Movement is Detroit’s long-running techno music festival that made its way back to the city last month. Dynamic sounds and energetic tempos could be felt miles away from Hart Plaza as massive crowds danced their way through Memorial Day Weekend.
Headlining this year’s festival was Carl Craig, a Detroit music producer, DJ, and founder of the record label Planet E Communications. Last year, a documentary film that chronicles the artist's life, Desire: The Carl Craig Story, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. This year, the film was screened at a pre-party to the music festival, ringing in the vibrant celebration of techno.
“Most people don’t get a chance to see their lives before their eyes until a near-death experience. So I’m totally happy to see these things. These friends, family members, everyone in front of my face,” said Craig.
Craig is something of an electronic music pioneer, having produced mesmerizing beats and rich sounds for over thirty years. His discography strikes at different angles and taps into a variety of emotions, but for Craig, the beauty of his work often comes from repetition.
“I might hear the same rhythm, but I find another way of presenting it, a different way of making a melody work. I think the best ways that I can develop as a human as well as a musician is to visit things and see them in different ways, whether it’s how it’s presented to me or that I’m just spitballing and I see something that’s different. Isn’t that how the best formulas come together?”
This level of adaptability is present in all aspects of his career. In fact, much of the inspiration for his music came from Detroit’s built environment.
“The decline of neighborhoods, the vacant houses, people moving out, the Devil’s Night fires were things that were happening when I was ten, eleven, twelve. A city in chaos. Architecture and driving around at night and looking at buildings and houses and these things—I found great inspiration.”
Everything from the city’s architecture to its economical collapse are hubs of creative innovation for Craig. Destruction is not always bleak according to his creative process. It can give life to something beautiful and new.
“Cities like Detroit had problems with people burning up their property in order to get insurance money. And I remember there was a warehouse fire, and it was one of the most glorious things I’ve seen in my life.”
Making music doesn’t come without its obstacles for Craig. In some ways, his sound-centered passions are at odds with his lived reality as someone who deals with Tinnitus, an internal ringing in the ears.
“The thing with art is that you have to live it. To me, I don’t think great art is based around somebody coming up with something that’s imaginary. I think great art is taking something that we take for granted every day and making it into something that can be seen and appreciated.”
As the world moves towards an AI-saturated reality, the nature of work like Craig’s is in many ways under threat. The intimacy and human emotion that makes Craig’s creative genius possible cannot exactly be replicated by artificial entities. But this is not a universally acknowledged truth, especially for those who are not so musically-inclined.
“There are more people than we probably realize that have what’s called a tin ear. They hear music and it doesn’t do anything. [...] It’s just something to fill in the space. And with AI music, it’s something that fills in the space," he said.
In the meantime, Craig continues to set the standard for how to fill that space with authenticity, diligence, and sounds that you can’t help but dance to.
You can listen to the full conversation with Carl Craig on the Stateside Podcast.
GUEST ON THIS EPISODE:
- Carl Craig, music producer and DJ from Detroit
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