Carl Craig
In the future, when history books will include a chapter on the history of Detroit techno, one of the names people will come across is Carl Craig. A young Craig started out as Derrick May’s chief assistant at Transmat Records in Detroit and London. In 1989, Craig released “Elements,” a debut single as Psyche on Transmat, which quickly lead to his name being attached to what became known as the second wave of Detroit techno artists. In the ’90s Craig released house, techno and electronic jazz under different monikers – 69, Innerzone Orchestra and Paperclip People – and on various labels – KMS, Open, Mo’Wax, Retroactive. In the early ’00s he co-created the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, serving as its artistic director for the first two years before returning to it in the early ’10s.
In this lecture at the 2007 Red Bull Music Academy, the techno pioneer revisited the evolution of the city’s most famous musical invention and his approach to remixing and production.
Hosted by Torsten Schmidt We’re very fortunate to welcome Mr. Carl Craig all the way from Detroit, so please make him feel very welcome. [applause] How was the drive up here? Carl Craig Hard, very difficult. Torsten Schmidt What was so difficult about it? Carl Craig Seeing that I have a horse and carriage, it’s like the pioneering days. No. No, no. It was easy except for the rain and the traffic and all that kind of stuff. Detroit is a car city but we have no traffic. I don’t know what Toronto’s known for but you guys have too much traffic. What are you going to do? Torsten Schmidt Wow, six weeks into it and finally we get some proper feedback, that’s nice too. Interesting. Is there any sort of relation between the two cities at all or are they just relatively close to each other for North American standards? Carl Craig It’s kind of difficult to say, I mean, for us in Detroit and Toronto, Toronto was always this exotic place to come to, to come for the festivals in summertime and to try to pick up the girls in the summer as well. I think musically Toronto had more to do with New York and house music. With techno and electronic music, the closest to Detroit has been London and Windsor and that’s with what Richie Hawtin and John Acquaviva were doing, so I don’t think that the cities have been as close as what they could’ve and should have been. Torsten Schmidt What do you mean with “should have been”? Carl Craig Since they’re so close in distance... Torsten Schmidt It’s kind of weird when, at least for Europeans, I guess, when you take to proximity that’s like what, three or four hours? Carl Craig Right, yes. Torsten Schmidt Which is quite a lot, and then if you look at the state of Ontario you’re just not even getting, I don’t know, a tenth of it covered in four hours, and that’s one of the smallest states in the country in the first place. What’s it like living... What’s it like for... Carl Craig I think I’m cut off anyway. Torsten Schmidt Yeah. Audience No, we can hear you. Torsten Schmidt Yeah. How do you work with that hearing then? You got one of those fancy ear plugs? Carl Craig Stick my fingers in my ears and keep on going. Torsten Schmidt How old school. If we were to take a ride down there, what would be the difference as far as city layout goes and different mentalities probably? Carl Craig City layout. Detroit’s kind of a big city, but we don’t have anything. Not a lot of buildings. We have less than a million people that live there, in comparison to here, where it’s a newer city and the sign said 2.5 million people, so that’s quite a huge difference. I think also Toronto’s maybe a bit more cosmopolitan in ideas and thoughts to what happens artistically and what’s accepted and the boundaries you can really take, where Detroit is a very small-town mentality, and I think that’s what helped us to make the music we have over the years, because we were fighting against a lot of the small-minded mentality that came from the people sometimes. In Detroit it’s like “What do you do?” Well, I make music. “What are you, a singer?” No. “What do you do?” I produce. “Oh you produce, like Motown.” No, not like Motown. “Oh, well what do you do?” I make electronic music. “That techno? You make techno?!” Yeah, OK, another one of these motherfuckers, OK. So, that’s just... Detroit is a great place, I lived there all my life. But at the same time, in your hometown you have to fight a bit more maybe. Torsten Schmidt Nevertheless, that mentality seemed to foster a lot more talent than, let’s say, the relative easiness of... this place, for example. Carl Craig Right. It might be because all we have is music. Cars and music, you know. Torsten Schmidt And the cars are gone now too, right? Carl Craig But everybody drives big cars still. We’re trying to floss and pimp ourselves, and all that kind of stuff, so the mentality is still there, but that’s inevitably what it is, is cars and music. That’s what Detroit’s about. Torsten Schmidt So your outlook has been slightly different than, let’s say, that of the average