|
 It
was a typically Arctic winter day in Detroit, early 1995.
Inside the offices of Planet E Records, sitting across the
conference table from Carl Craig, Francisco Mora was offering
a tutorial on the 40-year evolution of African-American
electronic music. It began with Sun Ra, he claimed, and
continued with Miles Davis. “I think you’re a continuum
of that,” said Mora, a 50-ish drummer who played in Sun
Ra’s orchestra for most of the ‘70s.
“What do you mean?” asked Craig.
“This
heavy electronic sequencing and experimentation with the
synthesizer and ambient effects, that’s what I mean,” said
Mora. “It’s something that has been worked out for quite
a while. As far back as 1952, Sun Ra had already started
experimenting with electric pianos.”
At
the time, Carl “Continuum” Craig, deeply immersed in the
rigid rhythms of German Bau-house, knew nothing of Sun Ra’s
music. He had just released Landcruising (Blanco
Y Negro/Warner), a major label debut that acknowledged his
debt to Kraftwerk — and electro, perhaps Prince, too. Like
every first-wave European electronic artist and their Motor
City offspring, the crux of Craig’s young career celebrated
the age of machines. Yet more so than anyone else in Detroit,
Craig’s records portrayed one individual’s maestro-like
control over them. Landcruising’s warm and bouncy
synth strokes artfully insisted that machines, like paint,
were enslaved to human will.
This
Kraut-centric preoccupation was galaxies removed from Sun
Ra’s free-jazz interstellar noodlism, but Craig’s deficient
commercial profile did provide insight into the late legend’s
uncompromising aesthetic. When the shelf life of Landcruising
lasted as long as that of a mango, Craig concluded that
major labels were no more committed to techno than they
were to Polka. The only way to distribute his music, he
realized, was through his four-year-old Planet E label.
He had already established that the only way to manage his
career — as producer, prolific remixer and global DJ — was
to manage it himself.
Sun
Ra managed his own career and distributed his wildly errr…expressionistic
music on his own label, too. And after borrowing from Mora
a copy of Sun Ra’s “Space Probe,” Craig began viewing his
own machine-jams as a descendant of this “joyful noise’’
– albeit without the musicianship. Three months after their
initial sit-down, Craig invited Mora into the studio to
cut a track where techno and free jazz could rendezvous.
Mora, noting that Sun Ra and Craig also shared the same
birthday, accepted.
With
this career shift, Craig amended the Techno Magna Carta.
Produced in a bedroom, preferably alone, using machines,
Techno works as a kind of metaphor for mankind’s unyielding
loneliness. So if it requires living, breathing jazz cats,
or is performed live without want of voltage, well, then
it just wouldn’t be techno. Not only did this heresy equal
that of Bob Dylan plugging in, but Craig would also be obligated
to pay scale to his musicians.
 Fortunately
for Craig, heresy had been a familiar guiding principle
throughout his career. Why else would someone loop a frantic
rim-shot jazz break on to a techno track? Craig did, back
in 1992, on his Innerzone Orchestra’s “Bug in the Bass Bin.”
When played at a frenzied 45 RPM by Fabio, Grooverider and
4 Hero’s Dego, “Bug” foreshadowed the jazzy drum-n-bass
that later flowed from Goldie, Roni Size and Alex Reece,
among others.
Even after he started his dalliance with Mora and upright
bassist Rodney Whitaker, Craig continued issuing cerebral,
idiosyncratic techno albums that made memorable sunrise
soundtracks. With 1997’s More Songs About Food and Revolutionary
Art (Planet E), Craig reclaimed for Detroit techno an
electronic eccentricity that had been usurped by English
tweakers like Aphex Twin, Plaid and Squarepusher. Offering
an all-you-can-eat buffet of sounds and textures that included
trance-like 909 minimalism, flatulent rhythms, dramatic
single-note symphonies, wheezing slo-mo hip hop and a somber
anthem (“At Les”), More Songs… remains a powerful
watermark.
In some ways, so too does The Secret Tapes of Dr. Eich,
(Planet E), Craig’s 1998 Paperclip People project. Relying
more on straight-ahead 909 patterns, echo pans, collapsing
hi-hats and telegrammed build-ups and breakdowns, The
Secret Tapes resonates with Craig’s imaginative voice.
Nearly five years after Craig’s initial meeting with Mora,
and two years after Innerzone Orchestra’s live debut, Programmed
(Planet E/Astralwerks) finally hit the racks this past summer.
