Canadian DJs Kid Koala and A-Trak discuss battling ahead of Thre3style

TORONTO – The last time Kid Koala entered a DJ battle, he knew pretty quickly he wouldn’t be doing it again.

The Vancouver-born, Montreal-reared DJ — whose real name is Eric San — never really liked the scratch-as-scratch-can head-to-head competitions, with the friendly hip-hop vet noting that there “had to be a lot of posturing involved” and that battling thus “wasn’t enjoyable at all.”

But it took a particularly bad experience in the mid-’90s to convince San to swear off DJ competitions. He and some friends were driving from Montreal to Toronto for a battle and their car stalled about halfway through the journey in Kingston, Ont. They rented a U-Haul — the only rental option available to the not-yet-25 travellers — and soldiered on, enduring “ridiculous” traffic and one gas depletion that sent San scurrying to a nearby station with a red canteen.

By the time they arrived at the venue, they were told they were late and had been disqualified.

It didn’t end there. The U-Haul was due back at 7:30 a.m. so they set sail from Toronto in the wee hours of the morning. Upon arriving, they received the diagnosis on their broken-down car: it needed a new distributor, which would take days to acquire. With a gig that night in Montreal, waiting wasn’t an option. They hit the road and the car stalled every five minutes or so, requiring one of the passengers to jump out each time to douse the distributor with water.

What should have been a three-hour trip took eight.

“I was just so scarred for life,” San said, laughing, in a recent phone interview. “I decided, you know, I think this is the universe telling me that battling is not for me.”

And yet, San is in Toronto this week to watch — and judge — as talented young DJs put themselves through those familiar paces at the Red Bull Thre3style World DJ Championships, which run this week with a winner to be crowned Saturday at Toronto’s Kool Haus. More than 20 DJs from around the world are competing, with Quebec City’s Adam Doubleyou representing Canada.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, San identifies with the competitors and won’t be too punitive about small mistakes.

“I know how hard these kids practise. It’s essentially like Olympic level. They’ll be doing the same six-to-15-minute routine for six months now. So a lot of things — wobbliness, skipping — I’m not going to dock points for something like that. I might even give points if they are able to recover from it fluidly.”

As blissfully brief as his battling career was, San recalls his own agonizingly intense rehearsal routines.

“I do remember the stakes,” said San, who in addition to an accomplished solo career has performed with Radiohead, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and, most recently, worked as part of the cult-hero hip-hop trio Deltron 3030.

“We would literally practise for hours the same six-minute routine, which is fine for us because we were working on it, but I remember, like, our girlfriends were hanging around. Wow, they must have been slowly going insane.”

If there’s someone who might understand how San felt, it’s fellow Montreal DJ A-Trak, the one-time phenom who became the youngest-ever champ at the DMC World DJ Championships in 1997 at the tender age of 15.

“When I won, that really put my name on the map overnight,” recalled the DJ, whose real name is Alain Macklovitch.

Back then, battles were a more prominent part of hip-hop lore. Even though DJing is much, much bigger now as a scene, there was a unique focus on turntablism technique in the ’90s, and Macklovitch points out that casual fans would have been familiar with such fellow champs as Q-Bert and Roc Raida.

Macklovitch, also a judge at the Thre3style competition, says that his criteria has thus evolved.

“There’s such a saturation with DJing in general, so originality might be the most important thing,” said A-Trak, who has recorded with Kanye West and co-founded the influential Fool’s Gold record label in 2007.

“Back then, skills and technique reigned supreme. Nowadays, I think a lot of people have mastered a certain amount of technique. There’s no longer a select handful of guys who know how to do a couple tricks.

“It’s definitely a balance of originality and really just style in general,” he added.

San agrees, and points out that since the competing DJs have a full 15 minutes to create their sets, he’ll be watching for whether the hopefuls create “space and tension.” He points out that when he started playing in bands, “they had to crack (his) head open” to realize that “sometimes restraint is the place.”

But with his decades-old battle scars still visible, he won’t be judging too harshly.

“I’ll probably just give everybody straight As for effort,” he said with a chuckle.

“I always assume if I don’t like something it’s because I don’t understand it yet. But again, I think if people are up there and doing their thing, then I support it.”