Carl Craig - ’More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art’
No. 25 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
“Revolutionary art is not determined by its avant-garde content;
nor its formal or technical trickery, its interpretation or its reality, or its verisimilitude, but, rather, by how much it revolutionizes our thinking and imagination; overturning our preconceptions, bias and prejudice and inspiring us to change ourselves and the world…” — Jeff Sawell for Planet E, 1997
The scan lines come in as clear as day on a green tinted screen to nowhere. Or “nowhere” in the minds of the many who imagined bleak beauty when they heard the mourning sounds of Carl Craig’s so-called “Detroit” techno. Born in the Motor City as it retreated into ruin while the gleaming glass towers of carmakers cut into the grey skies, Craig’s magnum opus, More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art, was contrastive music at its finest, like the ghostly words on its album cover flickering inside an old cathode ray TV, the static of a faint signal flashing back into focus.
The album’s message about trickery and reality, about how great revolutionary art revolutionizes our moral imagination and how we think and how we live in the world, how we perceive truth, invoked Gil-Scott Heron’s 1974 album, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, backing up Heron’s insinuation with one of Craig’s best songs, the edgy ‘Televised Green Smoke.’ Through sound alone, it conjured a dust devil of the mind, a green storm, its Kurzweil K-2000 synthesizer bass line ravaging space and time, its melodic shards of light waking the wayward life to a wide open sky. Writing for The Face magazine in early 1997, the British techno writer Tim Barr flew to Detroit to answer some of the mysteries surrounding that smoke, searching for its fire…
“It stands on the edge of an oddly un-square square, not far away from two of Detroit’s most significant monuments to the future,” Barr wrote. “To the east, the enormous glittering towers of the Renaissance Center reach defiantly into the sky over the Detroit River. In the opposite direction, over on Broadway, a deserted shop-front marks all that is left of the Music Institute, the legendary club where…the city’s kids switched on to a whole new dance sound. It seems appropriate that Carl Craig has chosen to locate the offices of his record company…in a building midway between these two landmarks. A symbol, perhaps, of his affinity with both and yet his allegiance to neither.” So, like green smoke, he was a special kind of specter.
For he was essentially in a category to himself. He was hard to pin down because his music backflips through space and time. Where others see the lines of a box in which to check their careers, he walks right past them and onto the next town, planet, galaxy or universe. He’s the wandering chameleon and Detroit techno’s restless soul. And what’s the sound of a renaissance man is best described as the essence of artistic freedom. Calling him Detroit’s “boy genius,” the writer Kodwo Eshun profiled his application of that freedom for i-D magazine in 1995 — "I don't want to alienate anybody,” Craig told him. “But when I listened to music, there were no barriers.”
Tellingly, Craig evoked the famous quote by his mentor Derrick May, oft repeated, about Kraftwerk and Funkadelic being stuck in an elevator together with nothing but a sequencer between them, as the very definition of techno: “No-one said you couldn’t listen to Michael Jackson after Kraftwerk," he told Eshun. Younger than May and the early techno legends — Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Eddie Flashin’ Fowlkes, Jeff Mills, Mad Mike Banks, and others — Jackson’s Thriller probably shaped Craig more than it did his older peers. The flashiness, the skip across genres, the Quincy Jones tasteful touches, all the extraordinary dance moves, taught Craig perhaps how to moonwalk in people’s heads, and critically, how to outstrip musical definitions.*
For from an early age he was an outlier. He stayed up past his bedtime listening to WGPR Detroit’s Electrifyin’ Mojo or watching Saturday Night Live, transfixed by the live performances of new wave acts like the Talking Heads and Devo. His older sister took him to visit the Windy City when he was a pre-teen, picking up hot mixtapes of synth pop, new wave, dark disco and electro funk — the DNA of Chicago house. At only 13, he went to Ron Hardy‘s legendary Music Box — where he met Frankie Knuckles and witnessed the birth of the modern DJ. As a teen he apprenticed with May, learning from the man who helped set Detroit on what Barr long called its “romantic drift.”