Sun Ra’s paint-splashing gestures find their closest approximation
on “Eruption,” where Craig Tayborn’s rudderless keyboards
oscillate with Craig’s techno chirps and squawks.
The remainder of the album resembles an experimental cookbook:
On “The Beginning of the End,” break beats, an unsettling
piano-plink, staccato violins and a vision of millennial
apocalypse recall Rza behind the boards for Wu-Tang. “Eruption”
pastes drill-press machinery to live keyboards, sequenced
parts and Mora’s drumming. The rough-hewn industrial texture
of the title track is worthy of Meat Beat Manifesto, while
War’s funky, outta’ sight “Galaxy” receives a gracious re-working
complete with piping flute. And, with re-recorded versions
of “At Les,” and “Bug in the Bass Bin,” Craig flirts with
jazz’s idea of tracks as standards.
If
nothing else, at least Programmed unites the previously
divided camps of jazz purists and technophiles: Both camps
are equally puzzled by it. But both camps should also know
that the greatest jazz records and the best Detroit techno
were both initially misunderstood and ignored upon their
release in the States. With Programmed, Carl Craig
assures us that that legacy continues.
DJ Times met up with Craig in the Astralwerks New
York office, where he spoke about changes of direction,
DJing, managing your own career, and the future of techno.
DJ Times: The direction of this album, musically,
was influenced in many ways by the input of your drummer,
Francisco Mora.
Craig:
Yeah, we hooked up through his daughter, and he was
generally just into whatever I had to say concerning the
world and Detroit, and we related in a lot of ways. He told
me about the stuff that he had done in the past, and we
listened to stuff that he had done in the past, and he was
really influencing me and opening me up to a lot of work.
DJ Times: Obviously, that includes a lot of Sun Ra
stuff, who he played with in the ‘70s. Had you ever checked
out Sun Ra before you met Francisco?
Craig: No, not really. I knew who Sun Ra was, but
my head at that time, in like 1995, was still into Kraftwerk,
because I was trying to understand as a producer some of
the things that they did, as well as some of the things
that were happening with older electronic music and funk
and stuff. So, a lot of Sun Ra, Miles, Coltrane, Donald
Byrd, all that stuff, I knew, but I wasn’t really getting
my head into it. My head was totally into something else.
 DJ
Times: Francisco told me that when you guys met, he
told you he thought you were part of this African-American,
electronic continuum? What was your reaction?
Craig:
I thought it was great because no one who’s older than I
am is into that [electronic stuff]. Francisco and I are
totally different generations – whereas Derrick May and
I are about the same generation – so it was just like, “Wow.
Some guy who was a teenager or more when I was born is into
my shit.” That’s really cool. Francisco had done work on
Music Concrete while living in Mexico City, and I had heard
some of the electronic compositions that he had done, and
they really blew my mind. It was on a totally different
level of stuff that I had heard.
DJ Times: He gave you a copy of a some Sun Ra stuff
to listen to…
Craig: “Space Probe”. He gave me a copy of “Space
Probe” and he gave me a copy of Aura, which are both
on Sun Ra’s label, Saturn Research, or El Saturn research.
And “Space Probe” was our code, it was some crazy material.
It doesn’t take one listen to go like, “Wow, this is amazing.”
It takes a listen but you have to go within the dimensions
of it. Because with some of that stuff, especially with
what Sun Ra was doing, he’s playing very randomized notes.
He’d play everything live, doing knob tweaking, and then
on some tracks he’d have a sax player come in and play a
flurry of crazy notes, and there were voices everywhere,
all kinds of nutty stuff. And from my view then, listening
to it 25 years later, it was like, “This shit sounds old.”
But then you have to get into the whole concept. It’s just
like listening to somebody play sax. You can listen to somebody
like John Coltrane, and if you’re not a sax player, you
can say, “Guys have been doing that for the last10 years
– hell, Kenny G can hold a note for 10 days or something.
So what’s special about it?” You’ve seen it so many times,
it’s just common. I knew there was something special about
[Sun Ra], but I had to get into it. I had to really delve
into it, it wasn’t a first listen, “Oh, yeah, I got it.”
I just listened and listened, took my time with it, and
it’s really out cold. It’s stuff that I can’t do, I couldn’t
even imagine doing, because he has that musicianship as
well as that whole space-age mindset of doing some different
shit.
