Astrofunk pres. Carl Craig @ Gaelic Club, Sydney (26/03/05)
Carl Craig is a bit of a legend. A LOT of a legend, in fact. If you believe the hype, he saved techno, invented drum and bass, re-invigorated jazz, took the concept of the remix to places unimaginable and played live at a party in Sydney a few years ago that it seems half the population of Australia went to.
Given that I’m a huge fan of his work, you can imagine my delight at hearing he was coming to town – especially as I’d yet to experience the man in the flesh. Now there’s an interesting issue to acknowledge before we continue – the promoters had booked CC to play a DJ set. While his live sets are truly the stuff of soaking wet dreams, Craig’s reputation as a DJ is somewhat bipolar, to say the least. By his own admission, Craig is a reluctant DJ, only getting into the game because people were offering him stupid amounts of money to do it. When he first started out he didn’t even bother beatmatching, but over the years his skills have improved to the point where many people have rated his sets as the best they’ve heard. At the same time, bizarrely, other people have heard sets of his that they’ve said were truly awful. Anybody who’s capable of evoking opinions that strongly deserves a look, and so with a considerable amount of trepidation, we made our way to the Gaelic Club last Saturday.
On getting in, it was nice to see a good crowd milling around to the sounds of the supports, up on that big stage with some really simple decor – a huge colourful single slide projected across the DJ booth and onto the back wall. The spartan look evoked an old acid house party, and as Biz took to the stage, dropping Abe Duque tracks and rave-tinged house music, the whole place for a while became some squat in London circa ‘89. It felt pretty cool. Biz continued on quite a subdued vibe, even going easy on the old crossfader mashing for which he’s renowned. He was setting the tone for the main event wonderfully, especially as Craig is not a techno DJ in the banging sense – this is, after all, someone who’s as happy producing noodly jazz music or soulful Erykah Badu joints as he is catering to sweaty dancefloors. As Biz finished off, dropping Craig’s cosmic remix of Recloose’s ‘Can’t Take It’, the man himself lobbed up and finished hooking his laptop up to the mixer. Biz cleared off, Craig dropped some crazy fucked-up electronic funk and we were off.
Never really veering much above 130bpm all the way through, CC dropped a big heap of quality music, starting off all minimal with some choice Rhythm & Sound numbers and the new Luciano track. He went from there to dubby house, dropping Moodymann’s ‘Shades of Jae’ to a rapturous response. Before long he headed firmly into Detroit tech territory, and remained there for most of the rest of his set, save for a few excursions back into percussive, interestingly produced house music. He played plenty of his own gear, and when he dropped the seemingly obligatory Detroit Bomb Tracks he did so with restraint, and he wound up with Strings of Life and then that was that.
So what to make of it? Was he mindblowingly amazing or utter crap? Well, there were plenty of people there on the night who’ll happily testify that he was one or the other. For my money, I think he was alright. Nothing crazy special, but it was great to hear some of my favourite tracks of recent times on a big system. There wasn’t really much to say about his programming or his mixing – he just dropped a whole heap of good music, one after the next, and the crowd was content to groove away. Save for a little segment of about 4 tracks where the place went pretty crazy (attempted moshing, freaky dancers getting up on stage Bez-style), I’d be a liar if I said the Gaelic Club was going off. It wasn’t.
The issue in my mind was that there wasn’t much of a coherent vibe throughout the night – it was quite disjointed. Once Craig finished, Vic and Mark Murphy jumped on and delivered a tight, banging tech set that while it was competent and technically superior to Craig’s somewhat pedestrian mixing style, didn’t really seem to suit the flow of the night and resulted unsurprisingly in a mass exodus of people who weren’t into that sound at all, while those folk who hadn’t enjoyed Craig’s sound seemed to flock from the woodwork and finally get their dancing boots on, as if there was a change in shifts on the dancefloor. Whereas music is supposed to bring people together, it’s fair to say that tonight it succeded in dividing folk.
In short, my complaint about the night is that it seemed to me to be a coldly-calculated exercise in making money – I didn’t really feel like this was an event that was put together with love. The promoters booked DJs that push lots of different sounds, in what seemed to me to be an attempt to get as many payers through the doors with no thought as to whether they would actually enjoy the music or not. I walked away from the night with the feeling that it could have been so much better, and that the fault for this didn’t really lie on Craig’s head.
And in the middle of all of this was one of the great talents in electronic music, playing music to a crowd that was half up for it and half not. On the night, I think it was the crowd that exhibited the polarity normally attributed to Carl Craig’s DJ sets, while the man himself was just average. Perhaps it’s always this way?
