In a leafy neighbourhood just outside the city limits, Detroit techno DJ and producer Carl Craig sits before a vast bank of knobs in his home studio. A sticker on a monitor reads “DESTROY THIS SPEAKER”; another commands, “MAKE ROOM FOR THAT BOOM”. Behind his durag and funky glasses, Craig cuts an understated figure. But leaving the stage after a set, he says, feels like walking away from battle.
“Sometimes the music keeps playing in my head just for days,” says Craig, who is due to headline the city’s Movement Music Festival the day after we meet. “When I perform with Jon [Dixon, jazz keyboardist] tomorrow, or with Moritz von Oswald or Francesco Tristano, there would be a part where we just felt free. Anything came. We would call it a moment. An hour set might have five moments. Then it’s a changeover, and then we try to find the moment again.” What he’s after is the improvisatory freedom of his idol, Miles Davis.
Craig, 55, is less interested in instant gratification or in performing for social media viewers. “What they see in that little 30 seconds of Travis Scott or Drake or whoever — they see the crowd is all moving and they want that 30 seconds to be a whole hour,” he says. “It takes a lot for that to be an hour. You have to have peaks and valleys.”
A key figure in what’s known as Detroit techno’s second wave, Craig studied and collaborated with the genre’s founders and drew from his traditional musical education to advance the sound. He’s credited with bringing a jazz sensibility that summoned a new emotional dimension in machine music: lyrical even without words. In Detroit, he’s often described as an ambassador renowned for his ability to translate techno across cultural spheres.
He’s been nominated for a Grammy, performed at Carnegie Hall and released an album with Tristano, Versus, that adapted some of his best-known tracks for the symphony. Now he is the subject of a new documentary, Desire: The Carl Craig Story, premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York on June 12. The magic of Craig’s music is “based in . . . a future aspect”, says the late music producer John Juan Mendez, aka Silent Servant, in the film.
“I’ve always seen Carl as being kind of the face of Detroit techno,” says curator and theorist DeForrest Brown, Jr. “Even as he’s playing with orchestras he’s always trying to remind people where the music came from.”
The Movement festival itself encapsulates this ambition. In downtown Hart Plaza, bass throbs from a catacomb of garages and an illuminated fountain resembles a UFO tractor beam. Inaugurated in 2000 as the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, it was among the first US festivals to focus on dance music. Craig was its original curator, before being publicly dismissed after a falling-out with producers. “The first year was such a big success that everybody’s heads were stuck up their asses,” he says. “I’m glad that there was a lot of support for me and I’m even happier that the festival survived.”
That first year, Craig recalls, “I had a guy in the basement making sound with electric saws and electric tools and stuff like that. I really wanted it to be something that was going to push the boundaries of what people thought electronic music was.”
The festival’s current organisers have retained Craig’s mission to enshrine Detroit as techno’s rightful home. But the scene never quite found the same popular traction in the US as in Europe: Berlin’s thriving techno scene recently received Unesco World Heritage status, and Frankfurt is home to a techno museum. These efforts have rankled the Detroit community. Here, techno’s creators are known as the Belleville Three: Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson and Craig’s mentor, Derrick May.
Though he’s passionate about Movement, Craig waxes nostalgic for an earlier, looser era of electronic-music gatherings. “Festivals give a great reason for politicians to say why clubs should close down,” he says: local authorities often prefer a cookie-cutter corporate event that is less likely to draw noise complaints. “It’s not how it felt when I first started going to festivals, because festivals for electronic music were actually raves first, highly illegal raves.”
At this stage of his career, Craig says, he’s interested in demystifying the life of a techno musician. For him, that includes not just the challenges of touring but of tinnitus. Already there are times when the phantom tones interfere with his work; he fears the day he might become permanently impaired.
Covid became a trial run for that eventuality. “It was a situation when the music stops, when the business stops,” he says. “How do you make your money? How do you do anything?” In 2020, he pivoted to fine arts with Party/After-Party, an installation that turned the basement of New York’s Dia Beacon museum into a multisensory evocation of the circadian cycle of the professional DJ.
There is one topic Craig won’t discuss: allegations of sexual misconduct against his mentor, Derrick May, as reported by journalist Annabel Ross in 2020-21. May is “like my brother”, Craig says, but on this subject — and Ross’s complaint that Craig retaliated by blocking her from covering Movement — he declines to comment. The real scourge, he believes, is online commentary from outsiders. (In a statement to the FT for this piece, May said that he has “never been arrested on any misdemeanor or felony arrest, nor charged, nor appeared at any deposition(s) nor been a defendant in any civil judgement(s)”.)
“The entire Detroit community is learning from this lesson with Derrick May, maybe years later,” says DeForrest Brown, Jr. “There’s been a real understanding of how they are represented in a global way that maybe wasn’t as transparent before.” Among its founding artists, “I think there’s an ‘us vs them’ mentality”: accustomed to being on the back foot, Detroit’s techno originators have found further criticism difficult to accept.
As Craig takes the stage the following night, a thunking 4/4 beat bleeds over from Bosnian-German DJ Solomun on the opposite stage. “This is not an EDM festival,” Craig announces to cheers from his crowd: true-blue fans come to techno for its soulful subtlety, not a monster bass drop. As usual, he makes a point to credit each of the Belleville Three by name (though applause for May feels somewhat muted). Then he switches off the mic, and the synths begin to build.
‘Desire’ screens June 12-15, tribecafilm.com
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