But it had all started at an even earlier age, when his older brother played him Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy. “They were funky,” he told The Wire’s Ken Hollings in 1999. “They had this crazy kind of instigative funk which wasn’t like real funk. But the way in which all the sounds came together was just bad. So that album has haunted me for years.” Songs like ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ and ‘No Quarter’ carry that deepening range of longing and determination that one can hear haunting Craig’s evolving musical adventurism throughout his career. You can even hear some of ‘Televised Green Smoke’ and its gritty grind in the heavy guitar of ‘No Quarter.’
The same can be said for another broody, bluesy highlight, the album’s ‘Goodbye World,’ with its simultaneous classical atmosphere, almost Germanic in spirit with its moody, heavy chords, evoking the ghosts of Beethoven and Wagner. And like on his ‘Televised Green Smoke,’ on ‘Goodbye World,’ you hear the intense wailing highs on top of deeper vibes, a little Jimmy Page as it were — or even Prince, who Craig also worshipped, the electric guitar a fierce lightning strike in their hands. “And Zappa's Zoot Allures was one I was really dope on,” Craig told Hollings. “There were a lot of funk records that used guitars, like The Isley Brothers, you know?" Frank Zappa’s incendiary virtuosity on songs like ‘Black Napkins,’ and Page or Prince’s elastic intensity, on songs like Led Zeppelin’s ‘When the Levee Breaks’ and Prince’s revolutionizing ‘Let’s Go Crazy,’ haunt Craig’s every instigative techno note.
As Barr reported in his Making Music profile, “I’m just trying to take the music further…” Craig told him on the same trip Barr took for The Face. It’s not just that he abstracted these timeless influences into his melodic strikes and his manic grooves, it’s that he was taking forward a timeless attitude — one of defiance as well as a kind of instrumental incandescence. Like Atkins before him, Craig loved the guitar and he dreamed of being Prince, who had in turn been inspired by Sly and the Family Stone, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and George Clinton. You can hear Prince’s ‘When You Were Mine’ in ‘Televised Green Smoke’ and ‘Goodbye World’ too, the urgency, propulsion, and slightly off-kilter swing, the stabs and frets. And yes, on the meandering squeals on classic Isley Brothers songs like ‘Voyage to Atlantis.’
“There have been so many revolutions that have not been televised,” Craig told Hollings. “Revolutions in music that have never been acknowledged. As you can see from Gil Scott-Heron or Sun Ra or George Clinton, there are a lot of brothers out there who think beyond shit, and they’re not scared to admit that. Whereas within a lot of Black music, unfortunately, a lot of people are really reserved…Why can’t someone come out with, like, a space suit on? On roller skates or green fatigues…Some big, sparkly sequined Bootsy Collins type platforms that…make 'em seven feet tall!” Confusingly though, Craig was also in many ways far more subdued; his music ricocheted between the highly expressive and the highly reflective — of the quintessential romantic — in the drift of dreams and the static of machines.
That is, More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art is not the Scott-Heron revolution, or the Sun Ra jazz trip into oblivion, nor the Clinton mothership connection, but rather a kind of radical psychical television. It’s where a more personal revolution can happen; tuning out of static and into the tragic and the elegiac and the fantastic; it’s a thriller, but for the true techno believer, the kind willing to brave the winds of Detroit in the form of cold hard emotions and synthesizer shivers, and yet holding steady with the lantern, the robot dogs barking: the futuristic sound of escaping. America for all its wealth and progression was still for many a prison — the old perennial question is can we uphold a higher idealism? Turn on the television…
The TV signals crossed at first. One ran down the antennae. And then it shot through a vacuum of space from a cathode ray tube onto the phosphorous coating on the convex greenish screen of TV sets across the nation — a telepathic vision. Other signals were out there in a sea of radio waves — telecommunications between cities and TV stations — broadcast and transmitted, video raster-scanned by the tube’s electron beams exciting the phosphor, running in horizontal scan lines and then moving downward, creating a succession of ignited moving images, and then repeating again and again, changing with each frame, a shared grand illusion.
