March 19, 2009

A-Trak, Infinity+1
Thrive Records, March 31
Like most of his peers, Montreal DJ Alain Macklovitch got his start as an obsessed underager, eventually moving on to become a prodigy in the scratching game (he won the Disco Mix Club’s world DJ Championship at age 15), which brings us hurriedly to the here and now and his fringe-famous role as a Kanye West sideshow, synching up beats and futzing around with his beloved Serato Scratch widget, a technology that allows DJs to scratch with CDs in the same manner as they did with vinyl.

A lot of people will like his latest mix, somewhat inaccurately touted as a “mashup” (a bone of basic parlance: beat-matching segues between full-length songs doesn’t automatically spell “mashup”) (or “genius,” for that matter) of electro Cheez-Its from, among others, MSTRKRFT, Gonzales and always-boring house guy Laurent Wolf. Now that you’re thoroughly confused, let’s just leave it at this: out of its natural fabby-nightclub habitat it nevertheless could constitute an upbeat, seismic party record that would work for the barbecue planned mainly for your hip-hop/dance-club buddies but which is under serious threat of being invaded by Granny and the Oldsters, who’ll probably grok all this nonsense as fancy-pants computer updates of Jazzy Jeff stuff (as should you, but, you know, fine, be that way). B — Eric W. Saeger