Get to know Amtrac, the producer making a mark on the international house scene

Sometimes a phone call can change your life. Caleb Cornett was spending his weekends driving around his native Kentucky in a knackered old car, playing DJ sets in dive bars when he got a fortuitous call. “A friend of mine called and said he’d played my music to someone who wanted to sign me,” he recalls. “That turned out to be Derek, who now manages me. He called and said he wanted to start a record label. And he asked if I’d go and play a show with Steve Aoki in Florida that he was putting on!”

While breaks like that don’t come around every day, it’s hard to argue that the now 29-year-old Amtrac hadn’t already paid his dues. After starting out in an emo band in the mid-noughties (we were called Phlegmatic – it means unemotional,” he laughs), Cornett gravitated towards tinkering around with sound engineering and learning production skills, inspired by the expansive sounds of post-rock bands like Explosions In The Sky and Sigur Rós.

After discovering UK sounds like dubstep (“before people in the US were making it,” he tells us; “the US stuff is too abrasive... the UK sound was more rhythmic”) and eventually house, he began to produce his own music. Building a reputation for his gently melodic house productions on SoundCloud, remix requests started flooding in from the likes of Two Door Cinema Club, Duke Dumont and Sigur Rós, while Radio 1 big guns like Pete Tong, Annie Mac and Danny Howard got his records on heavy radio rotation.

Now, having built a career as an in-demand remixer and DJ, Amtrac’s turning his attention to his own music with new EP ‘1987’, and his own label, Openers, which pays homage to that most undervalued of club staples, the warm-up DJ.

“Opening DJs play a huge role on the night,” he tells us. “It can go either way, but I’ve had to open many a show and when a DJ nails it, you’re just like ‘damn, that’s the shit!” Let’s hear it for the openers – although somehow, thanks to his millions of plays across YouTube and Spotify, we don’t think Amtrac’s going back to being the first on the bill anytime soon.

Amtrac is in the Smirnoff Sound Collective. Find out more: Mixmag.net/soundcollective