It was not real. We were not there. Or were we? It was a new there — a new place, where new revolutions could happen or could also be wiped from our attention. What came into focus as the electrons excited the phosphor screen, on the curve of that TV glass, as a young Craig stared on, was a spinning disco ball with a video graphics title overlaid on its glittering surface: The Scene. It was a Michigan-based TV show, that modeled itself on the national dance program Soul Train but focused on local talent like A Number Of Names and Felix & Jarvis, the camera capturing dressed up, high fashion clubbers riding the funky and futuristic machine rhythms of the Motor City, including new wave songs like ‘I.O.U.’ by Freez and DJ mixes by a young Jeff Mills.
Sights of beautiful Black people, moving to the sounds of tomorrow, went hand in hand with the freeform radio shows of Mojo, Mills (“The Wizard”), and May, whose Street Beat techno, house and new wave format on WJLB reached Craig while he was a student at Cooley High in Detroit’s west side. May would be instrumental as mentor and instigator, pushing Craig hard while he opened doors for him at the same time. Joining May on a European tour, he spent his days off at R&S Record’s recording studio in Ghent, Belgium, producing his first release, Crack Down, on May’s own Transmat Records, a single of singular vision, including the ebullient romance of ‘Crack Down,’ a lassoing guitar riff entrancing the mind, body, and soul, sawing contemplation into slices of groove with portals into fractal liquid movements.
What followed was one of the most ambitious and extraordinary bursts of raw creativity in the history of techno. “When I work I just feel shit out,” Craig told Philip Sherburne for The Wire in 2008. “Sometimes when I’m feeling it out, it doesn’t work and sometimes it does work, and sometimes if it is out of tune, it’s kinda cool if it’s out of tune, and sometimes if it’s perfectly in tune, it sucks.” Inspired by early techno work like May’s future bebop classic, ‘Nude Photo,’ and Suburban Knight’s sneaking and lurking prowler, ‘The Groove,’ both released in 1987, Craig was searching for that perfect balance of avant-garde and avant-smooth: abstract, slightly weird, even classical at times, and yet always sexy, gritty, surprising, and down to earth.*
That experimental intuition has led to some of the most assured and influential electronic compositions and remixes of all time: ‘Neurotic Behavior’ as Psyche, ‘Bug in the Bass Bin’ as Innerzone Orchestra, ‘Chicken Noodle Soup’ as BFC, ‘Microlovr’ and ‘Desire’ as 69, ‘Throw’ as Paperclip People, his remix of Tori Amos’ ‘God,’ and on and on. And like two finely tuned TV antennae, his instincts have always been pitched to the unexpected. “I didn’t ever try to copy anyone else,” Craig told Barr in his Making Music profile, arguing for creative independence. “That would’ve been missing the point. That’s not what techno is about and it isn’t what my music is about…”
What it was about was artistic truth — a new there where artists could take an uncompromising journey into the heart of sound and music itself. After Crack Down, Craig released Evolution, an extended play that included the cosmic, rattling ‘Galaxy,’ its incessant snares and woozy synths showing off a knack for both percussive edge and melodic calm. It’s something he would tilt just so, on the groundbreaking 4 Jazz Funk Classics E.P. as 69, the first release on his own Planet E Communications label. Released in 1991, it helped kickstart the ‘90s obsession with grainy vinyl samples as textures, like sand rubbing away the divide between different times — ‘My Machine’ patiently building with its layered acoustic drum loops, before dropping into a deep echoic groove, followed by the hazy reggae chants from Inner Circle’s ‘Groovin’ In Love’ from 1976 — helping inspire Basic Channel’s dub-techno Berlin excursions.
That same year, under the Paperclip People alias, he released the E.P. Oscillator - Electronic Flirtation Device, which featured the astonishing ‘Paper Clip Man.’ Its rough samples again concussed the mind into the now, infectious disco-electro racing and running under big distortion riffs, dropping onto the groove like bombs from above, pouring at divine intervals onto Craig’s hypnosis, like 8-bit acid from Zeus’s dipper; video game-like consciousness but also a drift into turntable dreams, here was an artist on fire, lobbing one thunderbolt after another. The next year he struck again, with ‘Nitwit’ as Shop, flickering and flashing over brainwaves like an approaching lightning storm sending messages down into the earth; and of course Innerzone Orchestra’s ‘Bug in the Bass Bin,’ its wave-breaks influencing UK drum ‘n’ bass.
