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In Depth: Carl Craig Impresses The Importance Of Showing Love For Detroit

"...you almost have to make sure that it is possible that people can be exposed to your music and to the history of the whole thing [at the same time]"And it feels like, with Detroit Love, you’re adopting a mentor like role, helping the next generation come through by supporting them at events… In some cases I am raising a new generation; there's not only my kids, who are the next generation, but there's always going to be new generations of people who discover music in the way that I discovered music from people way after they were gone – for instance people like John Coltrane or Sun Ra. In the same way people are learning about my music and learning about the music of Detroit, so you almost have to make sure that it is possible that people can be exposed to your music and to the history of the whole thing [at the same time]. It’s funny that you mentioned your biological family as a new generation… I mean Kevin Saunderson’s son Dantiez is joining us (and you) for the Detroit Love event here at the end of November… Dantiez is really exciting. He's really excited to do what he's doing. He's grown up in it because when Dantiez and DaMarii (Kevin’s other son) were pre-teens they were on stage with his dad, watching him DJ. And of course it’s important not only because I've known those kids for a long time but because the excitement that’s gone into Dantiez. He's like a machine right now. He's really doing a lot of great stuff and working really hard. Would you recommend music as a viable path to young people? Yes, of course. I think it's important to always have new generations that can adopt and take over, creatively, because if it wasn't for me then maybe a lot of people wouldn't have known about what people like Juan were doing, or without MK a lot of people may not have known about what Kevin was doing. One thing that’s important for people to know about the music is that the younger generation always need come in and put their spin on it. I’m always curious about what other younger artists that you're aware of in Detroit that you think are showing a lot of promise...? I mean the main two are Jay Daniel and Kyle Hall that are already around. And definitely Dantiez and DaMarii Saunderson, they are looking really hot.
"Most Detroiters that come out to play are proud to play music that we’ve been working on and testing out."And knowing that you’ve done a lot of Detroit Love events in Ibiza, do you feel that Europe is still better at supporting Detroit techno artists than the USA is? On the whole Europe is still the strongest because all the countries are really close to each other and the information gets around very quickly. Asia's different because it's mainly Japan but Japan can't handle all the interest in Asia. It seems that South America is becoming more of an emerging market, which I'm really quite happy about, but in the US it's still very trend based. Now that people have been ridiculing EDM so bad I think there might be another lull in the dance music community until people jump onto the next big thing. I think a lot of people had kind of hoped that there would eventually be a trickledown effect from all these kids getting into EDM, that they’d be actively looking for and discovering more and more underground music. Have you seen any evidence of that actually happening in the US of yet? It only really happens in big cities… so New York, LA, San Francisco, Miami… but you have to remember that it’s 300,000 million people and 3000 miles from east to west, so it's a lot of territory. If New York was kind of the centre of the country in the same way that London is and it was a lot smaller country I think we would be able to see that trickledown more obviously. So what is the actual experience of a Detroit Love event like? What we can expect? Detroit Love has always been about playing good music and presenting it in a way that's very Detroit-centric - you don't necessarily have to play all Detroit records but it's just that mind of how you play it. Plus there's a Detroit way of playing it. Most Detroiters that come out to play are proud to play music that we've been working on and testing out, they’re giving people treats whether they expect it or not. We do our best to try to make sure that we give out treats every time we play. The treat is in the music.
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