Stars of the Post-Histoire (VI)

Over the last weeks, a recurrent figure in my audio playback devices as well as in the interviews and features I consume has been prodigious Carl Craig, of Detroit fame. Carl Craig is a magician, go and buy all his records and remixes [1]. Basically every track he has ever laid his hands on is a better one than it must have been before — something that I would not dare to say about the inbred remixing industry in general.

His records do sound timeless, as if he had found the key to an otherworldly funkiness. We should imagine Carl Craig as the man who has catapulted himself out of this pseudo-fluctuating styles stratosphere into an eternal loop surrounding our planet, from where he frequently transmits dry beauty and funk [2]; I would not be surprised to learn that his loop out there sounds like the two quarter notes of ‘Hit and Run’ that Carl had sampled for Paperclip people's eternally valid ‘Throw’ from 1994.

“What I’m trying to do is similar to what Herbie did back in the day in the 1970’s. And to what Miles had done back in the day in the late 1960’s / early 1970’s, where it just had the feel that was timeless, that was amazing. And they were able to integrate aspects of modern technology at that time. My whole outlook isn’t to make a pop record. My whole outlook is to make a classic, timeless piece of music that I could pick up thirty years from now and be proud of it, as well as the average person could pick up and say ‘well fucking shit, this is amazing.’ Or maybe today they won’t get into it but in five years time it might be like ‘damn, what the fuck was he on? Was he on some kind of drugs when he was doing this shit?’
You know, just doing something that is against the grain of what has been done, but borrowing concepts and ideas from what has been done, but taking it a few steps further. I think one of the other groups that is doing something kind of similar to that whole concept is Tortoise. They took another avenue to what was happening with the whole Can thing and elevated that to a 1990’s, end of the century concept.”

¹The super smart !K7 sessions album of Craig is out this week.

²After having drafted this paragraph, I found out how fitting my astronaut / stars wars analogy was: On his myspace profile, Craig himself calls his occupation “Thermonuclear brain teasing”.