DJ
Times: What were some of the things that you thought
you could draw from Sun Ra?
Craig: From Sun Ra, I think it’s just that “out there”
attitude more than anything. I think there’s still a lot
I can learn from Sun Ra, because Sun Ra did so much. I mean,
“Space Probe” is one out of 200 or 500 compositions.
DJ
Times: That’s the thing with Sun Ra, where do you start?
Craig: Exactly. But there is a fiend or mine, Kurt,
a friend of mine who makes records also, and he’s the big
Sun Ra collector. There’s this Sun Ra CD that was recently
compiled called the Sun Ra Singles, which is really
absurd if you think about it, and there’s some stuff on
there that is really good. I would say to anybody who’s
trying to get into Sun Ra, check that out.
DJ
Times: You recorded two versions of “At Les.” One was
on More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art, and
the other with Innerzone Orchestra. Why did you decide to
re-record that song?
Craig: When we started doing Innerzone Orchestra
live with Francisco and Rodney [Whitaker] — he was the bassist
on part of the tour in 1997 when we were a three-piece.
We were doing “Bug in the Bassbin,” “At Les,” “Desire” —
we were just doing new versions of songs that I’d done before.
Then last year, I decided not to use an upright bass, and
to use Craig Tayborn to play keys instead. We did some sessions
and during one of the sessions we did “At Les,” and Craig’s
playing was so remarkable on that, as was the vibe and the
feeling, it was definitely a song to re-present to the people
that are into it — or the people that aren’t into it. There
are people that don’t know “At Les” that would think that
it’s a techno record and they don’t want to hear no techno,
that it’s bullshit. So if they hear it as a jazz version,
then it might bring them closer to the music.
Now
I also feel, with jazz, there are standards, and with jazz
standards, you can say, “Play ‘A Train,’ or play ‘A Love
Supreme.’ ” I don’t think techno has standards for people
to play during a live set. I think the standards in techno
are more like “Strings of Life,” where you play it right
in the middle of your set and the whole crowd goes crazy
cause it’s like, “Strings of Life, oh my God, you timed
it right.” Or you bring out a classic like “Good Life” or
one of Juan’s old records, or even some of Todd Terry’s
old things, or whatever. But in a live set, there’s none
of that to be had and I wanted to bring that into focus
and show the validity of what this music is as electronic
music – not as techno, but electronic music.
DJ Times: For those two different versions of “At
Les,” describe the evolution of your drum programming.
Craig:
On the jazz mix of “At Les,” there was no drum programming.
On the original, the drum programming was done…that’s when
I was using computers and then I stopped using computers,
so I went almost a full circle when it came to making music.
I started off using a drum machine, a hard sequencer, keyboards,
etc. then I bought a Mac computer and the program that was
the big deal within the engineer’s circuit – not the artist’s
circuit so much – was Performer. It was set up like a tape
deck, basically, so you could use it real easy, and you
didn’t really have to look at the manual so much. So I started
out with the pads first, and then did the chorus on top
of it and then programmed drums on top of that.
DJ
Times: How did you program the drums?
 Craig:
Back then, my mentality of programming drums was like taking
the whole logical drummer thing and throwing it out the
window — almost in the same way that a jazz drummer took
drums and looked at reinventing it and doing something different,
rather than just being a straight 2/4 thing. So it can be
anything that’s thrown in there – of drums, samples of sounds,
samples of whatever I had in the machine at the time.
DJ Times: How did Derrick May influence your drum
programming?
Craig: Derrick has a very manic way or working, period.
Derrick feels his music in a spiritual way, but in a very
rhythmic way. When you watch him DJ, he’ll do some transforming,
and he’s cutting and he’s moving and he’s doing his thing
– that’s how he makes music. He’s into it, all over the
place. Within that context of how he was, just manic, insane,
just everywhere, that’s how he programmed drums. He never
really programmed drums that you can program in real time,
like with the MPC3000, you have the click and you just program
it. He programmed drums more based around step time and
with the 909 and 808. You know, 808s have a switch where
you can push it to the left and push the Fill button and
a fill will come in, in time, right there; you push it to
the right, push the Fill button and a different fill will
come in. So he would improvise after he did his drum programming.
So within the mix, he’s improvising, pressing added keys
for hi hat sounds or pressing the Fill button whenever he
felt it had to come in on a certain fill or changing patterns
or doing whatever. He just did it all free and it was improvised.
