Carl Craig has turned his back catalogue into an orchestral masterpiece

Following the success of the performance, the orchestra reconvened in the studio with Craig and Tristano in 2010. “We had to work through a new way of recording for me and a new way for the orchestra,” says Craig, whose studio mastery was tested to the limits in the painstaking edits and reworks he’s since worked on.

The pieces as they appear on the finished ‘Versus’ album have changed substantially, a labour of love continuously revisited over the last half decade, in and around Craig’s busy remix and performance schedules.

A mere member of the orchestra in the original performance, Craig has stepped to the fore on the recorded version, designing new interlude pieces and completely new percussion tracks for each composition. ‘Versus’ now offers an even more integrated marriage of machine and orchestra than the live show, and as a result some tracks, like the Iraq war–inspired ‘Sandstorms’, would even work in a club. Others, like ‘Desire’, boast a crunching rhythm closer to the original recording, and ‘At Les’, while retaining the psychedelic beauty of the original, is all about the orchestra’s delicate layers.

But does music inspired by sci-fi and proud of its forward-thinking nature lose any of its vision in the hands of traditional instruments? Carl Craig doesn’t think so, citing the Gravity movie soundtrack as a comparable example of merging orchestration and modern techniques to create something beyond contemporary. “You can be futuristic with a guitar and a flanger,” he says. “It’s not the instrument that’s futuristic; it’s the idea behind what’s played that makes it futuristic.”

“With us, in Detroit, Chicago or New York, when technology came into play we didn’t need to hire a studio with a band,” he says, comparing house and techno’s pioneers to earlier ensembles like MFSB and Salsoul Orchestra. “That wasn’t the vision. The vision was a futuristic one: man and machine. The necessity for an orchestra became nil.

“By kicking the band out of the room and doing as we pleased – that’s gone on to inspire some of a new generation of classically trained musicians and enable them to adapt what they do, to help them realise they’re not locked into a box. Francesco is a pianist, but on ‘Darkness’ you can hear him playing the inside of the piano, the strings. It’s always exciting to be inspired to do new things with instruments. When ‘Alleys Of Your Mind’ by Juan [Atkins] or ‘Can You Feel It’ by Larry Heard came out, that, for me, was like hearing a distorted guitar for the first time. It laid out a path of new possibilities for me to think that this is where I wanted to go.”

The path Craig has travelled since those early inspirations is full of unparalleled diversity. From the crossover drive of ‘Paperclip People’, the experimental mastery of ‘Psyche’ and the jazz inspired proto-drum ’n’ bass of Innerzone Orchestra to the offbeat rave flavours of his 69 project and the never-just-straight-up techno of his Planet E label, he has established himself as one of the most creative and in-demand remixers around with an ability to churn out classic after classic whatever the mood or tempo.

“I feel that the remixes give me practice and they inspire me to do something I may never have done,” Carl muses. Of the tracks selected for Versus, he says ‘Darkness’, ‘Sandstorms’, his remix of Maurizio’s ‘Domina’ and ‘At Les’ are among his career highlights, before giving us an insight into how the last one, a haunting 1997 classic, came about: “I was living with a girlfriend and her name was Lesley. Our apartment had a view of Canada and the Detroit River and at night you could see helicopters with spotlights flying down the river, looking for maybe stray boats or people trying to cross the border. It had a kind of Terminator vibe, like the flashback where he goes into like a dream and he’s remembering all the searchlights and machines chasing after him. It was also at a time when there were still those stupid arsons happening [Detroit suffered an arson wave around ‘Devils Night’ in the 80 and 90s]. As I was making music, I would be looking out of these floor to ceiling windows at what looked like a movie with a sometimes apocalyptic vision.”

Carl Craig’s vast, diverse output has exactly that kind of cinematic quality. Perhaps the orchestral versions on ‘Versus’ are us hearing it in widescreen.

[Second image: Pierre Emmanuel Rastoin]