Bringing The Underground Back To New York _ Interview With Craft

Craft surfaces for a chat..

INTERVIEW WITH CRAFT – BRINGING THE UNDERGROUND BACK TO NEW YORK

By: Colin Kraan

At the age of 14, Craft (real name Daniel Ciocio, ed.) bought himself his technics 1200’s and Vestax mixer to start his journey into the world of electronic music. From 1999 on he began producing music under the name “Craft”. Now the born New Yorker performs regularly in the NYC underground techno scene where he also has established his ‘Twice as Proper’ techno events. Subsekt sat down with Craft in Amsterdam during his European album tour to talk about his background, the NYC underground techno scene and his forthcoming new album.

For most of the techno minded people, you’re a new cat in the scene, although you are already making music for 15 years now. Can you tell us in short who Craft is and who is inspired by?

I’m just a producer/dj from New York who’s making music now for a lot of years. I mostly play techno and do some parties. Big inspiration comes from Detroit and it’s history. I was heavily influenced by classic legends like Juan Atkins and Jeff Mills.

Besides techno, what else do you play?

Actually, in the past I used to make some downtempo stuff and ambient tracks, and different genres within the techno.

The name Craft, where does it come from?

I started to play with the turntables and got to have all this equipment when I was 14. I realized then you can actually make a story, make an art with music with other art, and layer it. And because everything was done with the hands you’re like crafting a story and that’s the real origin of the name.

Does that maybe imply that you’re only playing vinyl?

Well yeah, at the time, in the mid nineties, I only played vinyl, I played vinyl for 11 years. Now I play with everything, USB, CDJs, controllers sometimes, so everything you can create something with whatever you have in front of you.

You just released your Spatialization of Time EP for Next Week Records in Holland. It sounds very powerful with a focus on the bassline. Is that the real sound of Craft?

Well, I like to play with a lot of energy and with a heavy bassline. I was very excited to be part of this label; the projects and the way they are building it from the ground, the team, the energy, it’s perfect. The ideas for some of these tracks came from my Detroit experiences but also from here, from events like Awakenings and especially from guys like Speedy J. That’s the way it came out and it had to be like that for me.

Your new album was expected to be released in june 2014. Is it already out, because this tour is named European album tour?

Well it’s doing well, its actually the Pristine Generation album, it’s for a friend of mine in New York, for his label (Aerotropic, ed.). The concept behind it is bringing back some older tunes that we reworked a bit. so it consists of all those audio stories from many different places, from different cd’s at different times in life which each have a story. So it’s not a banging techno album, it’s more an album which explains the path I followed in all those years. But well, it’s out now, and it’s nice to say that three tracks have already been featured in a Mexican gangster movie, for the scenes of the bad guys and that movie is going to be projected in theatres at the end of the year too.