Carl Craig/Innerzone Orchestra
by Andrew Duke (interview recorded 23 Aug 99)

Carl Craig is quite the juggler: worldwide gigs performing live solo as Paperclip People and with his Innerzone Orchestra project, DJing more and more as his profile rises, helming his Planet E label, and even finding time to produce a folk group, Custom Blue, for Island Records. Now with the release of Innerzone Orchestra's Programmed album (through Talkin' Loud in the UK and Planet E/Astralwerks for North America), Craig is busy playing "meet the press". Andrew Duke caught up with Craig via the long distance line--at his Detroit home and finishing up his dishwashing as the conversation began--and they talked about Blakula, Diana Ross, "Bug In The Bass Bin", his new label, and plenty more.

You've been successful with your own work as Paperclip People and various other guises, plus under your own name. Why was it important to you to start up Innerzone Orchestra with bassist Paul Randolf, pianist Craig Taborn, and percussionist Francisco Mora, and do a full length album?
"It's important to be different. I look at music as art. It's just the whole concept of in order to make art you have to please yourself and I had to please myself above all. I didn't want to restrict myself to being 'Carl Craig the techno aristocrat', you know? People were pegging me with that and trying to hold me down, and I really don't want to be held down, so Programmed was my way of expressing myself, trying something else, and seeing where I could take it."

You worked with live musicians on this release. Tell me how it was recorded.
"The concept of the name Programmed is the sense that I'm programming these musicians in some way or another. So I took pieces that we recorded and sampled them, rearranged them, made new grooves out of them just to give a new dimension to the music so it wasn't like a straightforward live record. It was almost an experiment to see how an original groove can almost kind of morph into a totally new concept."

The first track you did as Innerzone Orchestra was "Bug In The Bass Bin" in 1992 and you've done a new version for Programmed. You've also reworked your "At Les" track. Tell me about those.
"'At Les' was done in the beginning of the sessions, and I knew early in that I wanted to do this new version of 'Bug In The Bass Bin'. There's two versions [of 'Bug…']. One is the original and one is the remixed version when we re-released it on Mo' Wax a few years ago. This version on the new album is a mix between the feel of the original and the feel of the remix, so it kind of morphs from starting out as the original into the jazz mix. With 'At Les', the concept was sort of 'hey, this is classic material, how can I make it be seen as classic beyond what I'm thinking in my own house when I'm hearing it?' So I needed to do a new version to put it into peoples' faces and say, 'hey, this is something classic. Techno can be classic. You might not have heard this song because you thought it was techno bullshit, so--bam!--here's a new version.'"

Tell me about your Blakula persona that you've taken on in Innerzone Orchestra. Does it have much to do with the movie character with the similar name?
"I thought the movie character, Blacula, was fun. Within what is considered techno we have very limited concepts of the image of what a techno artist is. By bringing [my character of] Blakula in, it puts a new spin on it. When you see 'Blakula' in a credit, you might think, 'who the fuck is Blakula? What kind of motherfucker would call himself that?' But it was also in the concept of imagination, you know, in comparison to people drawing their own conclusions from the electronic instrumental music that they're hearing. People might be thinking, 'hey, what were you thinking at the time? You must have been jacking off in your back room or something when you were doing [69's] "Desire", what was on your head?' I get that all the time, so I thought, 'hey, fuck it.' I was sitting in front of the TV watching Blacula [the movie character] and I thought, 'hey, here's Blakula! Dig it.' Plus it was my imagination of what a real Blacula would be--a black vampire. The general western culture sees Afrikans as being scary in many ways, through voodoo, through the news and media, and all kinds of crazy shit. I thought, 'what if there was a Blacula? What would Blacula be?' And Blacula would definitely be the baddest motherfucker around. He would have spirit behind him, supernatural abilities, and all that, and I think it could go that much further-- [thus my Blakula]."

