Photos by Jonathan Mannion

The biggest surprise of last year's Governor's Ball festival in New York City wasn't anything headliner Kanye West said, or the impossibly shitty weather. It was a duck. Specifically, a giant inflatable web-footed creature in a bomber jacket—the Duck Sauce mascot—being tugged through the East River. 

"It was a vision—an apparition," laughs Alain Macklovitch, known to the general public as fedora-sporting producer and Fool's Gold co-founder A-Trak. "We wanted to do something that we could talk about years later, like, 'Remember when we put that duck in the water?' It goes into our spirit of being goofballs and following the ideas that seem ridiculous to everyone else. We like going where the laughter is."

After releasing a string of singles over the last four years, A-Trak and NYC house legend Armand Van Helden are finally ready with their debut Duck Sauce LP, Quack, due out in April. Sitting in the Lower East Side's Flux Studios, Macklovitch is sporting his personal uniform: leather jacket, silver chain that just extends above his collarbone, sparkling white Yves Saint Laurent sneakers—and yes, the hat. Van Helden, who Macklovitch later refers to as "the Buddha of my circle," arrives carrying a bag from Pret a Manger and sporting a knit cap, fresh-looking Nikes, and a vintage Kacy's World Colors "Positive History" T-shirt; his hulking, jovial persona stands in contrast to Macklovitch's politely thoughtful demeanor.

Within minutes of Van Helden's arrival, the duo are cracking up at pretty much everything, like how Macklovitch commonly refers to his friend Kanye's 2010 opus My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy as My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It all underlines Duck Sauce's overall M.O.: "The best thing we can do is to turn off our brains and tap into whatever our instincts are, which allows ourselves to do ridiculous stuff in the studio and keep what sticks," Macklovitch explains. "The Duck Sauce rubber duck toys fit into that mindset, too. We're like, 'Should we do this? Ah, fuck it.' Then we do it and our friends are like, 'You’re stupid,' but they go along with it anyway. It's about making a career out of brain farts."

Macklovitch and Van Helden first met around 2007 and became fast friends. The pair would get together once a year to bang out a few songs, choose one as a single, and then make a video for that track—a process that yielded the duo's most successful song to date, 2010's so-annoyingly-catchy-it's-kind-of-great "Barbra Streisand", which topped dance charts in seven countries. "Armand once compared it to the Champs' 'Tequila Song'—just a riff and a word," Macklovitch marvels. "Penetrating culture has always been appealing to me, and somehow 'Barbra Streisand' turned into a song that people would play at bar mitzvahs and weddings. What are the odds?"

Despite having a real-deal hit under their belts, Macklovitch and Van Helden nonetheless strived to keep the project's freewheeling ethos in mind as they worked on Quack over the years, finishing the record last June and taking three months to master the LP just right. "When it comes to sonics, we're super-picky," Macklovitch says, and on Quack, it shows: The record bursts with tons of energy but doesn't batter listeners' ears into submission. 

Duck Sauce's popularity with the furry-boots festival crowd is well-established, but aside from the squeaky Dutch house motifs of whistle-while-you-twerk single "It's You", Quack sounds like little else in mainstream dance music right now; it blends the bright chords and disco affectations of French Touch auteurs like Daft Punk and Alan Braxe with a joyful goofiness that recalls 90s big-beat producer Norman Cook's work as Fatboy Slim. "It's the tone and sound that separates us," Van Helden says. "When we play festivals, the lineup is usually some dubstep guy, then us, then Diplo. There’s nobody else doing our thing. As a term, 'disco house' is an abomination—disco is house, so it doesn't make sense—but amongst the other genres out there, 'disco house' is a great place to be in."

The sound of Quack may explicitly resemble dance music proper, but its spirit is rooted in classic hip-hop: "We listened to Paul's Boutique a lot," Macklovitch explains, talking about the album's sample-delic tendencies. Adding to the CD-era rap aesthetic are many skits that riff on everything from Chinese takeout to Wu-Tang Clan's classic Enter the 36 Chambers skit "Torture". Along with Macklovitch and Van Helden, comedy personalities Fabrizio Goldstein (aka The Fat Jew) and Lord Sear from the 90s hip-hop radio program "The Stretch Armstrong & Bobbito Show" crack wise between tracks. Macklovitch claims it's all an attempt to be "the Beatnuts of dance music."

Dance culture has never been too friendly to the notion of proper albums, and Macklovitch acknowledges that a "singles project" such as Duck Sauce releasing a full-length represents a risk. "This album was definitely something we didn’t need to do, but we had a statement we wanted to make. From the top-down, it's is about entering the duck land." It's also about paying tribute to the rich musical and cultural heritage of New York City, as Macklovitch points out with a sly grin: "Even the name Duck Sauce makes us think of New York, because there's the culture of Chinese takeout here. New York is important for duck sauce."

Pitchfork: It was refreshing to hear you guys bring skits back on this album, though they can sometimes carry the reputation of being funnier in concept than they are in execution.

Alain Macklovitch: Yeah, if you're making a rap album with skits, people just say,"OK, you guys are just trying to do some old Dr. Dre shit." But juxtaposing hip-hop-styled skits with house songs feels funnier and less expected. There’s nothing serious about Duck Sauce—nothing. We don’t have the slightest idea what people are going to think of this album—we’ve just made the album we always wanted to make. If you listen to Armand's old albums, he had hilarious skits where he was making fun of trance music, and fake rap skits. There’s a magic to his approach that makes me feel like a kid in a candy store.

Pitchfork: At the end of the track "Ring Me", there's a skit where The Fat Jew calls a Chinese restaurant to try to buy an enormous amount of duck sauce. Is that phone call real?

AM: That was very real—we had to debate whether it would cause a lawsuit. The funny thing with skits like that is it was originally six minutes of long of awkward conversation, and you're waiting for those nuggets of gold. My stomach was in knots listening to the actual phone call.

Pitchfork: Armand, as a NYC dance veteran, how would you appraise the state of the city's nightlife in 2014?

Armand Van Helden: It just won’t quit. I was around when Rudy Giuliani was mayor, when he shut down [former NYC clubs] Limelight and Palladium, and the press was saying, “New York’s gone to shit. Everyone's just laying around in the streets, they don’t know what to do with themselves.” I was like, “What?" The reality is that this is a humongous city with endless amounts of nightlife, and it's very good, and very underground, and it has nothing to do with five Walt Disney nightclubs being shut down. That was the only time over the last 20 years that I’ve heard people talk about New York nightlife being dead, and I lived through it—and I was out more then than I ever am now.

Pitchfork: How often do the two of you go out these days?

AM: We hit the town once in a while.

AVH: We used to hit the town once in a lot. In those early days, [Macklovitch] would hit me up all the time—he’d be in the loop, and I’m lazy. He’s quite the networker. We have a little generation gap, so he knows I’m completely fascinated with staying current and being on the scene. He’s always plugged in, while I’m in a plug-in-and-plug-out kind of guy. We actually haven’t gone out in a bit now.

AM: And when we do, we don’t stay out for long, like 20 minutes. [Van Helden] calls it the “swim-through.”

AVH: The big choice when it comes to the "swim-through" is left or right. You get superstitious, because you go, “Man, I did the swim-through to the left, but I bet you if I went right I’d have gotten more shorties." I’m serious! If you start to linger, all the girls' radars go, “Oh, that guy's been here, he’s wack.” The first run-through is when all the magic happens.