“In music it’s very important to walk your own line,” May told Barr in that same 1997 Making Music story, reminiscing about how he first met Craig, who showed up on his doorstep with a beat-less mix of his ‘Neurotic Behavior’ on cassette. Craig didn't have a drum machine then. “The first time I met him I could tell Carl Craig had something special and had the ability to do something unique….Carl has always stayed hungry and that’s what makes you the shit.” Having put aside the electric guitar, the year before he met May, he was dropping down to the metal of techno’s circuit board.
Like a derecho on the landscape, Craig had shaken up the Transatlantic dance. Images of the future came in flashes and waves, jittering and ghosting. Landcruising arrived in 1995 on the heels of more lightning strikes, including ‘Throw’ — which set off a new revolution in epic filter-disco house — and ‘Desire’ — which haunted with Craig’s beautifully emotive and heart-wrenching synth playing, and that many later described as the sound of machines crying; not by Craig scaring, but by caring.**
“That was a good time,” Craig recalled to Barr. “Nobody had expectations that I conform in a certain way; no-one was asking me to sound like anyone else. At heart, I was just making music for myself. Even now I always think that’s the best way to be — when you have complete freedom just to trip out and experiment and do whatever it is you want to do.” It is with that spirit that he wrote all of his albums. It is what carried him through less than ideal situations and setups. When he recorded many of his underground classics, he was working out of his parents’ basement. Or later on, producing out of his apartment looking over the “fast-moving” Detroit river.
For years he ran all his gear through a battered Electro-Voice stage mixer — it whispered and grumbled and fizzed with interference as he ran his instruments through its copper wire transformers, capacitors and circuits. “It had a real static problem,” he explained to Barr. “I used to have to tap on it to get it to stop making noise.” Like the stacked, polyrhythmic Xerox machines at his old copy job, the quirky and temperamental Electro-Voice mixer pushed Craig to improvise and to listen more closely to the deeper rhythms around him. It was part of his music’s charm, the down-to-earth reality and trickery of his lived artistry. You can hear it in More Songs About Food And Revolutionary Art’s opening chapter: the sweeping synth dust of the intro ‘Es.30,’ the striding daze, then rise, of ‘Televised Green Smoke,’ and the dirge-like ‘Goodbye World,’ followed by the radio mumbling of ‘Alien Talk,’ and the red siren melancholia of ‘Red Lights,’ its almost crinkling celesta notes playing a mournful melody to the crime scene of a street murder or a police encounter gone awry.
It’s a difficult first act — “a powerful electronic dust storm sweeping through the world’s communication channels,” wrote Hollings in his feature on Craig. “Television voices are scrambled into a malevolent approximation, of chattering extraterrestrials on ‘Alien Talk,’ while ‘Act 2’ features the entire opening sequence from Landcruising masked by a wiry, incessant keyboard loop.” Landcruising, which was released two years before More Songs About Food And Revolutionary Art, was envisioned as a continuation of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, a grand tour of the “land,” a roadmap into tomorrow. Gorgeous pulsing tunes like the opening ‘Mind of a Machine,’ and restlessness intoned with Craig’s uncommon grace on ‘Science Fiction,’ all demonstrated an imagination that rejoiced in criss-crossing borderlands.
Barr described it as “glittering widescreen productions” that hinted at a new boundless continent of sound on tracks like the hopeful ‘A Wonderful Life’ and the frenetically exciting ‘Einbahn’ — “inside the gleaming electronics,” he wrote, “lay the future of techno.” Many Craig fans might mark Landcruising as their favorite, but the future of techno wouldn’t arrive until More Songs About Food And Revolutionary Art. Less nostalgic and more individualistic, Craig’s third album — Paperclip People’s The Secret Tapes of Dr. Eich also preceded it — was entirely alien and far different than “intelligent dance music” or other “second wave” Detroit techno statements, even though it traversed and interacted with similar territories, timbres and strategies.