blue-collar car worker, right? How did it come about regarding upbringing, education, influences... Carl Craig Say that again? I’m sorry. Torsten Schmidt What made you actually venture into the field of music instead of following the path that might be slightly more traditional around there. Carl Craig That’s difficult to say. Maybe it’s music from the radio that really inspired me to make records. We had a radio disc jockey in Detroit named the Electrifying Mojo, and he had so much influence in the city musically, and the music that I was intrigued by the most was all this weird stuff that he was playing. I was learning how to play guitar and all that kind of stuff, so once I actually got to touch a keyboard and to play little melodies like Harold Faltermeyer — “Axel F,” or Kraftwerk’s stuff or whatever it was on the little keyboard. That gave me to bug and I just have to follow my instinct. We also had Jeff Mills on the radio as the Wizard and Derrick May had a radio show, and Derrick’s really the guy who turned my head around musically. Torsten Schmidt Now, we want to wrap this up rather quickly because we actually want to go right into the nitty-gritty of remixing, which I guess is one of your main professions these days. Probably to give those an idea who might not be all too familiar with your work, can you take us through the... God knows what, fifteen different aliases? Like how many are there? Carl Craig I can’t even remember, I’m sorry. Torsten Schmidt What’s Carl Craig doing in the first place, like if you put a Carl Craig moniker on a record? Carl Craig A Carl Craig record consists of ideas that are melodic and drum-driven electronic music that is really influenced by rural music, by Eno, by hip-hop, by everything to listen to. But maybe more of a subdued context, in comparison to something like 69, which is just the craziest shit that you could think of to throw down there. Maybe a bit more influenced by Public Enemy, or Paperclip People that’s straight disco, just loopy craziness or Très Demented that’s supposed to be demented. Everything has a purpose, so I don’t make tracks and then say “I’m gonna be a different guy today.” It all sounds kind of different to me. When I make Carl Craig stuff, it’s only after I’ve made the material that it becomes Carl Craig material that it sounds as though it’s supposed to be Carl Craig. When I did the “Demented Drums” and that stuff, those Tres Demented, it had to have something new because it really didn’t fit into anything I had done before. Torsten Schmidt What’s the difference to working in a more a group sort of environment when you take the Innerzone Orchestra or the Detroit Experiment? Carl Craig Hmm. Well, with Innerzone it was a one man band that I felt needed to be expanded to three people or five people or whatever the instrumentation was. With Detroit Experiment or with this Tribe album that we’re doing now with Marcus Belgrave and Wendell Harrison and Phil Ranelin, that is a group mentality that is just produced by me. The idea is starting off as a group doing songs in comparison to one person doing a track, going freestyle, and then saying, “You know what, maybe I should add some real drumms in here, maybe I should get an upright bass, maybe I should get a pianist involved in it.” Torsten Schmidt What’s the difference in the workflow when you speak of tracks in comparison to songs? Carl Craig For me, keeping the integrity of the song is necessary if that’s what the final idea is. I’m more of a track kind of cat anyway so I like making rhythm, making a groove, and then maybe adding some changes into it later. When I take a remix or something, if it’s a song and it needs to stay a song, then I try to keep it as much of a song as possible. One example is “Kilode” by Tony Allen I did recently, and I tried to keep it as much Tony Allen as possible and as much of a song as possible. It being a track and a groove and builds up as a track, but still stays a song in some cases. (music: Tony Allen — “Kilode (Carl Craig Remix)”) [new topic] ...and you listen to the track constantly and constantly. The only structure is the structure that you’re building as you’re mixing, because I don’t really arrange things to come in at certain places in Logic or on Radar or whatever I use. I just kind of use the mixing console almost as an instrument. Torsten Schmidt Old school, hands-on? Carl Craig Old school, hands-on, yeah. I try to make it a little easier by placing things where I can touch a little better, but sometimes. I was just working on a mix the other day, and I had the MPC running Logic, and the MPCs over there, and the mixing consoles over here. I’m changing sequences and running and trying to pull instruments out and in and stuff, so it makes it a little more difficult, but I like that kind of thing. It’s quirky. Instead of sitting there in front of a computer saying “OK, well, I run it to be there,” and then playing it over again, “No, that doesn’t sound right there.” It’s maybe a little too cerebral, in comparison to it being