Desire: The Carl Craig Story review – serious notes on a techno legend

The Guardian

07-05-2025

T his film about Detroit's techno-scene éminence grise Carl Craig is as sober, goatee-stroking and serious as the kind of liner notes that squeezed into a tiny font to fit thousands of words into an album gatefold. That's a compliment; an air of scholarly sobriety suits the subject, a man just a quarter of a generation younger than Detroit DJ legends such as Derrick May or Kevin Saunderson who helped to create the distinctive electronic sound that Craig would expand and experiment with.
Don't worry if you hardly know anything about techno, or Craig himself, because director Jean-Cosme Delaloye skilfully delineates who he is and what's significant about him via long snatches of Craig's music and insightful interviews with his friends, family and peers. That last group includes a goodly wodge of Brits, such as DJ Gilles Peterson, musician Roni Size and writer Gamall Awad, who fill in just how Craig was influenced by acts like Throbbing Gristle and Gary Numan, and in turn how influential he was on the European techno scene. Meanwhile, many of Craig's other contemporaries and collaborators expound on his debt to jazz (the interview with Sun Ra-associate Francisco Mora Catlett is particularly delightful) and other forms of music.
It's a common complaint that music documentaries – unless they are in the classical realm – are seldom sufficiently musicological, but this one gets much more down and dirty than most with talk of acoustics, key changes and the influence of industrial rhythms. It turns out Craig's early sound was inspired by his work in a copy shop where he spent all day listening to the sorting mechanisms clacking away – who knew?
If anything, Delaloye errs somewhat in the opposite direction: Craig remains something of an enigma by the end, a dapper but often monochromatic figure given to elaborate headwear but circumspect and cautious in his conversation. A little more perspective on the techno scene, especially in its current form where it seems increasingly dependent on an ageing demographic, would have been welcome too, but I guess no documentary can be all things to all viewers.
Desire: The Carl Craig Story is in UK and Irish cinemas from 8 May.