While Landcruising averred the synthesizer’s connection to the electric guitar — ‘Science Fiction’ featured Craig’s own guitar chops — More Songs About Food And Revolutionary Art was revolutionary because it took those instincts and that visceral human touch that can be heard throughout Craig’s career, but then somehow turned it all inside out, like a machine that has taken off its shell and is pouring its heart out. It is the sound of humanity running through circuit boards and microchips, half reimagined as robots and factory bots, as shadows on rainy streets, as the ghostly images on the green television screen, and the spaces in between words, as much as the glowing phosphor letters lit up by electron beams, the new there inside architects’ dreams.
“Located firmly at the project’s center was Craig’s concept of revolutionary art,” wrote Hollings, “one that has nothing to do with formal preoccupations but rejoices instead in the overturning of received opinion.” Named after the Talking Heads’ classic 1978 album, More Songs About Buildings And Food, Craig’s answer to the art-rock punk funk that transformed the band’s sense of alienation into new wave sophistication, was to create the sound of cybernetic cities and buildings and even food in a way. More Songs About Food And Revolutionary Art feels tangible and digestible even though hearing its songs is like tasting foreign food for the first time. Until one carefully listens to what is going on, every corner and bite tests one’s acumen.
Among the artists that Craig considered capable of effecting a change of such consciousness was architect Antonin Gaudi, whose biomorphic art nouveau buildings moved him greatly. “He runs Barcelona,” he told Hollings. “His structures are the most dominant ones in Barcelona, and the amazing thing is, he was doing that at the turn of the century. So far beyond, yet very archaic in what he was doing.” He listed the Watts Towers of Los Angeles as also inspiring in its own way, and the tireless work of Detroit artist Tyree Guyton, who painted polka dots on derelict homes, and pinned colorful stuffed animals on abandoned buildings, throughout his hometown and beyond.
It was the music of a new civilization. Not one limited by borders, but also not without a sense of boundaries or the urban. It was city and country and cosmos. The second act of the album was Craig’s tour de force. The first act scrambled the signals but what followed was the fire — the heat, the light, his soul. It shifts with ‘Dreamland,’ a timeless introspection behind city windows, raindrops beading and streaking down the glass. Here is the legend of Craig sealed and delivered immaculate and for the ages to behold and dream. Not just yonder or beyond, but ever the here and now.
“The night sky over Detroit is a curiously iridescent blue-green colour. It’s clearly visible on a late night flight into Metro airport when the entire atmosphere above the city seems suffused with an extra-terrestrial glow — as if the plane has shifted through a rip in the space-time continuum,” wrote Barr, who was coming in to land in what he daydreamed was an “alien metropolis” from the future: ‘Dreamland’ is followed by ‘Butterfly,’ a gentle piano echoing Chicago house legend Larry Heard, a summer nocturnal glide into a lepidopteran swarm in a concrete lot overgrown with wild bergamot and milkweed, turning blighted city blocks into meadows of renewal.
A new here — ‘Dominas’ trips out to cut-up voice samples, looped like a scratched record. The tension builds until long breaths of warmth blow over the surface; it feels like you’re wading into shallow water before it stuns again, electric chords and faint horns flickering off the shoreline of Detroit, on Belle Isle Beach or north on Lake St. Clair. A “lady” in control, it is one of Craig’s most beloved songs, its driving pulse a consolation as well as an invitation to a more personal transformation — a joyous realization that time is just an illusion, and in the jazz of life the secret to any real liberation is the relinquishing of control to the young, who will rediscover truth.
And then, ‘At Les.’ A classic ambient drift through clusters of ghostly tones and skeletal syncopation, it forever falls into a well of quiet within. Once dubbed by critic Simon Reynolds as the possible apotheosis of ’90s Detroit techno, it was a gleaming reminder of techno’s original destiny. “Urban soul,” is how Craig described the album. “It’s my ultimate album. Everything I love, everything I can listen to a hundred million times, is on there.” And ‘At Les’ is at the heart of it. It shimmers. It cascades. It goes here and it goes there. It breaks up. It falls off. It corrects. It accelerates. It rests.