Whereas, I feel a lot of house and techno is not improvised
at all – except for somebody playing some gospel piano on
top. With drums, it’s always a basic kind of 2/4, like a
blues-rock, gospel based backing around disco and Latin
percussion. It doesn’t go much further than that and I think
Derrick always attempted to go beyond that and get more.
For him, drums were a composition on their own, as well
as everything else going on around it.
DJ Times: That was your introduction to programming?
Craig: Before I met Derrick I had a drum machine
that I was using. I did take a course in college. I was
in the Music Synthesis Program, which introduced me to synthesizers,
drum machines, how to record, how to use sequencers, etc.
Well, that mentality of “When you turn on a drum machine
it should be like a drummer, it shouldn’t do anything beyond
what a drummer can do in reality” — I’ve always been against
that. That’s one of the main flaws I’ve always found with
companies that make synthesizers, and drum machines and
whatever: They’ve always made the sounds to be within the
realism of what somebody who could play would do. After
the 808 and 909, the Lin drum was mainly the one that said,
“Ok, this is a real snare sound, this is really the way
a hi-hat should sound.” Where, with 808s it’s like, “OK,
this is a synthesizer, and we’ll make it sound like a hi
hat but it doesn’t sound like a hi hat.” So it’s slick,
and it has it’s own charisma, its own “This is what we can
do within our limitations.” And when those limitations went
outwards, and you had HR16, Beat Boss Dr. Rhythms, R8, and
all these machines that just had boring sounds, manufacturers
had to go back and say, “Well, hip hop people are using
808s, and techno people are using 909s, they want these
sounds, they don’t really want real sounds. If we’re going
to put real sounds in, make them so they can tweak them
and make them not sound like real sounds. Give them some
type of rope to work with it.” And that thinking all leads
to things like the Electribe. They’re now making machines
based around the DJ culture, instead of basing it around
some goofball that’s in his basement trying to make Mariah
Carey records.
DJ
Times: Which we saw with Yamaha and Roland and the distortion
effects they put into some of their gear to give it that
Chemical Brothers grunge. American techno hasn’t really
had that kind of impact. Why is that?
Craig: With techno, it’s always been about diversity
within it, to make music and change artistically within
eras before anyone can latch on to it. Just when you think
you know what’s happening with an Underground Resistance
band, UR would change. Where if you look at something like
hip house, hip house got beat with a stick before it had
to die, and that’s the thing with these sounds that are
coming from England and all these other places. People are
relating to it, music that’s being done that people can
relate to consistently, music that’s using those hard-edged
sounds like the Chemicals, Propellerheads, or Fatboy Slim
stuff. And it brings it more to a pop, commercial audience,
or at least where young kids can say, “Did you hear that
Fatboy Slim record, it sounds like something else I heard.”
And then something else is going to come out that’s just
like that. Detroit techno was never like that. Detroit techno
was always like, “You do something that’s slick and then
try and make something better the next time.” That’s the
reason we have all these monikers, and the reason why I’m
doing this Innerzone Orchestra, because I look at it being
an art and artistically for myself being able to progress.
DJ
Times: There are two hip-hop tracks on the album, “Programmed”
and “Beginning Of The End.”
Craig:
On both of those I tried to use different quantizing techniques.
With “Beginning of the End” I did a lot of things in triplets,
to get the kick drum to do certain rhythms within what it
does, for it to be hip hop-ish. It’s too fast to be hip
hop, or at least what people would think of as hip hop.
I had an idea to do something that would be an antidote
to hip hop, cause I see hip hop right now as just very Timbaland
and Sean Puffy Combs, etc. Those guys were revolutionary
within their own right of what they did, but there’s just
too much of them happening. So I wanted to do something
that said, “OK, this is the next step maybe.” I’m following
maybe a little bit of what Timbaland did, cause Timbaland
always uses different concepts behind his drum programming
— it’s almost like drum-n-bass.
DJ
Times: It’s interesting, because Timbaland says he had
no understanding of drum-n-bass at all, yet everyone in
the UK is all over his stuff, pitching it up during their
sets, playing them at 45…
Craig:
It’s either a fluke or it’s bullshit. He had to have heard
someone’s record and just thought, “This shit is too fast.”
And it might even had gone right into the back of his brain
and he went home and started messing around with it. I think
a lot of what he does, as far as his drums go, is based
around lyrics. And that’s why it sounds like that. He’s
not doing a straight thing. It’s like that Missy Elliot
thing, it’s like his drums are based around that melody
line. It’s almost as if his drums are doing a melody thing
instead of trying to hold down the straight rhythm. So it
can be a song within itself almost.