maybe just a spirit thing. That is a perfect example of me putting my spirit into the music and it becoming what it becomes, and I mix it as it is. [applause] This is the Tribe stuff, the jazz side of things. Marcus Belgrave and Wendell Harrison and Phil Ranelin. Karriem Riggins, who’s a great drummer and plays with Kanye and Common and all those guys. Check it out. (music: Tribe — unknown / applause) That was some legendary Detroit musicians. Marcus Belgrave, Wendell Harrison, Phil Ranelin. It was all these guys in the room and playing and doing their things, and it was great. So this kind of shows the scope of what I do musically, where I do things on my own, which might be a little more trance-y or crazy or whatever it might be. Or with other artists as a producer and mixer, or as a re-mixer by taking the material that’s given to me and then I just kind of manipulate it and play around with it and make some new things or some old things or whatever the case might be. Torsten Schmidt So, I guess the remixing is more the bread and butter of things, because it’s relative. Unless you need eight, nine months to get your head around the Tony Allen track, it’s, I don’t know, I guess some Junior Boys track wouldn’t take that long. Carl Craig The Junior Boys one took a little less time, but because I listen to things as an artist, I think of things as an artist as well, so it’s not like “OK, well, shoot, can I do twenty remixes this month and get paid bookoo dollars, go out and buy me a Rolls Royce,” or some shit like that. It’s not as easy as that and I don’t have a team of people that are working with me. It’s mainly me, and I have an engineer that works with me and I’ll tell him to pull it up and then he might sit there in the studio for five days twiddling his thumbs until I come in and actually do something with it. Torsten Schmidt How does it work other than if you were doing it for demonstration purposes? How many offers do you turn down? Carl Craig I turn down a lot actually. I like doing mixes for people that I know, because it more fun to do it. Then there’s the mixes for money, and those aren’t necessarily the most fun to do because sometimes you might have to try to fix something you don’t like in the beginning. I don’t try to take mixes that I don’t like from the beginning. If I don’t like the song then I can’t do anything with it. With the Junior Boys thing, I really liked the song, so I could fit my thing into what they do. The Tony Allen thing, like I told you, we love that record, so... Torsten Schmidt Theo [Parrish]’s “Falling Up”? Carl Craig Theo’s record, yep. Theo’s record was another one that took me a while to really get to it. I think I was being a bit precious about his music because I’ve known Theo for a long time. I was asked by Third Ear to do it, and I hadn’t talked to Theo for a little while. It was just a situation where I took my time and really listened to it and listened to what he did, and even with that song, what I did in order to try and make it better, ’cause I think what he did was genius, was not to sample him and play the samples. It was actually to sit down there, figure out what he did, and then replayed it. Like the sample that he’s using as a chorus, I had to figure out what that chord was. Then I played it in Logic, sampled it into NP and replayed it. That taught me a lot of lessons of how to take something and almost keep it the same, but it’s becoming me at the same time. When I do a remix, the idea of doing a mix isn’t that I’m doing a mix and then “OK, here you go, that’s your record. That’s your thing.” It’s the concept that that’s my record too. It’s almost like we’re collaborating. I try not to let something out of my studio unless I’m really happy with what it is. If I think it sucks, then I’ll tell them I don’t want to put it out, or whatever the case is. Torsten Schmidt Also, there’s a certain sense of trademark that you have to defend I guess, ’cause, to quote a British radio journalist who might be amongst us somewhere in the building, “Yeah, he does those records that save my ass when I have to play places like Sonar.” Carl Craig [laughs] OK, well, that’s good. Torsten Schmidt There’s a certain type of quality that you can get. Usually those remixes say exactly what it says on the tin. You get some sort of a big, momentum, peak time, ten-minute buildup monster-ish kind of thing. Carl Craig Some of them work that way and some of them don’t. Can’t make a ten-minute monster all the time. [laughs] Torsten Schmidt That’s the other thing. When you realize you’re just not getting there, but somehow you got deadlines and people are just like “Come on, we need it, we’re too late for the pressing thing,” and you’re just like “Yeah, it’s alright but not all right.” Carl Craig Yeah, a lot of people have missed a lot of deadlines. With Wajeed’s mix of Tony Allen, I think my mix was supposed to come out before his did, but I couldn’t do it, so he got his done and his came out. Luckily I know Mark, who owns the label, so it made it really simple. The