Carl Craig - 'More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art'
No. 25 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
Carl Craig is practically in a category to himself. He’s hard to pin down because his music back-flips through time and space. Where others see the lines of a box in which to check their careers, he walks right past them. He’s the wandering chameleon, Detroit techno’s restless soul. And what’s the sound of a renaissance man is best described as a feeling.
From an early age Craig 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 under Derrick May, learning directly from the man who set Detroit techno on its worldwide orbit.
“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.”
That experimental intuition has lead to some of the most assured and influential electronic compositions and remixes of all time: ‘Neurotic Behavior’ as Psyche, ‘Bug in the Bassbin’ as Innerzone Orchestra, ‘Chicken Noodle Soup’ as BFC, ‘Microlovr’ as 69, ‘Throw’ as Paperclip People, his remix of Tori Amos’ ‘God,’ and on and on. Like finely tuned antennae, his instincts always seem pitched to the unexpected. There’s no user manual, just curiosity and life in the moment.
Listening to his 1997 masterpiece More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art is little different. It’s about feeling your way into a maze of intricate rhythms and haunted moods. The opening ambient gusts of ‘Es.30’ give way to the roly poly groove of ‘Televised Green Smoke,’ both as spacious as they are wildly present. That gentle confidence keeps coming at you, like the smile of a shy date or the click of a new friend’s intellect.
“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: ‘Goodbye World’ quivers under a baleful moon reminiscent of Tangerine Dream while the Kraftwerkian ‘As Time Goes By’ cruises as a mystic night drive, its headlights catching deer in its winding turns.
On ‘Butterfly,’ you can hear the glacial heart of Detroit techno as well as the deep piano echoes of Chicago house legend Larry Heard. And yet it’s not some derivative in-between. It’s a paradise all its own. ‘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.
Craig knows how to get you right where he wants you because next comes ‘At Les.’ A classic ambient glide through clusters of ghostly tones and skeletal syncopation, it forever falls into the quiet within. Once dubbed by critic Simon Reynolds as the possible apotheosis of ’90s Detroit techno, it’s also a handy middle finger to the Black-White divide in music. At a time when Europe was overflowing with electronic innovators, Revolutionary Art was a gleaming reminder of techno’s original destiny.
Calmly tearing at the straitjacket of what Black music should be, Craig’s album is at once avant garde and sensual functional. Craig was pushing into less stereotyped territory about technology and ethnology. Like Jeff Mills or Robert Hood, he was on a mission of artistic purity, hurrying down a romantic path first hacked by May and Jamie Principle.
Driving that point home in the closing quarter of More Songs, Craig’s achingly beautiful ‘Frustration’ stretches the emotions like putty, as if shaping the unknown with gentle optimism over broken glass. The delightful ‘Attitude’ bounces the octaves with scat singing by Naomi Daniel, not a whit out of context. ‘Food And Art (In The Spirit of Revolution)’ oscillates in choppy waters with gulls and sea beasts moaning, a spellbinding echo of Giorgio Moroder and 808 State. It’s primordial and engrossing.
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 cry for freedom in a nation that has not yet delivered all its promise. It’s an attitude closer to the deepest longings of humanity than the superclubs of London or the Balearic bliss of Ibiza. And its message, in an age of deception and misinformation and brainwashing, has only grown in relevance.
All this would be awfully pretentious if the music and the mind behind it weren’t so devastatingly good. Quality makes all the difference here as does a sharp historical perspective. But did that nerve come from Craig’s precocious beginnings, his early exposure to wild nocturnal art? Or was the boy wonder of Detroit just an archetypal genius born to an age of sequencers and synthesizers?
Always true of Craig, the answer is neither here nor there, lurking between serendipity, grace, and birthright. 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.
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