DJ Times: How did you assemble “The Beginning of
the End”?
Craig:
With “The Beginning of the End,” I sat down with the
MPC3000 and tried to work out how I could go beyond what
a lot of hip hop is doing, and take some elements of where
it has gone and just try to take it to another level, and
try to show that there is a possibility that techno and
hip hop can mix. Somebody told me a story about a West Coast
hip hop rapper who was rapping on the air, and the DJ was
speeding up the record at the same time, and the rapper
stops and says, “Hold it hold it, hold it — I don’t rap
to techno.” There’s this line that’s always drawn between
techno and hip hop, and I wanted to erase that, because
techno is a very urban thing. It started out in the streets
of Detroit, from electro, which was like Newcleus and Afrika
Baambaata, which started out in the streets of New York
and the streets of L.A., and I wanted to bring that all
together.
DJ
Times: The title track has a real rough hip hop feel
to it, very anti-Carl Craig.
Craig:
It’s more industrial. If you listen to the main 16th notes,
it’s a Moog, a little Moog-resonated sound. It was [engineer]
Dave and I – he has the Moog, I have some Prophets – and
we just sat there and made up sounds, with the DAT machine,
and with effects, with an Eventide harmonizer and some delays,
just sat there and programmed synths all day. I took home
on DAT whatever we programmed and just loaded it into my
MPC and tried to find things that I liked. So within that,
I just found little pieces of that 16th note sequence and
put it on pads and then replayed it so it was almost like
a hi-hat thing, and I just sampled some other sounds and
attempted to give it some other completely different feel
than what an industrial or techno record would be, just
to make that industrial hard-edge sound , but with some
Detroit flavor.
DJ
Times: How did you give it that roughness?
Craig: It depends on how I sample. Sometimes, I might
sample it with more EQ on it, I might sample it though an
effect, I might sample it compressed. It depends on how
it’s all put together. Most of the time I try to find sounds
that are just a little harder. You take things from break
records, you take whatever you can find and then you put
it into a melting pot until you get into the studio, and
you say, “OK I want this stuff to be hard, so you compress
the shit out of it and put some distortion on it.”
DJ
Times: Have you been using samplers from the beginning?
Craig:
Just about. First piece I had was a Prophet synthesizer
and a little sequencer, the Alesis. That was like “Neurotic
Behavior” under the name Psyche, I think it was, without
the drums.
DJ
Times: Why did you record “Neurotic Behavior” without
drums?
Craig: Because I didn’t have a drum machine [laughs].
DJ Times: That’s pretty inspirational for those folks
who are under-equipped in their studios.
Craig: Oh yeah. I was talking to somebody the other
day about obsolete equipment, and he claimed he couldn’t
do his art because his equipment was obsolete, which was
absurd to me. I didn’t grow up in a rich family, I got my
first synthesizer when I was like 18 or whatever, I wasn’t
spoiled. I wasn’t one of those guitar kids who had a $1,000
Rickenbacker at the age of 14, like “My fingers can’t touch
anything less than a $1,000 guitar.” I think that’s bullshit.
I think a lot of people use that as an excuse. For me to
progress, all I need to have is better material.
DJ Times: “Neurotic Behavior” was the track that
convinced Derrick May that you had the goods…
Craig:
One of them, yeah. There were some other things that never
came out, which I thought were finished at the time but
were just experiments.
DJ
Times: Derrick took you on the road with Rhythim is
Rhythim.
Craig: Yeah, we had worked on the remake, or remix,
of “Strings of Life” in 1989, and by 1990 I decided I no
longer wanted to work with [Derrick’s label] Transmat.
DJ
Times: How come you no longer wanted to work with Derrick?
 Craig:
I had always wanted to do something that was a little different,
every time, so I kind of knew. It’s kind of like having
a girlfriend. You have a girlfriend in high school, and
some guys think, “I’ll be with her for the rest of my life,”
while others are like, “She’s OK, but it’s time to move
on. There are more things to do out there in the world and
I just have to explore it.” I had this thing as a kid about
Warner Bros and Sire, because most of the stuff that we
listened to – like Kraftwerk, The B-52s, Funkadelic, Yaz
— was all through Warners for some reason. I had this aspiration
– I wanted to be on Warner Bros.
