Ever since he started creeping out of the
fantastical urban dystopia of Detroit, Carl Craig has been one of the figures
most closely associated with the sound of classic Detroit techno. He came up in
the late '80s, shortly after the genre's original pioneers, and his expansive
take on the techno sound helped suffuse it with moodiness and soul. (The
original Detroit techno pioneers, known collectively as the Belleville Three,
were Derrick May, Juan Atkins, and Kevin Saunderson.) In the years since, Craig
has developed a preternaturally "musical" sound given to dramatic spells of
release and restraint, with warm chords and drum-sounds that suggest as much as
they state. Craig himself recently took stock of his career for Sessions, an essential two-disc
mix of his own tracks (under his given name, plus aliases like Paperclip
People, 69, and Innerzone Orchestra) and remixes for other artists. On the
occasion of Sessions' release, The A.V. Club spoke with Craig about the mythology of
Detroit techno, Blade Runner, and feeling weird around machines.
The A.V. Club: When do you remember first
responding to electronic music as an idea?
Carl Craig: My ear was already tuned into electronic
music by being born at the time that I was. There was a lot of Switched-On
Bach kind
of stuff and strange-sounding things in commercials. When I was a kid,
"Popcorn" was on the charts. Then George Clinton with Parliament
Funkadelic, all the basslines and Moog synthesizers. And then Prince. By the
time I heard "Alleys Of Your Mind," the first Cybotron
record, I had already made a conscious decision that I would try to meet Derrick
May. He was really the next step. His were modern futuristic sounds, compared
to what I'd heard. I always liked synthesizers and was exposed to them for a few
years before then, but that was the time when it was like, "Damn, you can
really do all this shit by yourself? You don't have to be in a band? You don't
have to have a guitar?" What they were doing was just as diverse and
interesting and crazy as anything in terms of the structure of a song. Just
sounds and rhythms. It was great.
AVC: A lot of the creation story of Detroit
techno involves a bigger context of science-fiction books, movies, and comics.
Were you into that kind of stuff as a kid?
CC: I wouldn't say that it engulfed my life. I'm not
a Trekkie. I still don't know all the Star Wars dialogue. I'm not that
kind of cat. I became more of a fiend for comics and sci-fi as I became an
adult. I was more interested in The Brady Bunch when I was a kid.
AVC: Was a lot of that stuff around in the air
there?
CC: Yeah, definitely. With Jeff Mills, one of the
first tracks he did had dialogue from Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, and it was quite
interesting how it was used. If you talked to Derrick May, he was all about
philosophy and space-age shit. He's the guy who started turning me onto comics
for real. He could sit there for hours and talk about Arkham Asylum and how deep it is. I was
into Blade Runner
about that time, though, and Brazil. Those other guys had been influenced by science fiction
completely, but they are a little older than I am, so they were watching Star
Trek when
it was coming on at 8 at night.
AVC: Being a little bit younger and hearing
Derrick May and Cybotron on the radio, was there a communal sense in Detroit
that there was a movement brewing?
CC: Definitely. When A Number Of Names did "Sharivari,"
everyone knew it was a Detroit record. With Cybotron, everyone knew it was
Detroit. There was a consciousness about the music, and when [Derrick May's] "Nude
Photo" came out, everybody knew it was from Detroit and cared that it was from Detroit. That
was maybe even the most important aspect of it—that it was a local guy who
was being very innovative and taking the next step. I remember having
discussions with a friend who worked in a record store: We'd stand there for
hours talking about how futuristic the 808 was [The Roland TR-808 drum machine.
—ed.] and who was better, Derrick May or Kevin Saunderson. These were
conversations that were going on in back yards and at schools and basketball
courts and record stores—any place where people who were 17 or 18 years
old were congregating.
AVC: When you mentioned Derrick May as sort of a
techno philosopher, what were the ideas of his that you remember most now?
CC: At the time, he was very spiritual in a
futuristic sort of way. If he wasn't Derrick May the producer and DJ, he would
have been Reverend Derrick May, because he was so spiritual at the time, and
into how the music related to what he felt and what he was doing—how the music
can change the world. Derrick is my mentor and like my big brother as well, so
there was a lot of teaching there, whether he was doing it on purpose or not.
AVC: How did it factor into your own thinking?
