Carl Craig: Sway & King Tech, Vol. 6 : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

With the discipline of a gene splicer, Detroit techno legend Carl Craig turns future beats into jazz and piano breaks into extraterrestrial interludes. On this collection of some of his remixes, Craig sends a disparate array of tracks through his own electronic finishing school, and most of them come out looking as sleek as Bryan Ferry. Craig sticks a meditative piano into the middle of Johnny Blas' "Picadillo," transforming the tune into an abstract Latin loop; he also stretches the shopping-mall funk of Incognito's "Out of the Storm" into outer-galaxy pensiveness. Like most DJ sets, Designer Music builds from the easy-beat numbers up to the stompers; this time, the pinnacle is "Buena Vida," Craig's acidic rewiring of Kevin Saunderson and Inner City's 1988 anthem "Good Life." Craig turns the breezy classic into a shuddering, psychedelic stunner. Remixes, like cover songs, are often just reanimations of older hits, but "Buena Vida" is a top-to-bottom reinvention, throbbing with so much flavor and funk that it could set the course of techno for the next ten years. (RS 850)

PAT BLASHILL