Gamall Awad on Carl Craig
By Gamall Awad
Carl Craig: Party/After-Party, installation view, Dia Beacon, Beacon, New York, March 6, 2020–Summer 2021. © Carl Craig. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York
The cover of Carl Craig’s legendary 1997 full-length LP, More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art, features a quote by writer Jeff Sawtell: “Revolutionary art is not determined by its avantgarde content; nor its formal or technical trickery, its interpretation of reality or its verisimilitude, but, rather, by how much it revolutionizes our thinking and imagination; overturning our preconceptions, bias and prejudice and inspiring us to change ourselves and the world.”
Craig’s commission for Dia Art Foundation, Party/After-Party (2020), reflects his experiences as an internationally touring DJ over a career of more than three decades. Reimagining Dia Beacon’s lower level into a sonic environment, sound textures intensify and recede, creating an arc—from elation to disorientation—reflective of the euphoric rise and the subsequent aftereffects inherent to the communal rush of the dance floor. Party/After-Party is a contemplative space built on the politics of techno—one of borderlessness, reclamation, and of a humanization of the machine aesthetic. Opening just a week before Dia Beacon was closed due to the current pandemic, Party/After-Party is now silent, as are the club spaces that are inherent to the experience of techno. While we are left without the physical collective at this moment, we can still activate our apartments, homes, basements, and backyards with the sonic connectivity that builds on an archive of emotive memory. Soon we will return to a state of togetherness, and when we do, we can only expect that these gatherings will move forth the potentiality that techno inspires.
On the occasion of Party/After-Party, Gamall Awad, a music writer and long-time friend of Craig, was invited to write the following text. Tracing key moments in Craig’s practice, Awad highlights specific projects and tracks that have both informed and led to the realization of the installation. Additionally, Awad situates Craig—well-known for his richly layered electronic compositions—and the movement of techno within the wider and much-deserved context of art.
This weekend, May 23–25, 2020, Movement, the annual Detroit-based electronic music festival that Craig was instrumental in cofounding twenty years ago, will be held virtually. Movement at Home will occur from Saturday, May 23, to Monday, May 25, on the festival’s website, movement.us. Contributions made during Movement at Home will benefit MusiCares COVID-19 Relief Fund.
—Kelly Kivland, Curator, Dia Art Foundation
Party/After-Party (2020) is a détournement of Carl Craig’s life as a producer and DJ over the last three decades.[1] As his first solo presentation in a museum, it both simultaneously reflects his lived experiences and stands apart from them as a refined reimaging of his reality. For Party, Craig uses sound and space to abstract his memories of London’s Ministry of Sound club space in the 1990s as well as more recent experiences at Panorama Bar within Berlin’s Berghain, a hedonistic, electronic-music club located in a former power plant. Party is built on Craig’s aural and visual observations from the DJ booth; it’s a position of privilege and one that is a reflective inversion of the experiences of clubbers themselves. Party both refines and offers insight into the viewpoint of a DJ.
The sonance of Party is reminiscent of a number of key projects from Craig’s extensive and complex production discography. Firstly it recalls his 1997 remix of “Domina” (1993) for Berlin-based producer Moritz von Oswald.[2] (Nods are given specifically to the vocal sample from that remix.) Oswald, who is known for his exacting auditory standards, has influenced Craig’s own quest for sonic perfection. It is important to note that Party/After-Party was an acoustic challenge for Craig, requiring multiple frequency and rhythmic range experiments in order to find sounds that would work within the unusual sonic reverberations of Dia Beacon’s basement. The fact that these challenges are not apparent to most is a testament to the artist’s craftsmanship.