DJ
Times: And you got the chance, although briefly, to
live that dream with the Landcruising record. In
retrospect, what did that experience teach you about major
label politics?
Craig:
Jeff Travis, the person who was behind Blanco Y Negro, was
actually the guy who started Rough Trade – which had the
Smiths and some other cool groups. I think Jeff had a vision
that the other people at Warner didn’t have. And I think
that music is so different now in the 90s than labels like
Warner at that time, who we thought were looking ahead –
which at the time they were, putting out Talking Heads when
they weren’t making pop records. They had a different viewpoint,
where now I think they’re totally different. I think the
really large majors who are going through these mergers,
their idealism isn’t about making art and building art.
Their whole idealism is the fact that Hanson sold X amount
of copies and they need another Hanson.
DJ
Times: That was your rude introduction to the politics
of music…
Craig: I thought watching the machine work was actually
kind of cool, until I saw them doing nothing with my record.
DJ
Times: Nothing, meaning there were no promo people making
phone calls…
Craig:
Their whole view of it — and I hate to say this about a
lot of English labels — when they look at somebody with
a name, they look at promoting them only on the basis of
their name, on the basis of what they can get in the media
for it. So they’re not even trying to develop stories, they’re
just saying, “OK this guy Roger Sanchez is a big name, he’s
going to get a lot of press. That’s what we’re going to
do, we’re going to make a press-driven record. And after
that, if it happens, then we’ll make it into a pop record.”
But if it doesn’t fly, they’re like, “We can’t do shit with
it.” In my situation, [retailer] Phat Kat Records was in
business at the time, and they wanted [to sell my] record,
and I was like, “Phat Kat has to get this record.” And they
weren’t interested in selling to independent stores, they
were only interested in selling to chain stores. They didn’t
understand this music is about the mom-pop indies.
DJ
Times: Detroit has a reputation for being musically
creative, but business-wise there’s a lot to be desired.
Craig:
I think it has something to do with artists who like to
be creative, because they also like to be coddled. So they
put their trust in someone who claim to be their friends
or hangers-on who are supposed to do things but don’t do
it, who take your money. And for me, I come from a family
of skeptics, and that kind of rubbed off on me. I have agents
that I deal with but I still manage myself. And there are
mistakes I’m going to make, but I’d rather be the one making
those mistakes, rather than someone else. And also in Detroit,
there’s not enough people who are qualified enough to be
managers. Everyone’s kinda’ wingin’ it. So fuck it, it’s
my career, why not take the risk with my own career rather
than someone else fucking it up?
DJ Times: What kind of mistakes have you made in
managing your own career?
Craig:
Every day there always something. Like, if I don’t book
a ticket on time, it’ll come back to bite me because it
will be double the price.
DJ Times: What are some cost-cutting tactics one
can use who wishes to run their own label and manage their
own career?
Craig:
For one, fly coach all the time, get a platinum card
and then you can fly first-class for coach price. That’s
a big one. Also, never go the easy route. For instance,
if you try the easy route for making records, like going
through a brokerage like DiscMakers or something like that,
it always winds up being more expensive to manufacture your
records. It’s always better to find your own record-pressing
plant, your own labels done at a place that does labels,
spec out your own jacket manufacturer, spec out your own
mastering engineer, because you can control the quality
of what’s going to happen. With a brokerage firm, you can
tell them that [whatever they did] is fucked up, they’ll
re-do it, and they’ll scatter and get everything together,
but you’re paying a lot of money to get it done if it’s
not right.
DJ
Times: How many folks do you employ at Planet E?
Craig: Including me, we have six. There’s five full
timers, and interns do stuff, too.
DJ
Times: Is payroll your biggest operating expense?
Craig:
Yeah. Like I have Peter [Wohelski] as my label manager,
and you have to pay someone to manage your label because
I couldn’t do it anymore. I was spending too much time doing
label stuff.
DJ
Times: When do you know you’re not doing enough artist
stuff, and when do you know you’re not doing enough label
stuff?
 Craig:
When you’re doing too much label stuff, you’re saying, “I
used to make music.” When people ask you, “What do you do,”
you say, “I run a label, but I used to make music.” At that
point, stop doing the label, go back to making music. But
it also depends on what you’re better at. I don’t know which
one I’m better at – I think I’m better at making music because
I can be by myself. Whereas, with running the label, there’s
always this interaction that has to happen. I do get off
on running the label. At the same time, when you’re doing
too much artistic stuff and not enough of the label, that’s
when people start running away with your money. That’s why
my cousin runs distribution and my father runs the accounting,
and Hannah my wife does press and art stuff.