The atlas to Craig’s global vision is that, in many ways, like ‘At Les,’ it has none. “I believe my music isn’t techno or jazz,” he told Barr for The Face. “I feel as though it is nothing. It has elements of many styles. It has ingredients of jazz, techno, orchestral and soul without being only one.” As esoteric as always, but also emotionally direct, some have long believed that ‘At Les’ refers to the eclectic Belgian record label Les Disques du Crépuscule, translated as “The Records of Twilight” in English. No one really knows and Craig has never said, but the mystery of its title fits the music.
“It’s a difficult record to digest, but more deserving of Jeff Mills‘ oft-quoted tag concerning techno being something you’ve never heard before than any techno record of the ’90s,” the critic John Bush rightly proposed. Around every corner is a sly poetic surprise and a thrilling sense of the impossible — a running stop into shimmers in the darkness: the opening ambient gusts of ‘Es.30’ give way to the roly poly groove of ‘Televised Green Smoke,’ both as spacious as they are present; ‘Goodbye World’ quivers under a baleful moon in a Tangerine Dream. ‘Red Lights’ sparkles in rain.
On the other side of ‘At Les’ is ‘Suspiria,’ the sound of robots smithing robots it seems, harkening back to Craig’s 1991 record, No More Words — the first released under his own name — while the Kraftwerkian ‘As Time Goes By (Sitting Under A Tree)’ cruises as a mystic night drive, its headlights catching deer in its winding turns. And yet the heart of the album is ‘Dreamland’ and ‘Butterfly,’ bisected by ‘Act 2,’ and ‘Dominas’ and ‘At Les’ — a quartet of received opinions — of conventions — overturned.***
As the new overturns the old, artists like Craig and Gaudi connect us to the ancient and beyond, so that we can more wisely receive the newest revolutions in thought. In the late 20th century, the new digital order emerged, and in part through techno and Craig’s work, the chaos of that shift, as it challenged the old order, was both exciting and uplifting. But the darkness that More Songs About Food And Revolutionary Art also so clearly received and expressed, also underlined a multigenerational contradiction: technology does not actually make us more equal or better.
No, people do. People must nurture peace among each other. And music can communicate that charter when it’s in the right hands. Which is why ‘Frustration,’ the highpoint of the album’s third act and its climax, so perfectly fits the human questions that Craig so often asks. “‘Frustration’ dates from around the time when Derrick and I were still working together, around ‘90 or ‘91,” Craig recalled of its heady genesis. “It was very difficult because there were so many people making demands on Derrick’s time that he would get really upset. We’d sit there and by the time we could actually get to work on something, it would be three o’clock in the morning…”
“So it was a strange kind of vibe,” Craig continued, remembering years, how that tension played into the song’s earnest melodicism: “I asked Derrick what we should call it and he said, ‘Frustration, because I’m frustrated.’ He was just kidding, but I kept it as that and I think he was a little upset about that,” he explained, it taking them five years to complete, to refocus May back on its mission, “because he likes those real ‘Kaotic Harmony: This Is Some Beyond Shit’ kind of titles. But I’ve always felt very earthly, and that frustration was a very human thing, and it came right into play through most of our working relationship together.”
Driving home the power of More Songs About Food And Revolutionary Art, Craig and May’s achingly beautiful ‘Frustration’ stretches the emotions, like molten metal, May’s veering between edge and calm — tears and tatters like drifty clouds lit by city lights — making it the worthy successor to May’s classic ‘It Is What It Is,’ shaping the darkness with a resilient optimism; running from ‘Attitude’ which bounces octaves with scat singing by Naomi Daniel, not a whit out of context; ‘Food And Art (In The Spirit of Revolution)’ oscillating in choppy waters with gulls and sea beasts moaning, a spellbinding echo of Giorgio Moroder and 808 State — a primordial moment.
Finally, a short deep-voiced adieu with mournful synths leaves little doubt: “Paint will be spilled with color of blood. This blood signifies all the minds that will be lost in the revolution. This is not a revolution against governments. This is a revolution against ignorance.” It’s a freedom cry in a world that has not delivered on its promise. Its message, in an age of deception and propaganda, has only grown in resonance, televised green smoke entering the air. “Computers will take over,” he told Barr, contemplating a dangerous 21st century. “And make humans relics,” he mulled.