cash transaction didn’t happen until after I finished the mix. I’ve known him for a long time, but if somebody’s going to pay me money up front, then the pressure’s on. If you’re hired by Japanese, for instance, they hate not being on deadline. Germans too, by that fact. Carl Craig Yes dear. Audience Member Is there any reverent track that you would love to remix, but wouldn’t dare touch? Carl Craig My problem is when I pick a track to remix, I always screw it up somehow, so it’s better that somebody pick a track for me to do because I don’t have that love for it. For instance, if I wanted to remix “Tour de France,” I’d completely destroy it. It would just not work. “One Nation Under a Groove” just would not work. You know the songs as the songs. I’d rather deconstruct something that I don’t have as much feeling for. Audience Member I bought your Tommy Allen remix. Carl Craig Oh great. Audience Member It’s good. Carl Craig Thank you. Audience Member I want to ask you if you want to remix somebody’s track, you approach them and they give you all the elements of the software to you? Carl Craig If I approach somebody concerning the track, yeah. It can come in various ways. In the old days they send DAT with the elements in stereo basically. Or maybe one side, like drums, and the other side might be bass or something. Whatever the situation is. It can come in Pro Tools form. It can come as Logic format. It can come as tape. It can come as anything. However it comes, it’s my job to go in and figure out what’s on it and get my head around it and put it into any form that makes it possible for me to feel comfortable with. For instance, when we took this track it was done in Logic, but I knew that doing it in Ableton would be better for me to do something a little quicker to just mess around with the ideas a little bit more. Audience Member I quite like the underground music and I found that a lot of classic tunes are really fabulous after remakes to different kinds of styles. For us we are fresh. We are young, just starting to produce and we really want to sample something from a track we like. Any ways to take the a cappella or the special part of the tunes very precisely so we can use it. Do you not suggest we do it like that? Carl Craig It’s art. It’s guerrilla warfare. You do what you’ve got to do in order to get that inspiration out there. On a business side of things, I would say if you sample somebody, try to recreate it. Sometimes that sample is just it. When you look at somebody like Puffy or Kanye or any of those guys that use samples in their shit, it’s a business decision for them to keep it in there. You’ve got to pay in order to get a bigger hit. If you’ve got a record that you think is going to sell 50 million copies or some shit like that, then you’ve got to pay to keep it in there. But in other cases you have to realize that maybe you won’t get permission to use it, so you have to go back to the drawing board and either scrap it or play it over again. Many a times you can clear the publishing, but you can’t clear the sound recording. If you recreate it you clear publishing a lot easier. Audience Member What software would you use for that? Carl Craig Fuck the software. Just use whatever you can to do it. Audience Member Just EQ it. Record it again to wave form. Carl Craig Whatever technique it takes. Sometimes the crappiest samples sound the best. Sometimes the best samples don’t have any feel to them. I’m an advocate for you getting the creativity out there, but I’m not an advocate for you to just rip off somebody, you know what I’m saying? Since we’re on tape, I’m not advocating ripping off motherfuckers. Audience Member Thanks. Carl Craig No problem. Audience Member I’d like to know do you have any new aliases or new sounds, as you described it earlier, coming out? Carl Craig Not as of right now. The Tribe thing is what I’ve produced recently, so the more jazz stuff. As far as other aliases, we’ll see what happens. Audience Member We’re satisfied as it is as well. Carl Craig Thank you. Thank you. When I get to be about 60 or 70 I’ll try something else. Yes sir. Audience Member Some people think that remixing is your way of improving a track. What’s your take on that? Carl Craig Sometimes. Sometimes it’s that way. Like I said earlier, sometimes a track is perfect. You just can’t touch it. There’s a few ways that you can look at taking a job as a remix. You can take it as a job or you can take it as an experiment or you can take it as a mission. You could do any of that kind of stuff. Sometimes it’s all three for me, one of each, whatever the situation is. Many a times, when I do take a mix, I take it in order to experiment more than anything; to find out how somebody might have produced that track. If it’s a commercial track, it’s like, “How’d they get it to sound like that?” I remember I did a mix for Inner City for a track called “That Man (He’s All Mine)” and the engineer was a man named Goh Hotoda, I think his name is. He engineered for Talate as well. This is the