ATTLAS Artist Bio

Jeff Hartford, better known by his stage name ATTLAS, is a Canadian DJ, electronic music producer and musician. Hartford is known for his progressive house and electronica releases on the electronic label mau5trap and has often appeared the label’s We are Friends album series. He has released three albums, six extended plays, and several other singles and has received two Juno Award nominations over the course of his career.

Born in Toronto, Hartford grew up surrounded by a variety of musical influences, including New Orleans jazz, Beethoven, hip-hop, and hard rock. After moving to Detroit, he learned to play a piano that was left in the basement of his home and began composing his own music. Later, an interest in electronic music was fostered by listening to productions from Matt Lange, deadmau5, and various artists from Warp Records. Before releasing his own music under the name ATTLAS, Hartford worked on film scores with composer Trevor Morris.

Hartford self-released a remix he had made of the Deadmau5 song “Aural Psynapse” in November 2014, which almost immediately gained attention and led to rumors being spread about the identity of the producer. Thanks to this positive attention Hartford decided to send his music to mau5trap, who signed him. During the period when Hartford’s songs were first released on mau5trap, a rumor circulated online that ATTLAS was a side project of deadmau5 akin to the Testpilot moniker Joel Zimmerman debuted also in 2014. Some even theorized that the name was a reference to the video game Bioshock and was a clue to the secret nature of the project. Although he mentioned his first name in some interviews, the true identity of ATTLAS was not fully known until Pete Tong revealed it on his Evolution broadcast on iHeartRadio. Tong said “There’s been a sneaky suspicion that he’s deadmau5 in disguise. However I can now reveal that he’s a fellow Canadian producer called Jeff Hartford.”

He is also half of the group Sun Lo with Richard Walters. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.