A-Trak's Australian Photo Diary

Australia is an interesting place to go for gigs, not just because it's on the other side of the world and they have great oysters, but because they have festivals that travel across the country with the same line-up. They usually cover two consecutive weekends, so you end up spending a week and a half with all these great bands and DJs. It's like summer camp, and remember, it is actually summer in the Southern hemisphere right now. The festival that I did earlier in the month was called Parklife, and I went there with my group Duck Sauce.

We were the headliners, and were there with Santigold, the Gossip, Diplo, Sebastien Tellier, Death From Above 1979, and a bunch of other great acts. I've been going to Australia for over ten years, and I've got some lovely friends that I get to catch up with every time I go back. A couple of them manage a program called Heaps Decent that encourages underprivileged teenagers to make music and helps nurture their talent, and on one of my days off I went to help them out for the second time. It was a very fulfilling trip that also bookended an action-packed summer spent zig-zagging across continents.

The Duck Sauce show is basically Armand Van Helden and I DJing in front of a giant duck with some lights. We play all our own music, it's all smiles. A pair of fans were showing off their Fool's Gold t-shirts (my record label). We were playing on the main stage, about 10,000 people in every city. Even more in Sydney.

This was the funniest part of the trip: to promote the Sydney show the organizers put our duck on a boat and made it enter Sydney Harbor. Here is the duck passing by the famous Sydney Opera House. I played there once, back when I was DJing for Kanye.

This was at the Heaps Decent workshop, I was giving tips to an up-and-coming producer. Also at the Heaps Decent workshop, this rapper Icey was practicing in front of the class for his first big show and I gave him some pointers on performance.