Carl Craig: Party/After-Party, installation view, Dia Beacon, Beacon, New York, March 6, 2020–Summer 2021. © Carl Craig. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York
Party also reflects Craig’s productions under the alias of Paperclip People, specifically a series of mid-1990s EPs like “The Climax (Reworked)” (1995) and “4 My Peepz” (1998).[3] Paperclip People was, and is, considered to be more “house” than “techno” (Craig frequently crossed lines between the two scenes during that period of time) and remains one of his most successful and well-known projects.[4] There is a joyful and free sensation in Craig’s approach as Paperclip People—a pure sensorial escapism and a reference, as per house music norms, to the chord patterns used in African American churches, which Craig references as “funk.” Party particularly leans toward the synthetic sound of “4 My Peepz,” which in itself updates the sound of Landcruising (1995), Craig’s first solo album and a sonic exploration of driving around Detroit with nods to Kraftwerk and the German Motorik beat. Adapting this roving sensation into longer form, “4 My Peepz” is less German Autobahn and more funk-infused hypnotic shuffle. Filters change the landscape and larger notes arrive like the swings of a boxer. The late 1990s track also features a vocal insert of the title by the artist, reflecting on his long-time dedication to his home city of Detroit.[5] If anything, there is a sense of determinism and strength that is specifically and historically African American within “4 My Peepz,” which recalls the “Monument to Joe Louis” (also known as “The Fist”) statue downtown near Hart Plaza where the Detroit Electronic Music Festival has been held. The inflections of the cymbals recall Detroit’s heyday as an emerging and developing center of jazz, and the guitar-like riffs hint at the city’s blues history. The filters on a “stabbed” mix of “4 My Peepz” resemble the distant sound of machinery and automobile production. It is possible to hear Detroit’s entire musical history within this one composition. Conscious or not, even if it is a stretch to say so, sonically the ghosts of those past are all present.
After-Party alternatively explores the personal flipside of time spent in the DJ booth. Craig, who suffers from tinnitus, has spoken about how he often returns to a hotel room after a DJ set to ringing, buzzing, and other constant tones that interrupt and overwhelm him. After-Party reflects this: a subliminal voice interrogates from the distance, while a Reese bass provides an ominous counterpoint. Originating in an early track from Detroit techno producer Kevin “Reese” Saunderson, the Reese sound was then used on other Detroit tracks, rave singles, early hardcore techno in the United Kingdom, and late 1990s drum n’ bass.[6] The brooding baseline is so ubiquitous across genres that a significant number of people immediately associate the sound with the feeling of dread, making its use very appropriate within Craig’s commission for Dia. A diffusion of oscillator-generated frequencies that echo the random nature of tinnitus complete the experience of After-Party. Although it may seem cheesy to mention, this experience also resembles our current reality. After-Party represents our socially distant state of affairs; its ominous sounds are a soundtrack for the failures of government, especially within African American communities.
Tinnitus is not the only challenge that the installation addresses. Party/After-Party arrives at a critical junction in the history of techno. No longer young, the techno that was created and innovated by African American producers in Detroit is now over thirty years old. Yet there is a battle on the horizon between the mainly white, production-by-the-numbers, “business techno” set and an emerging two-pronged eclectic movement. The latter of the two features a youthful African American underground intent to “Make Techno Black Again,” which was initiated partly by DeForrest Brown, Jr., in collaboration with the sustainable, gender-flexible clothing line HECHA/做,and others, and a burgeoning international LGBTQ scene, which is adopting and weaving techno into their own highly political soundtrack.[7] Where Craig lies in this, as is usual for him, is in a category and on a path of his own.
Carl Craig: Party/After-Party, installation view, Dia Beacon, Beacon, New York, March 6, 2020–Summer 2021. © Carl Craig. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York
However, Craig is not as isolated in bringing the distinct spatial dynamics of African American electronic music into an art setting. The avant-garde of African American creativity in the art world has increasingly pushed a more advanced agenda than the African American music world over the last fifteen years, and often references Detroit techno. Arthur Jafa used Robert Hood’s “Minus” (1994) in his video piece APEX (2013) and in a related interview remarked: “Techno is a very specific product of Detroit and black people’s relationship to technology . . . we were the first technology. We are the technology that drove the American industrial engine. . . . Club music—of which techno is a part—is DJ-based music. It’s not instrumental. The mix is it. The mix is in the face of linear thinking, it is in opposition to reductive thinking.”[8] Similarly Kevin Beasley recently continued his ongoing explorations of electronic music in A view of the landscape (2018–19) at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Beasley delved into the many tangential relationships between disparate electronic music practices both at the Whitney and in his organization of the Assembly festival at the Kitchen in New York.[10] Jafa and Beasley are part of a growing wave of artists creating new contexts for black electronic music in America. Craig’s installation puts him into direct dialogue with these works bridging the gap between these current and ongoing movements in art and music.