Yet the future was still unwritten. Craig’s music then and now kept listeners and dancers in touch with the unknowable, with the ineffable. Underneath the snow of static was something beautiful even if dark and dangerous — Jeff Sawell’s words on the cover of More Songs About Food And Revolutionary Art entreating us to change ourselves and the world — that Craig had televised through music. His paint, and his blood, and his revolution, give sustenance and intelligence — and excellence — in the fight against ignorance. And at its core is something simple: one man’s loving soul.
All this would be awfully pretentious if the music and the mind behind it weren’t so devastatingly good and righteous. Quality makes all the difference as does a sharp historical perspective. But did that nerve come from Craig’s precocious beginnings, his earlier exposure to wild nocturnal art? Was it the impresario May frustrating any attempt at filling his hunger? Or was the “boy wonder of Detroit” just an archetypal genius born to an age of sequencers and synthesizers, rather than guitars?
Always true of Craig, the answer is neither here, nor there, lurking between serendipity, purpose, and grace. Whatever the case, More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art feeds the soul. And more than any other electronica record of the ’90s, it’s a psychic cave of unforgettable riches and inimitable cool. Where Craig’s crazy kind of instigative art steels us beyond the numb and the cruel.
Tracks:
1. Es.30
2. Televised Green Smoke
3. Goodbye World
4. Alien Talk
5. Red Lights
6. Dreamland
7. Butterfly
8. Act 2
9. Dominas
10. At Les
11. Suspiria
12. As Time Goes By (Sitting Under A Tree)
13. Attitude
14. Frustration
15. Food And Art (In The Spirit Of Revolution)
16. Untitled
*The exact 1988 quote by May from the liner notes to the seminal breakout compilation, Techno! (The New Dance Sound of Detroit), is: “The music is just like Detroit, a complete mistake. It's like George Clinton and Kraftwerk are stuck in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company.”
**Craig never let his gear hold him back. This possibly goes back to his earlier interest in playing the electric guitar. He enrolled in an electronic music course but quickly moved on because he was eager to work things out himself.
“The machines were my band,” he told Barr in Making Music. “I used to record in my bedroom with a borrowed four-track and a Sequential Circuits Prophet 600 I bought from a session player back in 1987.” He was intensely scrappy. “Then I got a Roland S-10 sampler from Derrick and that was pretty much the set-up I used for a long time.”
That kind of persistence and resourcefulness takes time and care. It’s the right configuration of ambition, talent and pragmatism.
***Craig revolutionized electronic dance music many times over. But instead of running the risk of sounding overblown, here are some more observations from critical voices at the time, and from the man himself.
Eshun: “Standing in London's Ministry Of Sound last year, listening to Paperclip People’s ‘Throw,’ its disco kickback and funky skip, you realise how far Carl Craig is from techno’s dutiful seriousness, its burden of history. 'Throw' is indifferent. Innocent. Careless. Now…”
“Since its release late last year, Carl’s record has sold 18,000 copies; snaking through dancefloors from Edinburgh’s Pure to Liverpool’s Cream to New York’s Sound Factory. In a year crammed with brilliant records, ‘Throw’ is a sensation.”
“Carl came over to this country to DJ at the Drum Club last March," Jim Masters, head of the Ministry Of Sound's Open imprint, recalls. "It was his first DJ date in England. He played this one track and everyone just went mad. When I found out it was a Paperclip People track, he came in and we made a deal. I had a couple of slates pressed up, gave one to Weatherall and one to CJ Mackintosh."
Barr: Planet E Communications launched in November, 1991 — Four Jazz Funk Classics — ‘My Machines’ is “a wired outer-space symphony loaded with rattling percussion and sine wave arpeggios which predicted an entirely new direction for dance music’s already heavily-abstracted melodic sensibilities.”
Craig: “With the 69 material, I really wanted to fuck up people’s heads. I wanted to make intergalactic body music that would go way beyond the limitations of techno. It may even be considered some type of pop music in the not-so-distant future but I wanted it to be accepted on that level then.”