DJ
Times: You were making music before you started DJing,
but your DJing probably made you more popular than your
music.
Craig:
Yeah, after people starting recognizing my records, then
DJing gigs started coming in.
DJ
Times: Most DJs do make more money once their records
get out there.
Craig:
But that doesn’t mean that DJs who can’t make records should
go out there and make records. I don’t think they should.
I think the best DJs are those who don’t worry about the
triviality of making a Basic Channel cover version – which
is what a lot of DJs do just to get out there. All these
Basic Channel records – Basic Channel makes the best ones.
All these records that sound like Derrick May back in the
day – Derrick May made the best ones. You have the innovator
and then you have the followers. I remember Ron Hardy, from
the Music Box in Chicago. People were telling me I had to
check him out. And Ron Hardy didn’t really make any records.
Ron Hardy just edited, and he did the best edits of anybody
I’d ever heard before. I mean, Kevorkian’s bad, but Ron
Hardy would take disco records and correct them in some
way so that he could mix them, but also so that they would
be so much different from everybody else’s shit. I think
that’s what people aren’t doing now. They’re not trying
to be a DJ and make their shit so far on top of everybody
else’s shit by doing something special to whatever the hot
records are. They’re just making middle of the road tracks
and playing them, and people are hiring them because they
made a record and that’s how they get on. DJ Whoever, who
made “Bounce My Box or whatever,” yeah, he’s getting gigs
cause he’s got a record out. But as an artist, I really
don’t see the art in that. I see art in being a bad ass
DJ who scratches some shit up, or mixes better than Humphries
or Roger Sanchez. Try to make yourself individual. As an
artist, that’s what I’ve always tried to do and that’s why
I’m always trying different types of music.
DJ
Times: How does one go from being a solitary techno
producer in the studio to engaging with jazz cats? You’re
really going from an uncompromising situation to a compromising
one.
Craig:
I kind of realized that what I was doing was a future jazz
type of thing, but I didn’t realize that’s what it was.
So it was kind of a logical progression. Like, how “Desire”
was more of a blues thing than a techno thing, or “Bug”
is more jazz than techno. It’s just a progression, going
to the next step. I remember the first interview that I
ever did, back in 1989, I mentioned that my idols at the
time were Prince and Quincy Jones. Quincy Jones is a producer
in the real sense of what a producer is, and I’m trying
to expand my horizons to become a better producer, other
than a bedroom producer.
DJ Times: So what kind of challenges are presented
when you go from the bedroom to the studio?
Craig: With me, having employees, I’ve learned to
sort of give instructions in a creative way — as well as
having artists on my label. You have to deal with personalities
and creativity, rather than coming out like a Gestapo of
the bedroom and saying, “Well the computer played this perfectly,
how come you can’t?’
DJ
Times: In the studio, Francisco plays some stuff and
you do what to it?
Craig:
With “At Les,” for instance, Craig recorded a [keyboard]
fill first, then Francisco played off that, and he played
it perfectly. “Bug” was similar, where Francisco and Rodney,
being that was the first track they did with me, they thought
it was kind of simplistic, so they thought they could cut
it quickly. They came in and it wouldn’t cut to the click
correctly, so I had to get Francisco to play by himself
with something I had on tape, and then I had to get Rodney
to come back in. On “Basic Math,” we’re all playing together.
In “Eruption,” I start with the sequence line, and I didn’t
put a click in there on purpose because I wanted it to go
free. And with it going free, it didn’t have any basis,
so I listened, with an engineer, to what Francisco did.
The engineer sampled parts and was like, “What do you think
of this?” and I would say, “Sample that!” and then it was
looped, and then we added a click track to it and then looped
it onto it. It was the same drum line for 15 minutes, but
everything going on around it makes it feel like it’s progressing.
DJ
Times: Finally, why did you choose to call the record
“Programmed”?
Craig:
I wanted to call it programmed because, basically, I’m programming
these guys. I’m sampling them, and cutting them up. Also,
it’s just the concept of how life is, we’re getting programmed
all the time – by the media, everything that’s out there,
by Nike, by AT&T.
Copyright
© 1999 DJ Times Magazine
TESTA
Communications Publishing
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