Carl Craig: 20 years as ruler of Planet-E

To stay in business and at the top of your game for twenty years is no mean feat. Especially in the fickle world of music, where tastes, attitudes and styles can change as quickly as the wind. Which makes Carl Craig’s success all the more poignant. A product of the second generation of Detroit’s techno scene, he has maintained his position as of the genre’s most well-respected and hard working luminaries over two decades with his label Planet-E, which this year celebrates its 20th birthday, and an open-minded approach to his music. With forays into the worlds of jazz, classical music and many other genres besides, Carl has remained relevant to generations young and old and pushed out beyond the constraints of being tied to one particular genre. As he prepared for a huge Planet-E party at Amsterdam’s huge ADE event a couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to spend an evening which led to an in-depth conversation covering everything from the label, to his children, the future and even a demonstration of his rollerskating style.

So, 20 years… how does it feel to have reached this point?

I can’t say that I feel like Hugh Hefner [laughs]. It’s cool, it hasn’t been a long hard road at all, it’s been a pretty good roll, I’ve been able to write my own story. I had some great friends in the beginning, I’ve made some great friends in the meantime and I hope to make some great friends later on. It’s a good point because, from the start, it was me and then my cousin got involved and he’s been with me the whole time, manufacturing records… It’s great but, when you come to 20 years, you gotta think ‘Shit, what’s gonna happen over the next 20 years?!’..

…well, that was one of my questions – do you have any firm plans, or are you just rolling with it?

We’ve always kinda rolled. My concept of putting out music was very much like improvisation. Very strong on impulse, I’d finish a track and be like ‘Reg, I wanna put this out’ and we’d have it out as fast as we can. I’d hear a song I like, sign somebody’s music and we could put it out really fast – so, it’s always been artist-based in the sense of that impulsive attitude. But unfortunately… you can still be impulsive with digital, but… you gotta think about the next step. We’ve already gone 20 years, we can still be impulsive but it can be impulsive in a way that can keep you in business or out of business.

So I guess there’s a kind of informed intent to your impulsiveness now? You need to be quite considered in your approach in comparison to the early years…

Yeah, there’s a lot more to lose because you have 20 years of history to lose.

You never want to tarnish that.

It can be tarnished. In some cases it’s ok for it to be tarnished because you have made it to 20 years. The tarnishing isn’t the historical side of it, but it becomes the reality of how you stay in fucking business for another 20 years. Do you stay in business trying to release vinyl records? Do you stay in business trying to release music? Or do you stay in business for whatever the next step of the future is gonna be? And I’m paying attention to my daughters and my son in relation to what they’re seeing and how they’re seeing things and that’s gonna be the legacy – my kids walking in and saying ‘We wanna release this record instead’ … ‘Ok, well fine, here’s the Craig family record division, go on and do it. Let’s see what happens.’ Hopefully that will free me up from the creative A&R side of things where I can just focus on making Carl Craig music.

What do you think of the shift away from vinyl? Can digital ever have a soul?

It’s a tough scenario for me because I wasn’t in the first generation of guys that were laptop DJs. For me, because I travel so much, it’s easier – I don’t have to worry about records getting lost or any of the other problems that become involved in not being to have your music. BUT, there was a record, I think it was Snuff Crew on Gigolo Records, and I liked the track. I had a digital copy and a vinyl copy, I think I got the digital copy first and I thought ‘This is cool…’ then I listened to it on vinyl and it sounded totally different. The feeling is different because you actually see the mechanics of what’s going on…

…There’s a physicality.

There’s a physicality but it fucks with your imagination, in comparison to digital files. With digital files, your mind is somewhere else – you’re checking your emails or whatever. If something happens in the track that surprises you, when it’s digital, and you go to iTunes or whatever player and look at it, it’s just numbers. But, something happens and you look at the vinyl it’s doing something, it’s really special. With that record in particular, it had what’s considered a technical default, but it adds a little bit more impact. I don’t know if you know a whole lot about record pressing?

No, not a whole lot…

Well, they put the piece of wax on what are called plates. The mothers are the original, then the plates are made from the mothers which the records are pressed on. You can only press 2000 or something from each mother. So, as you’re pressing these records what happens is this inaccuracy and the inaccuracy is like maybe wearing a shoe that fits but it starts to slip a little bit while you’re wearing it, it gets a little bit bigger. This is what happens to those plates, they move a little bit and sometimes when you put a record on and it gets close to the label you get this ‘Voooo, voooo’ sound, that’s from the plates slipping. And that makes it more special. If it’s slipping too much it’s like ‘Alright this is fucked up’ but when there’s just a little bit, it adds some soul.

Aha, well that’s exactly what I was getting at. So, with 20 years of Planet-E how have you been celebrating?

[Looks at his glass of red wine and laughs] Lots of wine!

And in terms of the 20 Years Of Planet-E parties, has there been a theme to the whole thing?

The ideal of the parties are that they not only use artists that have something to do with Planet-E in some way or another, whether it be a remix or whatever, like with this party we’re having tomorrow [at ADE in Amsterdam] we have Caribou. But it’s also people that have an affinity with the label, like when we had Richie [Hawtin] play in Eindhoven. It’s like this conversation that happens and this affinity for what we’ve done as Planet-E… maybe to show people how we may have influenced dubstep, or how Planet-E was influenced – for example, having Derrick May play when we did the first two parties of the year in New York and Detroit.

Speaking about people like Caribou, who are from a completely different generation to yourself, how do manage to find time to check out the undercurrent of people who are coming up?