For newcomers and those who have been around since techno’s inception, the movement to “Make Techno Black Again” has a powerful resonance. The desire is for techno to be fully accepted, first and foremost, as a vital African American–created artform. Techno has never been fully appreciated as such in the United States of America. Now it’s time to recognize that techno is as American as jazz. The genre’s direct arrival in a major American museum via the work of Craig, one of its most creative artists, can only be seen as a new level of acknowledgment of the form. Techno lives.
Gamall Awad grew up in Sheffield, United Kingdom, during the post-punk period when bands like Cabaret Voltaire were local heroes. At the same time, he was dancing to Northern Soul and New Wave and going to Steve Lacy and Steve Reich concerts. Although he was professionally trained as an actor, music has been the through line in this life. At age seventeen he became a record store clerk. He then went on to write for the Wire, study jazz with Don Cherry, play in the Psychic TV group, co-run the electronic Reflective Records label, record music, host radio shows, launch a series of Demon Days parties alongside Carl Craig, and much more. Since 1999 he has run Backspin Promotions, a boutique PR company that works with independent labels, and has been fortunate to help advance the careers of a wide range of talent. He also acts as a music consultant for Unsound Festival and Q Department. Most recently he has returned to writing and other creative pursuits.
Carl Craig: Party/After-Party is made possible by major support from Ford Foundation. Additional support is provided by Jeffrey Deitch and Nazy Nazhand and Kurosh Nasseri. Special thanks to Meyer Sound Laboratories Incorporated and RME/Synthax Inc.
[1] Guy-Ernest Debord and Gil J. Wolman developed the concept of détournement (loosely translated from French as a “rerouting” or “overturning”) in their “Mode d’emploi du détournement” text in 1956, and then they adapted it as an aesthetic strategy of the Situationist International. See Guy-Ernest Debord and Gil J. Wolman, “Mode d’emploi du détournement,” Les Lèvres Nues 8 (May 1956); see also Guy-Ernest Debord and Gil J. Wolman, “Définitions,” Internationale Situationiste 1 (June 1958).
[2] The track was released in Germany on 12-inch vinyl under Oswald’s Maurizio alias. Craig and Oswald have a long-term history of performances and recordings together, including the live performance on March 7, 2020, for the opening of Craig’s exhibition at Dia Beacon.
[3] The name Paperclip People is a reference to Operation Paperclip, a covert counterintelligence program led by the United States Army, which brought German engineers and scientists, many of the former Nazi Party, to the United States during the decade that followed World War II. “The Climax (Reworked)” was released in the United Kingdom on Ministry of Sound’s Open imprint and “4 My Peepz” was released in the United States through Craig’s own Planet E Communications, both on 12-inch vinyl. A list of those two releases and the other EPs may be found here.
[4] Proof of this can be seen in pop-rock band LCD Soundsystem covering Paperclip People’s “Throw” (1994) in 2010.
[5] Dedicated to changing the landscape of Detroit, Craig has realized many community projects including the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, which he launched with several partners in 2000. Although the name and presenters of the festival have since changed a number of times, the festival still occurs yearly in Detroit. Resident Advisor published an oral history of the festival, titled “Put Your Hands Up,” which can be found here.
[6] The sound was originally featured on Reese’s “Just Want Another Chance,” which was released through Incognito Records in 1988.
[7] See Piotr Orlov, “Speaker Music Is Helping Make Techno Black Again,” Afropunk, December 10, 2019, https://afropunk.com/2019/12/speaker-music-is-helping-make-techno-black-again/; see also DeForrest Brown, Jr., Assembling a Black Counter Culture (New York: Primary Information, 2020).
[8] Arthur Jafa, “‘Black People Figured Out How to Make Culture in Freefall’: Arthur Jafa on the Creative Power of Melancholy,” interview by Kate Brown, Artnet, February 21, 2018, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/arthur-jafa-julia-stoschek-collection-1227422.
[9] Kevin Beasley’s Listening Room, which is an ongoing project by the artist, was realized for his A view of the landscape exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2018–19. The Listening Room not only made audible the mechanical, drone-like sounds of the central work, A cotton gin motor (2012–18), on display in an adjacent room; it was also a space for live performances by Taja Cheek, Jlin, Eli Keszler, Ralph Lemon, and Beasley.
[10] The Assembly festival took place at the Kitchen in June 2019 and featured a wide range of artists including Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, MHYSA, Jason Moran, Pamela Z, and others.
