Tell Carl Craig Techno Isn't About Raw Fucking Attitude and He'll Tell You to Shut up and Listen
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104 TELLdetroit CARLrising carl craig CRAIG TECHNO ISN’T ABOUT RAW FUCKING ATTITUDE AND HE’LL TELL YOU TO SHUT UP AND LISTEN. interview TEMPE NAKISKA The game-changing second generation Detroit producer is one the most influential names in techno and a fierce advocate for his city, from his essential role in founding the Detroit Electronic Music Festival to his latest project, Detroit Love, a touring DJ collective of some of the biggest talents in the field, old school to new. Craig grew up absorbing the odyssey of sounds that formed legendary UK. There he got acquainted with the industrial sonic experiments radio DJ The Electrifying Mojo’s show from 1977 to the mid-80s. of Throbbing Gristle and UK rave music’s singular take on the From Jimi Hendrix to floppy haired soft rocker Peter Frampton, breakbeat – a clinical, on-edge combustion that would heavily Depeche Mode synth pop to Talking Heads new wave, and ruthless influence Craig’s own sound. Returning to the US he started his dancefloor belters from Parliament, Prince and Funkadelic, Mojo own label, Planet E, and unleashed himself on the world. Drawing scratched out notions of genre or ‘black’ and ‘white’ music to serve from jazz, hip hop and world music, he violently shook up what his up pure soul. forebears had started. You want techno? Hear this. Attending his earliest gigs underage, Craig helped his cousin 2016 marks 25 years of Planet E, through which Craig has on lights. It was there, deep in Detroit’s 80s underground, that he cruised to the earth-ends of his influences, via aliases including first-hand witnessed the music of the Belleville Three. Techno’s 69, BFC, Innersole Orchestra, Paperclip People, No Boundaries, creators – Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson – three Tres Demented, C2 and Eich. Today on the phone it’s Carl. Battling high school friends who grew up confronted by a mass loss of jobs jetlag, he’s firing on all cylinders. in line with the rise of robotics, had swallowed their community’s growing resentment and spat it out via the musical influence of Tempe Nakiska: Hello? extraterrestrial funk master George Clinton and German krautrock Carl Craig: Yeah. engineers Kraftwerk. In a basement, messing with sequencers, they TN: Hey Carl, how are you going? took back control of the machine. From Cybotron to Atkins’ early CC: Good, I just got back from Argentina, jetlag hit me pretty hard label Metroplex you could hear the Motor City’s assembly lines yesterday. I was okay in the morning then I cooked breakfast and it chug, they were Alvin Toffler’s ‘techno rebels’ embodied. laid me out for the whole day. Craig was quick to dip his toes in – he released his first music TN: Was it a Detroit Love thing? under Derrick May’s label, Transmat, in 1990, before touring the CC: This one was just a Carl Motherfucking Craig thing. Picture Martyn Goodacre / Getty CARL CRAIG in PARIS, 1995 106 detroit rising Picture PYMCA / Getty carl craig of Detroit, it seemed like the English were the first to jump on the ever Movement festival, it was talking about the geographic and social house bandwagon, then of course the Italians then the French and boundaries of Detroit and how they helped shape the music coming the Dutch. With dance music, you guys never had a disco sucks out of there. Everyone’s talking about gentrification in Detroit movement, so there was no pushback from radio and the industry at the moment, do you think those divides will always be there? against disco. You could talk to Nile Rodgers about that one, because Is it shifting? he lived it, you know, after they bulldozed all those records, they CC: Detroit has been a black city for as long as I can remember. If shot ‘em out of fire canons, they almost destroyed the stadium [on Detroit didn’t have the exodus that it had more than 40 years ago, Disco Demolition Night on July 12, 1979, when a radio promotion if it didn’t have the fight and struggle that had to happen, I think incited thousands of baseball fans in Chicago, Illinois to storm a that it could be a lot more difficult for there to be a possibility White Sox game, exploding crates of disco records on the field]. of diversification in the culture. You look at a city like Chicago TN: Yeah it was crazy, like a riot. or Boston, where it can happen on a racial level, but you don’t CC: I mean, it was like the American Revolution was happening… really see it in Detroit, where for the most part the old guard, those but yeah, you didn’t have that in Europe. Also, music