`Sometimes when you answer the phone it's just too boring to answer `Yes' when people say `Is that Carl?' So sometimes I just like to say "No, it's Bob'. " Well, that explains something. Even by the standards of electronic dance music, where a certain disdain for personality cults has been a defining feature, Carl Craig - one of the genre's most innovative composers, musicians, remixers and producers - has been a bit shy.
When he first appeared in Europe it was under the name Psyche. Soon afterwards a record was released by something called BFC, which turned out to be by Carl Craig. Then in 1992 there was the mysterious 69 - which, it transpired, was another Craig project. By the time records by Paperclip People were released, efforts at disguise were becoming half-hearted.
Commercial sense was beginning to suggest that it was time to capitalise on the reputation that he had earned for himself. Craig was respected as much for his ability to drive dance floors in clubs from Edinburgh to Tokyo into sweat-drenched mayhem, as for his determination to bring intellectual rigour to the music that has been called the Motown of the 1990s, Detroit techno. But just when he might have been capitalising on his title as the leading figure in futuristic sci-fi dance music, Craig has recently taken another side-step. He has begun touring with a jazz band.
Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, the sound of Detroit techno vied with the House sound of Chicago as the soundtrack of the dance music explosion. When the movement formerly known as Acid House began to relocate from small clubs into larger venues and even into fields, its DJs still tended to play both sorts of music, picking the best records from each scene. Increasingly, however, audiences began to differentiate between the two sounds.
Unlike the House music typical of Chicago, the Detroit sound was less fixated on the voice, and on a classic soul feel. Detroit techno never aspired to the directly inspirational impact of Chicago music. Instead it looked towards the future, trying almost to make a music that could only seem warm in retrospect. It was about carefully managed repetition: about clean, pure, but hopefully always unfamiliar sounds; and Craig, along with his mentor, Derrick May, has been perhaps its most powerful driving force. Growing up in Detroit in the 1980s, young Craig's first interests were in his big brother's record collection. Not only in records by funky space lieutenants like Parliament and Funkedelic, but also in the big noise abstract bands, particularly Led Zeppelin, though as he explains quickly "stuff from Houses of the Holy, now, not that other stuff, I mean Stairway to Heaven? Who gives a damn . . . ?"
Soon enough, however, he was listening to the work of the German electronic pioneers Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. "At that stage," says Craig, "we listened to all sorts of things. It was very different to the way it is now, when people just listen to one type of music. We listened to whatever came out." His first contact with the instruments of the new music came at Henry Ford College in Detroit. Like many people who came into contact with early synthesisers, sequencers and samplers, Craig's instructors and fellow pupils were interested in the way these impressive new machines might produce passable imitations of traditional instruments.
"The majority of the people were interested in making pop records. They wanted the drum machines and whatever to make backing tracks. Basically, they were still interested in guitars . . . " Craig says with a note of disgust. "Our instructor had an idea about the synthesiser taking over, about how you could make great brass sounds . . . bunch of buffoons," he trails off.
When he describes the growth of Detroit techno, Craig is as likely to reel off the names of cherished and innovative synthesiser designs as musicians; and when he comes to give a rapid-fire history of the electronic music of his home town, he talks about "the revelation of the DX7 and the M1."
Craig's imagination was fired by how unlike conventional instruments these collections of noise processors could sound; how strange bleeps and flutters and twisted squeals could be marshalled into a music that did not look to the past, to rock'n'roll, as its touchstone of authenticity. "The interesting thing about those synthesisers was that you could get them to sound like some instrument, but not really sound like it. It would be like a version of the instrument from another planet. To imitate instruments seemed like going forward, where what I wanted to do was to create abstract sound - sounds from the future."
Which is why it is still a little strange that Carl Craig's latest project should be fronting Innerzone Orchestra, a jazz trio, albeit one that plays an alien, scifi bop. Craig has gathered jazz musicians Francisco Mora, a former drummer with Sun Ra's Archestra, and bass player Rodney Whitaker, who has been known to fly from Innerzone gigs to play with the likes of Wynton Marsalis and Yusef Latifa. Together they blend modern electronics with traditional jazz instruments into what Craig describes as "funky avant garde jazz craziness" that is "beyond mind-blowing".
The whole event would be akin to Bob Dylan going electric if it were not for the fact that the world has grown up a little since the 1960s, and Craig's hardcore fans almost demand such eclectic swerves. From the strange, warped dancefloor music he makes with Paperclip People, to the nets of chimes and washes that escape under his own name on albums like Landcruising and his most recent, More Songs About Food And Revolutionary Art, Carl Craig, after all, has never seen himself as a purveyor of mindless dance music. His musical creations may have found themselves gradually woven into mass culture, but since his earliest work, he has attempted to make music that he, without hesitation, calls avant garde.
"You have to go to the past before you can go into the future; that's why we learn history. You can only go further on if you can understand what people have done in the past. Techno is supposed to be about going into the future, but if you listen to the majority of techno that's happening now, it's boring. It's like everybody is making the same record over and over again. It's all just totally boring."
IF Craig's own attitude to music as a teenager would probably have let him enjoy the sort of music he wants to make now, he has less faith in young audiences in the United States these days.
"I think there is a new generation coming around who are as much influenced by what is happening on television as what is happening in their own surroundings. Most techno musicians in Detroit, for example, don't have videos, so they are missing out one huge segment of the market which just won't notice music unless there is a video attached," says Craig "In Britain and in Europe the situation is not as bad yet, because cable television is only starting to get really popular now, so they are still capable of reaching out. In some ways it's still cool to be knowledgeable about music in general, to be worldly in the sense of not just accepting what is given to you. That's the way I was when I was 17. But now, with MTV, you have clubs that virtually come to you in your house. There's no need to experiment."
Innerzone Orchestra play The Red Box tomorrow. Doors open at 9.30 p.m.
