The trick in Craig’s music, however, is the glue that connects generations, venues, and penchants. “Hunter Thompson never not wore his Chuck Taylor Converse low tops,” he says, with an unusual calmness for someone steps away from appearing in front of hundreds of people.Īt the auditorium, the crowd was an eclectic mixture of concert t-shirt-wearing techno fans and those more accustomed to sitting at shows. His favorite car is a twelve years old Mercedes currently at 109,000 miles, “but I am trying to get 300,000 out of it, so I have to make a few more rounds.” For his performance, Craig had paired one of his signature black fedoras with a Pakistani kurta shirt and Rick Owens pants, finished with his lucky gold detailed Adidas Top Tens. “Just like comedy, mixing is about timing: Richard Pryor shot Live on Sunset Trip in two days, because twenty minutes into his first attempt, he fucked up and had to start again.” He has concocted a few recipes for turning his crowds on: “For the Tokyo audience, I can start with whatever I want, even with some Miles Davis, but in London, I have to warm people up, some kind of foreplay at first.” The venue is often as crucial as the audience: At a recent set at Johannesburg’s Constitution Hill, which was part of his All Black Digital series during Black History Month, Craig invited a host of South African DJs to join him at the historic museum and former prison where Mahatma Ghandi and Nelson Mandela were formerly imprisoned.Ĭraig drove ten hours from Detroit to New York for his Carnegie Hall appearance-in fact, he drives to most of his gigs across the country. Calculated track lists and auto-piloted DJ’ing, he believes, takes the human element out of the game. “For a long time, I would try to swallow my mistakes, and it would drive me nuts, but I've come to embrace them,” he says. Making errors, whether in career or on stage, does not intimidate the 52-year-old. Science fiction and futurism heavily occupied his vision-especially the dystopian noir universe in Blade Runner, which was “not different from Detroit with its rainy darkness and tall buildings.” Craig and his mentor Derrick May spent hours surrounded by knotted wires and piles of tools, as well as manga and comics like Arkham Asylum, consuming art about other futures while composing their potential music.Ĭarl Craig performing at Dia Beacon in 2020. At 18 years old, he bought his first synthesizer with his mother’s money and pieced together other equipment he needed to make electronic music through “begging, borrowing or stealing.” The robotic rhythm of Xerox machines was an influence, as well as the echoes of electrified beats booming across the Motor City’s burgeoning techno scene. Unlike his heavy-hitting improvised sets at clubs like London’s Ministry of Sound or Tokyo’s Space Lab Yellow, the concert at the ornate Midtown venue included low-key sheet music compositions played by the keyboard players.Ĭraig’s techno superstardom began at the abandoned warehouses of an economically dilapidated Detroit over three decades ago. His return to the DJ booth in August 2020, after nightlife was shut down for a half year, had felt like “delving back into the energy ” a seated 10 pm performance-“an usually early time for me to be on stage,” he says-with his parents and siblings among the audience only doubled the thrill, even as this was likely to be a comparatively muted affair. “I am more interested in the art of putting sounds together, so I am less of a performer but more of an engineer who happens to be all on stage.”Īt a Manhattan café a few hours before the Carnegie Hall gig, which Craig played as part of its ongoing Afrofuturism festival, the Grammy-nominated musician was ready for the first post-pandemic reunion with his Synthesize Ensemble, a quartet of keyboard players and the pianist Kelvin Sholar. “I’ve never felt comfortable with that DJ as a Jesus-like superstar person,” he says. ![]() Today, at 52, Craig hasn’t forgotten those “social and mental beating” from his youth. ![]() ![]() Every time techno pioneer Carl Craig DJs, whether it’s a 5 am rave at the Berlin nightclub Panorama Bar or New York’s historic music pantheon Carnegie Hall, where he played for a sold-out crowd in mid-March, he reminds himself: “I will not show off!” Growing up in Detroit in the early ‘80s, he was a shy kid who occasionally found the courage to preen, but the girls or his friends always saw through his game.
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