education people are not ever going to move back to Detroit, it’s gonna be has always been more prevalent in Europe than in the US. In our their kids and grandkids that will move back, and those people have school programs music education is one of the first things to get been raised on Kanye and Taylor Swift, you know? There’s diversity, cut. So for there to be this new interest in techno or house music in they’re being exposed to things that will make it easier to adapt with the US has a lot to do with the festivals that are happening in the new culture, the people moving to Detroit are not the kind of people US. Mainly, Movement [Detroit Electronic Music Festival], it was a who are my age or older who ignored ‘black’ music, or on the other starting point for showing what was happening in Detroit music and side who ignored ‘white’ music, I think Detroit is likely going to be bringing people music that was on a realer level. You know, when I a culturally progressive city as it starts to move forward, and in some was involved in the first two years of the DEMF [in 2000 and 2001] cases, gentrify. But I don’t think it’s ever going to gentrify in the there was nothing else happening in the United States like what was same way that they’ve been able to gentrify, say, Harlem. going on in Detroit. It put a spotlight on that music. The other thing TN: What was the feeling in Detroit when you started listening to is that EDM has become so massive, it’s opened up ears and minds techno, getting to know what the Belleville Three were up to, was to other types of music from around the world. it positive? TN: You yourself have explored the classical-electronic mix pretty CC: Oh yeah, definitely. Before I was able to go to clubs myself I extensively, mixing those two genres live with Francesco Tristano had been doing some gigs with my cousin, assisting him as the light and on record with Moritz von Oswald. What’s so fascinating about man, I was able to see early aspects of the music that was happening the combination of human and machine? at the time. By the time I started going to the Detroit Music Institute CC: The experimental works of John Cage and Steve Reich are a big in 1988, there was such an amazing feeling about the music, it was influence, using tape loops and things like that, it’s within the same a movement that happened at the right time and it felt good to me, realm of using a CR-78 or an echo drum machine, something that it was something I was looking for and that my mind and my heart sounds very percussive and synthetic at the same time. It wasn’t ever and soul were open to. It was the perfect scene, when you went to a like, ‘Okay this is what you’ve got to listen to’, we’ve been very good party you really danced your ass off, it was about the music, it was at spreading our horizons in listening to things that are different and about people really dancing and the music really pumping, it was diverse. In relation to playing rock and funk and disco and electronic our version of what the Music Box in Chicago was. music I always defer to the boss, the God – The Electrifying Mojo. TN: What’s the feeling there today? There’s word that He would always start off his shows playing this John Williams Dimitri Hegemann [German nightclub owner who owns Berlin’s composition from Star Wars, probably twenty minutes of it, the thing Tresor, one of the biggest night clubs in the world] is looking to open was that at the time it just didn’t seem like there were any limits. On a club in an abandoned auto factory… FM radio you played the whole side of an album, but he’d start off CC: It still has a long way to go. I think that the American vision with his space age, spiritual monologue and then right after that he’d of what constitutes a club… [pauses] I think the people who open come out with Mothership Connection or something, and if you listen new clubs need to travel more. That’s the good thing about someone to Mothership Connection [by George Clinton’s funk band, Parliament] like Dmitri’s plans; he’s someone coming from the outside, who has there’s a drummer playing over the top of a drum machine! [laughs] travelled and seen things. You need to elevate the crowd to go, ‘Wow So, then there’s Bernie Worrell doing all his classical stuff, Herbie this is something really special,’ instead of ‘I’m going to walk into a Hancock who comes from a classical background did all this bar and drink.’ In America you go to a club to drink, really, and pick electronic music in the 70s like Nobu, and Rocket, this classical guy up girls, there’s not that thing of it being this place of entertainment turned jazz turned electronic musician.