DJ-Kicks: Carl Craig

Various Artists
DJ-Kicks: Carl Craig

Carl Craig was unstoppable in 1996. His debut album, Landcruising, had come out the year before, setting a new bar for Detroit techno’s experimental possibilities; he would release the even more ambitious More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art in 1997. Smack in between those two landmark albums came his DJ-Kicks mix—the second in the series, after C.J. Bolland’s installment in late 1995. “I could only think of a compilation in the way of what I'd been influenced by, so I was slashing Derrick May on the floor with a tape machine, a turntable, and a razor blade, and cutting tape and doing this mix by hand,” Craig tells Apple Music. “My DJ-Kicks was more about what the technical possibilities were. It was a true musical production. It really felt like a Carl Craig album in comparison to a Carl Craig mix.” If there’s an implicit theme here, it’s the way that Detroit techno’s influence was spreading across the globe in the mid-’90s, coloring all kinds of scenes in its high-tech image. In addition to Motor City stalwarts like Kosmic Messenger (Stacey Pullen) and Claude Young, Craig slots in a number of European artists—the UK’s Octagon Man and Ian Loveday, Vienna’s Auto Repeat, and Belgium’s Random Generator—who all trafficked in a similarly steely yet supple style. It’s a club set through and through, with flashing hi-hats and churning snares serving as the through lines for Craig’s swirls of filtered chords. And the finale is the most ingenious sort of coda: Titled “DJ-Kicks (The Track),” it’s Craig’s own nine-minute mash-up of elements of all the songs that have come before—proof that this remixer had some of the sharpest editing skills around.

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