You've done a cover of The Stylistics' "People Make The World Go 'Round" with Innerzone Orchestra's bassist, Paul Randolf on vocals. This is actually the first single. Why do that cover?
"I heard it on the radio and it really fucked me up, really blew my mind. I heard it and tried to find a copy of it, but could only find the single version. On the long version there's this amazing string section that goes right through the middle of it. It stayed with me so long--the words, the melody, the feeling behind it--and because I couldn't find the long version, I decided to make my own take, and that's what it came out to be. Mainly I made it for people who are interested in doing something different. So a DJ might get it and could break down the set. 'Desire' was used like that by people like Derrick May. Right in the middle of a set, Derrick might play 'Desire' at the apex and that would build up the second part of his set. It's for those kind of guys who are interested in trying something like that out. 'Love Hangover' [the Diana Ross classic] is kind of like that too, where it starts out as a ballad and then goes into this disco track which is real cool."

The intro track on the album, "Wrong Number", is that a skit that you did, or was that an actual message that was left on an answering machine?
"It was a message that was left on my personal answering machine about a year ago. I came home from a trip, my wife was out of town, I checked the messages and came across that. I was thinking 'Who is this? Who is this geek?' I couldn't figure out if he was calling his woman or his man. I thought it was interesting to put that on to start because it's like putting a virus into the system. People expect with a lot of R and B things, hip hop records, messages from Donald Trump and all that kind of stuff. I was thinking, 'OK,well, this is a twist on that.' And what it also does is it almost disorients the listener. The listener might be thinking 'OK, Carl Craig produced this [Innerzone Orchestra album]; it's gonna be the same kind of Carl Craig techno music. Let's check it out.' Then they put it on and it's something else, something different, it's on another level."

How did the album come together? Was it quite fluid and created as it went along, or did you have definite ideas of what you wanted to do before you started?
"I had ideas that I wanted to do covers of 'People…' and [War's] 'Galaxy' on the second half of the recording. So the first recording session, for instance, at the beginning of 1998, we did 'At Les' and 'Eruption' and 'Timing' and a few others. The second process was 'People…' and 'Galaxy' and 'The Beginning Of The End'. I just wanted to try other things. It was a year that I had time to listen to what we had worked on [in 1998] and think about how I wanted to rework things and complete it."

Who were you trying to make links to on the album?
"Miles Davis was a big influence. Bill Laswell's 'Panthalassa' remixes [of Davis] really opened my eyes up to the possibilities of what I believe a lot of people weren't doing with jazz. What jazz is seen as and what people are doing with jazz today is either light music or has to do with making classic reference to a lot of what is the original forms of jazz and the early forms of be bop with Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, and various past geniuses. But I feel as though there's a big section that's been ignored by the powers that be concerning late 60s and early 70s jazz and funk and it's a shame."

Is that why you started up the Community Projects imprint as a side label to Planet E?
"Yeah. Community Projects is based around a lot of the music of the 70s that I think is being ignored, that wasn't quite pop, but was on a different level. There's so many great musicians that have come from around this area, Detroit and Chicago, and I believe that there still is a lot of talent that is around there. I want to open up those avenues. By starting up the label, I hope it will influence others to understand that there is more out there to jazz then what is being put in front of them."

Is Innerzone Orchestra going to be a step in your musical path like Psyche or 69, or is something that you want to continue to develop?
"I'd like to see Innerzone Orchestra move forward as, if you want to call it, a moniker, or it ends up as a band with or without me or if I'm just the producer or whatever. I think there's possibilities for it to go further without me having to be the central entity involved. With Paperclip People, nobody else can do that, cos it's just me. But with Innerzone Orchestra, I believe that I can still produce the project, but use Francisco, or Craig, Recloose, or whomever else is associated with it to still do albums."

Innerzone Orchestra's Programmed is out now on CD via Astralwerks. Through Planet E, a limited edition 180g vinyl version is available. The debut release for Community Projects, Francisco Mora's "World Trade Music", is out now.