only time I ever came across a track that was on multitrack that when you put everything to zero, it was the record. There was nothing else that you had to do with it — when every level was at zero, the record was there. Maybe a little compression on the mix or something, but the record was there. It sounded perfect. From hearing that it made me realize a lot of things like the techniques that Quincy Jones and Bruce Swedien had used to do a lot of Michael Jackson’s stuff and George Benson things and the Brothers Johnson and all these records I grew up with that I love that sounded amazing and the techniques that they would go to find ways of making those records sound new and interesting and next step and all that. Of course it was the composition and the arrangement and all of these things that come involved in it, but a lot of it really has to do with how they capture that sound to take and how it’s presented afterwards and how much you really have to do to it in order to make it a record and not make it a record. When I took a mix from Yello, the power of the sound is what came through, which I wasn’t able to achieve at the time, so I learned from doing that. The presence of the vocals that were done on Tori Amos’s stuff and how they separated the piano from vocals with their playing at the same time and doing all these things. It was a lot of research for me over the years and I still look at it that way. If you gave me a track that I liked and I heard it on tape or I heard it on a CD or something, I’d say, “Damn that sounds fucking great. I wonder how did he do that.” I can add something to it, but let me really see what he was doing to this. Sometimes it might just be that you finalize the shit crazy and it sounds great, or it could be that you actually are a great engineer and there’s something that I don’t know that I want to discover how to do it. Every day. Old dogs can’t learn new tricks — fuck that. That’s out the window. Every day is a new adventure. Every day is a new experience. Every day is a lesson and you’ve just got to keep your eyes and your ears open constantly and always try to get to that next level. Audience Member What was the hardest remix you ever had to do? What was the hardest situation that you ended up completing? Carl Craig That I completed? Fuck. My hardest remix. No, but that’s an interesting question. I can’t think of what it... As I said earlier, if it’s something that I really loved, like the Tony Allen album. The whole album. It made it so much more difficult for me to do a remix of the track. Elements that were involved wasn’t just that Tony is a great drummer and he had some great people playing and some great ideas. It was that my friend Moritz von Oswald did the mix on it and the mix sounds fucking amazing. The whole album sounds great. That, I think, was one of the hardest ones for me to do and it just had more to do with the fact that there was a high bar set and I had to achieve it. I had to come close to it, if not better. Torsten Schmidt Over there we have the very last question for 2007’s Academy. They’re in Manchester. Audience Member I already took the mic. Torsten Schmidt Oh. Second to last. Audience Member I just wanted to finish off. I guess you get this question a lot, but I never figured out the truth about the sandwich. Carl Craig It’s true. Audience Member It’s true. OK. Thanks a lot. Audience Member Thanks for coming down. I really appreciate it. Carl Craig Yeah. Audience Member Just a quick question, really. How do you feel about being remixed, like the basic reshape, for instance? How do you feel about that? Carl Craig Love it. Audience Member You love it. Carl Craig Yeah. Yeah. What they did to “Climax,” what they did to that. Of course being an artist it’s more difficult to… Being an artist that remixes, it’s sometimes more difficult to appreciate what someone can do to a mix, but those I thought were great. We’re going through a series of remixes now called Elevate for Kevin Saunderson and I’m hearing all these remixes that people are doing. Loco Dice did a mix and Joris Voorn and SLS, I think their mixes are coming up now. These are songs that I’ve lived with, that inspired me; “Bassline” and that kind of stuff, that really blew my mind. It’s almost like I’m the artist being remixed in that situation and it’s really quite interesting to hear what people’s ideas are and how they use the tracks and whether they deconstruct the track or if they use any of the elements from the original or what they use. It’s quite amazing. Audience Member Do you know what Basic Channel did with your record? Carl Craig I don’t know. Stepped on it. Whatever they had to do. What Mark and Moritz had done and what they do is they definitely make it into a Basic Channel song. With something like “The Climax,” it was very little of the “Climax’s there, but I love what they do so it made it fantastic. Audience Member Great. Thank you. Carl Craig Thank you. All right. Are we done now? Torsten Schmidt It’s an honor to say thank you very much. [applause]