It depends, sometimes the music comes to me, sometimes I find the music, sometimes the artists find me. With Caribou I was just doing the typical iTunes thing and I came across Caribou’s first two albums when he was doing this stuff that’s avant-garde and that’s what attracted me to his music. But I found out more about Skrillex and Friendly Fires through my eldest daughter – she loves Skrillex and Benga and all this kind of stuff.

Would you pinpoint anything in particular that’s buoyed your success?

It comes from my parents. My dad works for my company and, even though he comes from a totally different world, there is some wisdom that he has in relation to management of an entity because he used to be a manager at postal stations. But, really, my mum is the person that had the most impact on me because she can see situations, analyse them and see the negative and the positive. And that’s part of her whole thing, she told me at a young age, and I tell a lot of people this: ‘Don’t do drugs. And you know why you don’t wanna do drugs? Because it takes all your money and you don’t wanna lose money do you?’ And, I see so many people using cocaine, so many people using Ketamine, so many people using really hard drugs and stuff… and it’s something they really love and it’s something that’s fantastic [to them] but it hasn’t done anything for me. I didn’t start drinking until I was 25, so I never had those things that were in the way, I never had those walls, when I was making music – I never said ‘Ok, I need a drink before I make music’. We were watching the new series of Californication earlier and the lead character, Hank Moody, he says something about how he never grew up, he’s still seventeen. And it’s that thing… holding on to being seventeen and being ultra-creative in that sense, that everything is exciting. I had that for as long as I could. I think maybe I lost it when my first child was born.

Now that you’re 42, and you’ve had a long prosperous career so far, do you have an idea of when you might retire from performing live?

It’s always thought of, it’s always talked about – I have these conversations with Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, Kenny Larkin, Stacey Pullen and all those guys. You have people that are like Frankie Knuckles age [56] still DJing, Danny Tenaglia [50] and all those guys – so you can still go until you’re 60. Do I wanna go until I’m 60? No. I don’t, but I’ve worked on aspects of what I do so that it gives me that possibility to always be adventurous musically. If I decide to do African music, it doesn’t seem so strange because I’ve already done these kinds of collaborations and tried to experiment with some of the remixes I’ve done. So, if I wanna go and do something like Damon Albarn did and go to Africa, I can. With the diversity that I’ve always tried to have musically it won’t seem out of place if maybe I do some punk ass rock, crazy s*** or some avant-garde jazz s***. That’s a major reason why I’ve done so many different types of remixes, it nurtures peoples’ ideas of what I do.

So what would you love to do now, what’s left?

When we did Versus in Paris, there was a Steve Reich piece that was done, it looked like a fucking huge bible. It was a score, and how you’re supposed to perform the score. So it was a dossier with diagrams on how things were supposed to be done, I think it even included the samples that you were supposed to use. That was freaking amazing! That was a point where I thought anything’s possible. You can, not only write a score for an orchestra, but you write a score and say this is exactly what you’re supposed to do. You’re not just seeing notes, you’re seeing everything that’s involved, it’s a complete script in relation to that. I would love to have the time and see the potential of that and build it in what I do.

You could write an opera in an electronic sense…

You could. In my relationship with Francesco [Tristano], that’s been a very strong point in relation to the arrangement. Francesco knows the music because he knows me and he knows electronic music. He’s a world-renowned concert pianist and there’s that potential of working with people that have the same experience, the same love, to elevate what I do to another level. There’s a really amazing performance for me, it was Yusef Lateef with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. He’s from Detroit, a renowned jazz musician – maybe one of the most phenomenal players around, after John Coltrane. When he played with the orchestra, with an oboe, it was incredible. Then he brought his band out and they had some specific players, but you could see the disconnect between orchestra and jazz. That’s what I don’t want, that division that you can see. It’s got to be…

…you need synchronicity.

Yeah, that synchronicity, and that comes down to the arranger. If those guys [members of the orchestra] are seeing 16th notes as 16th notes, but they’re not seeing them as tied notes or as dotted notes that add that swing to it, they’re gonna play it as they see it. Those players are programmed, you can give them all the range in the world but they’re not going to use that range. An arranger has to be willing to bend the rules in order to make the players say ‘This is interesting, let’s see what we can do with this’.

Finally, can you speak about the importance of early techno label Metroplex…?

When No UFOs came out that was a revelation, that was IT. There’s some debate over what the first techno record was: Alleys Of My Mind [by Metroplex owner Juan Atkins and Richard Davis] or Shari Vari. I’ll tell you now, it was Alleys Of My Mind, Shari Vari was a disco record. My relationship with Metroplex really started because I have a cousin who made the record Technicolor, which was the second release on Metroplex. But that my put my little finger in it – and I think when Night Drive was released, which is my favourite Metroplex record, I was starting to drive all the time. They used to play that record Drivetime, 5 o’clock in the afternoon, and that’s a huge fucking deal. For a local record to be played Drivetime. I’d be driving around after school tripping that I’m hearing ‘Time, Space, Transmat’ …it’s like “What the fuck?’. It was just incredible. The vision that Juan had with becoming his own boss is probably not that far off the vision I had when I started Planet-E. In Detroit it’s about unions, having a secure job… but in Detroit we also saw the corporate side of it with Ford, General Motors and stuff. That enterprising thing that occurred with the larger corporations, but also the smaller independent businesses like Berry Gordy making this huge conglomerate. It gives you the concept that anybody can do it anytime.

Carl Craig is celebrating 20 years of Planet-E – for more information go to www.carlcraig.net or www.planet-e.net 20 F@#&ING Years Of Planet E – We Ain’t Dead Yet vinyl box set is released this month. And you can catch Carl Craig at I Love Techno in Ghent, Belgium on Saturday November 12. For more information visit www.ilovetechno.be

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