Kaytranada is the stage name of Kevin Celestin, an electronica musician, producer and DJ who hails from Port-au-Prince, Haiti but was raised in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Born on the 25th of August 1992, he is already one of the most respected producers in alternative hip-hop.
It’s kind of incredible what can come from the right combination of talent, ambition and music production software. In the case of Kaytranada, it’s lead to building the kind of career that it could quite easily take a decade to cultivate in the space of four short years. He’s not the first to have this kind of rise and he’s surely not going to be the last, but few people have seemed more likely to be able to maintain this kind of profile. His is a kind of quiet success, that happens almost by accident but in his capable hands, could be the making of an entire career.
Kaytranada’s career began at the age of 14, when he took up DJ-ing for the first time. his brother Louis-Phillipe introduced him to his first set of music software, Fruityloops. He then translated his lifelong passion for Hip-Hop and R&B into creating music, and once he learned the basics of how to use the software he was totally addicted. However, it wasn’t until he posted a remix of Janet Jackson’s 1993 classic “If” onto the internet that he started making waves. He made the track, went to bed, and woke up the following morning to find it had been played 50’000 times on his Soundcloud page.
Granted, everyone gets their fifteen minutes of fame these days, and a lot of people luck out on a track they put on the internet. Kaytranada was different, and the key difference that he had was in how incredibly prolific he is. In the four years that he’s been making music professionally, first under the name Kaytradamus before changing it in 2012, he’s been responsible for sixteen E.P and single releases bolstered by countless remixes. Everyone from Danny Brown to TLC to Common has had the Kaytranada treatment and it was his skill with a remix that got him a slot producing a track on the last Mobb Deep album, 2014’s “The Infamous Mobb Deep”.
You don’t need to be a fortune teller to know that this is an artist set for great things. This is an artist whose mastery of producing and DJ-ing has come before his twenty third birthday, given time and experience, he’s only going to get better from here. Highly recommended.
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