The Witzard

My older cousins Ashley and James were always Diplomats (aka Dipset ) fans growing up and while I never really listened to them back in the early 2000's, I guess I have a few vague memories... Juelez Santana 's oft-delayed Lil' Wayne team-up I Can't Feel My Face , current reality star Jim Jones' lone hit "We Fly High," Cam'ron 's eccentric pink fur collection and "Purple Haze," and the eventual rise and fall of Dipset . Long-time admirer/super-fan A-Trak has recently teamed up with Dipset general Cam'ron for an upcoming collaborative EP, Federal Reserve ; fresh on the heels of his long-awaited and just released Duck Sauce album with DJ buddy Armand Van Helden , appropriately titled QUACK . Their Complex -premiered "Dipshits" is the second proper track to be unleashed from Federal Reserve EP , which A-Trak co-produced along with Just Blaze and his brother Dave 1 's (Chromeo) recent collaborator, Fool's G...

A-Trak & Armand Van Helden , better known as super-DJ duo Duck Sauce , finally released their long-awaited full-length album, QUACK earlier this month; included within are previously released neck-snapping singles "aNYway," "It's You," and "Barbara Streisand" amongst a gaggle of newly-crafted Disco-Funk revival jams. Duck Sauce 's wonderfully ridiculous new video for "NRG," which was previously remixed by Skrillex, Kill The Noise, Milo & Otis as well as Hudson Mohawke , premiered on the front page of Buzzfeed Wednesday afternoon. Director Dugan O'Neal ingeniously cast Kroll Show funnyman and RHCP2014 mastermind Jon Daly as a cheesy late night info-mercial pitchman, who's seemingly mesmerized A-Trak & Armand Van Helden (who oddly enough appear as his back-up pitchmen, too). The NRG product being sold in the clip is a magical "everything gel" that can supposedly fix over cooked left-overs, help yo...

Super-producers/DJ's A-Trak & Armand Van Helden (together Megazord -ing as Duck Sauce ) finally unleashed their latest, long-awaited video-single, "It's You." Throughout their short career, Duck Sauce have previously been miscast as a 70's Soul-Funk group, hairy human genitalia, and Barbara Streisand enthusiasts; Their short and sweet output includes "aNYway," Greatest Hits EP, "Barbara Streisand," "Big Bad Wolf," and I'd personally like to think an unconfirmed full-length. A-Trak & Armand Van Helden recently teamed up with director Philip Andelman to conjure up an interesting music video for "It's You." Building off it's underlying ol' timey barber shop quartet vibe, "It's You" enlists Duck Sauce as 2 sharp-edged barbers in a parlor where the hairdos, patrons' eyeballs, barber chairs, etc. all move in sync with the glitched-out track. Here's a few of my favourite h...

"[The concept behind] "Big Bad Wolf" is pretty simple, and it can mean anything, really, so we wanted the video to have its own narrative," says A-Trak , one-half of the dance duo Duck Sauce , along with DJ Armand Van Helden . "Remember when dance music videos used to actually be creative? Like when you think back to Aphex Twin , Fatboy Slim, and Daft Punk ... I don't know why the genre's videos became so generic in recent years." - Alain ("A-Trak") Macklovitch "When Keith [Schoffield] came up with this idea of "crotchfaces," we just thought it was hilarious," A-Trak continues. "He started coming up with all these gags and describing the characters living in this sort of parallel world, and we were sold. He wasn't sure if we'd be down to play the leads. But our take on this was, if we're going to do this, we need to go all the way. So, we played the dickheads, essentially."