There's a lot of post-human fantasy in the mechanical sound of techno, but at
the same time, a strong humanistic drive, a soulful sound for a very social
music. Do you think about it in those terms?
CC: What I've done is, I've tried to put as much of
my self and my spirit in as possible. And in Detroit, whether or not you want
to abandon all the roots of Motown and jazz and whatever else, it's still there
in our spirits. We hear that stuff all the time. We've heard it from the time
we were born all the way up. Parliament-Funkadelic, Prince, all that stuff was
major here. And the way those guys used synthesizers was human. The robot funk
of George Clinton was played by a real drummer playing like a drum machine. So
we took those influences and put it into our music with the pure idea of
keeping the funk there and developing something new. You can use the 808, and
what is produced around it can inevitably make it feel more human than just an
808 machine by itself. The human aspect that comes from Detroit techno comes
from the idea of trying to actually get an 808 to not sound like a typical 808.
Lots of tweaks and tricks can get the sound to be more organic, but the idea
was not to program it like a drummer, or to replace a drummer. It's programming
it to make it an instrument in its own right.
AVC: You mentioned Blade Runner earlier. Do you
remember the first time you saw it?
CC: It was on video, when I was a teenager. What was
really phenomenal about Blade Runner, other than the visuals—because the
storyline was kind of shitty—was the music, which was incredible. Vangelis
did an amazing job at bending ideas and capturing moods in what he composed.
It's a remarkable soundtrack: I felt it at the time, and I still feel that way
now. That Blade Runner influence was big here in Detroit. But for my influences, Scarface is still one of my
favorite movies. And Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas has been a big
influential movie for me recently.
AVC: How so?
CC: I've always been intrigued by drugs, but never
used them. It intrigues me that someone could have those experiences. In some
ways, I think the imagery in the movie, I can kind of relate to it musically. I
can relate some of what I do musically to what [Hunter S. Thompson's] experiences
were. In some cases, I walk into places and I feel like I can relate to him,
period. Like, "I'm having a fear-and-loathing experience."
AVC: Do you mean in the process of making music,
or hearing it?
CC: Making. Sometimes being a studio can be a
completely surreal experience. I'm in here right now, looking at knobs and
things, and it's kind of strange. I know it's all mine, and I know what it is
and what it does, but it's still a little surreal to me. I think that's what's
always fascinating to me. It feels like I'm not quite… I'm here, but it feels
like I'm hovering about it in wonderment.
AVC: Do you feel that way as much now as you
did in the beginning?
CC: Maybe. I think what is surreal about it is that
it's always been my dream, and now it's my reality, but it still feels like a
dream. When I started out, I wanted to have all these keyboards and shit, and
now I don't have to worry about it any more, because I've got all that power
inside my computer. It's kind of freaky. It's great.
AVC: What do you wish people would better
understand about the story of Detroit techno? Do you feel the story is missing
certain aspects, or misinterpreted in ways?
CC: I don't particularly find it frustrating. My
relationship with "Detroit techno" is less as something that dominates my life.
With Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson and Juan Atkins… With Derrick, he's
really apprehensive about how people respond to it, because he was one of the
pioneers of it. I'm not a pioneer of it. I wasn't there in 1985—I came in
later. I look at it as being a part of me, but not the main part of me. I also
do jazz records and whatever else sounds interesting. I didn't get upset when
English guys were trying to sound like they were from Detroit, or the Germans
doing it, or techno being taken over by the idea of rave. I'm not so precious
about Detroit techno. I'm precious about music.
AVC: In your last press kit, you described
yourself at the beginning as a young struggling songwriter. People who don't
listen to a lot of electronic music might be surprised to hear "songwriter" in
there. Do you still think of the process that way now, as akin to what's more traditionally
called songwriting?
CC: Not now. I look at myself as being more of a
collage artist. That's inevitably what I was then, but when I was starting out
in this thing and nobody had a definitive idea of what was going on with
techno, and I was making music in my bedroom and doing demos, I couldn't call
myself a producer. That was the only thing I could really connect with what I
was doing at the time. When I was learning other instruments, I was trying to
write songs: dirty lyrics or, you know, writing key lines, guitar lines, basslines,
whatever. In the idea of structured music at the time, you had the beginning,
verse, chorus, bridge, whatever. While working with Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson
and observing Juan Atkins, it became the way that most music out here nowadays
is: more of a James Brown thing, where you just build off the groove. Even
though some people don't want to call James Brown a "songwriter," he had to get
to the point where people would understand what he was doing as being music.
