented by DJ Q-Bert, San Francisco's revered three-time DMC world champ), where one beat is split into four in a millisecond, or beat juggling, where two separate beat patterns are cross-cut to create a new sound design, or the flare, where a single beat is dissected smack in the middle, are skills as arguably difficult to master as any classical instrument. And the possibilities are quite unbounded: a guitar can only sound like a guitar, or maybe like a drum if you beat a stick to its body, but a turntable can sound like anything at all. But there is one cog in the wheels of steel of certain turntablists, though. A cog which some DJs call body tricks and some call gimmickry. You know the deal: spinning records with your toe, scratching beats with your forehead, or in the case of International 1990 and 1991 DMC champ DJ David, doing breakdancing windmills on the turntable. No Montreal DJ does body tricks. Every Toronto DJ does. And judges usually love them, even if spinning your noggin on a Technics is a whole chunk easier then doing the Crab, and much less musical, to boot. U: The crowd adores body tricks, but to me what's most important is scratching. A: And the people in Toronto understand scratch DJing more than in Montreal. Here, the people will respond to the stuff that the crowds in Toronto are used to, like their body tricks. I think that if a crowd in Montreal sees a DJ doing good body tricks, they will like him better then us. The judges may too. Many DJs have bones to pick with DMC about who is chosen to judge the competition. And for good reason. Some of the names on the list of the Canadian elimination hold jobs at deluxe record labels or host "urban music" radio shows, but probably wouldn't know a flare or a Pee Wee Herman scratch if it landed on their head. However, they might understand showmanship and crowd response (Toronto already has two packed buses coming in support of their three elimination DJs and Canadian title-defender D-Scratch), which are two of the five categories on which judges base their marks. "If I were taller I would do body tricks," laughs Eric San, the local turntablist and 1995 Montreal DMC champ recently signed to Ninja Tune records under his DJ name Kid Koala. "Technically, body tricks are all showmanship and if you are going to do something on stage, in front of people, that's a big part of it." Koala respects body tricks when integrated into a DJ's soundscape, but like the outstanding Q-Bert, who after one recent battle famously railed "no body tricks, all sound," San concedes that the non-aural fringes can ultimately sabotage scratching's total art. "It's the gimmickry that's a bit off," he says. "Getting up there and doing a windmill on the turntable--that doesn't sound like anything. The turntable isn't even turned on. Or people who set their stuff on fire, or any kind of pyrotechnics or extra props that have nothing to do with the sound whatsoever. Close your eyes and nothing's there." Under this wisdom, our third-placing DJ Unaware doesn't stand a very good chance. Unaware made it through the Montreal finals in November by shaving off his beard between mixes. It hardly blew the crowd away. But then, neither did a single other local competitor (one of whom played only one record and tried cueing it for his entire six minutes; another who played high-energy disco music and got booed into oblivion) aside from Devious and A-Trak. So does the 15-year-old champion stand a chance, then? "There was one time when A-Trak, Q-Bert and I were jamming, when Q-Bert was visiting Montreal," says Koala. "I would be down reaching for a record and I would hear something wild and I'd turn around and go "No way, Q!" and it wouldn't be Q, it would be A-Trak. He's definitely on the level: he takes time. He studies, he's got practice sheets, where he lists every style of scratch that he has, and he's very methodical about it." This coming from someone who once said that everything in his life turned into six minutes before competing for DMC. "You can get obsessed," continues Koala, "but you've got to appreciate that kind of devotion. Even if people don't get it when he's on stage, even if they may not understand his tricks, he's pretty brilliant. I don't know what will happen on that night, but I do know he's a wicked DJ. And he will go far." * Experience the Crab and other handy tricks at The DMC Technics Canadian DJ Mixing Championship Final. At Metropolis Saturday, May 3, 9pm. Montreal finalists battle against finalists from Calgary, Toronto and Vancouver, and Toronto's D-Scratch defends his title. Special guest DJ Q-Bert from San Francisco. Advance tickets $12, available in shops and through Admission: 790-1245. General info: 932-5330 |
Local 15-year-old DJ A-Trak, Lasalle's DJ Devious and Laval's DJ Unaware are all after the title of World's Best DJ