AVC: After putting together this new
retrospective mix, how would say your priorities have changed in your own work
over the years? What do you do well now that you didn't before?
CC: My process of making music for a long time was to
get the idea out, and once that idea got on the tape, it was done—it didn't
matter how it got there. It could be the roughest demo, like "Neurotic
Behavior," which was made with a 4-track, a sequencer, and one keyboard,
and that became what everyone knows. For a long time, I functioned like that. I
didn't care if it sounded like a demo, as long as it had the right feel. I
didn't know at the time, until I read Berry Gordy's book about Motown… I can't
remember what Marvin Gaye track it was, but Gordy walked in when they were
doing the rough track and said, "That's it! Leave it like that." That's what I
was happy to get more than anything: that spirit, that impulse, that thing that
happens when you first come out with an idea. Now I look at it a little
differently. I can be more specific about how I tweak sounds, because I have
more equipment now, and more experience. I can get the same vibe, and clean it
up. It doesn't have to be the demo. But I still have an issue with spending too
long on music. If I'm still working on something a year later, it's probably
better that I not work on it any more.
AVC: Do you spend that much time on certain
work? Do you mean specific tracks or albums?
CC: Specific tracks. If I'm trying to work a concept
like an album and I come to the point where it's not working, then I throw it out
and just start from scratch. I've worked out rough ideas and tried to come back
to them, and some of the rough ideas work, and some don't. In time, you learn
what your threshold is and what you can really do. Some people sit on ideas for
quite a long time, and are afraid to throw it out. I've never been that way,
where I'm afraid to do something over. If it's really necessary to throw it
out, then you have to throw it out. But definitely as time went on, I started
to take a little more time and revisit things. Am I being contradictory?
AVC: No—
CC: [Laughs.] Just want to make sure, because I felt
a Hunter S. Thompson moment coming.
AVC: When you talk about how originally it was
that raw demo feeling that was really bracing for you, what in your current more
refined stage takes the place of that? What moves in as a substitute?
CC: The remix. With remixes, I'm always on a
timeline, so I have to make the ideas move a little quicker. And it's like I'm
taking somebody else's idea, which might be a fantastic idea or might not be,
and remolding it into something else. But sometimes I don't quite get it done
in time, so I give them something that would be like a demo, and then go back
and tighten things up and do it again.
AVC: Do you prefer remixing tracks with or
without fantastic ideas in the original incarnation?
CC: As a remixer, I have sometimes the option to select
what I would like to mix, and it seems that when I pick the one that I like, I
don't do as well as when somebody picks a song and I'm forced to deal with it.
I think that might be because I find a little more… that I'm closer to the
song, so it makes it more difficult to destroy it, if it really needs to be
destroyed. If you have to tear down a wall, but you think you should keep the
wall the way it is, then when you finally build it up, you realize you
shouldn't have torn the wall down. But it's too late.
AVC: What do you find most interesting in dance
music at large right now?
CC: What's most interesting to me is that technology
has gotten it to the point where sonically, most records are really good. I'm
getting demos that sound like finished products. But music-wise, I like what
Luciano and Ricardo Villalobos and those guys are doing, because they're taking
mood in another way, extending simple ideas and developing them with
interesting flavors. Their songs can't be three minutes long—they have to
be 10 or 11 minutes long, like they're growing, living, breathing. I'm into
things that are rhythmically interesting but simple, with elements that are
simple, but each with its purpose, and each one says something.
AVC: Does it feel to you like dance music is becoming
increasingly aware of its own history? In so much house and techno now, the
drive to do the next thing is going alongside an impulse to consider what's
happened and incorporate that.
CC: To perfect the past in some way, yeah. I'm happy
with the developments that have been happening in that sense. I feel as though
the ideas that have developed more have been in sound design and the relation
of sound to the music. The music is very simple: In many cases, what you'll
remember as a melody isn't a melody, it's a sound. It's interesting to me,
because I like being concrete. I was into all that crazy electronic sound. I
was more into that than actual music of the time. The sound of it. And we're at
that point again where it's that electronic sound that has the fantasy in it, that
has the imagination.