Synopsis

From the stage of Movement Festival in downtown Detroit, Carl Craig can see thousands of revelers dancing to the techno tracks he has been spinning for over two hours. On this warm spring night, the legendary producer and deejay from Motor City is clearly enjoying the sight of the crowd moving to the thick growl of bass at the foot the iconic tower of General Motors headquarters because he is finally home.

The electronic music producer has come a long way since making his first tracks of techno in his bedroom in the late 1980s. At the time, he sought to express the trance-like state he felt listening to the mechanical and repetitive beats of the copy machines in the store he worked in as a young man. Throughout his career, the artist born in 1969, never lost the will to embrace and reinvent the sound of the machines of the automated assembly lines that’s ceasing put an entire generation of workers out of employment and created havoc in a city scarred by the 1967 race riots.

When Detroit techno was created in the early 1980s, Underground Resistance, its first recording label, championed the activism inherited from the Black Panthers. This spirit of rebellion has remained one of the core tenets of techno throughout the years. And when George Floyd was killed by a white policeman in 2020, techno was inseparable from the calls of the Black Lives Matter movement in Detroit for a radical transformation of American society that would finally break free from endemic racism.

RHYTHMS OF TOMORROW recounts the 30-year quest of Carl Craig to create a specific atmosphere through his futuristic techno. This film is an immersion into the roots of this sonic warfare inspired by mythic technology whose aesthetics derives from the imagery of science fiction. Thanks to a mosaic of testimonies ranging from Carlos Santana to the Swiss producer Mirko Loko and the French deejays DJ Deep and Laurent Garnier, the film draws the portrait of Carl Craig, an artist whose fame transcends the world of techno.

The film will take audiences from Detroit to the Montreux Jazz Festival, where Carl Craig, an artist deeply inspired by jazz, performed in July 2022. It will also make stops in Paris, New York, Berlin, Lausanne and Verbier, where Carl Craig will perform at the Polaris Festival in November 2022. The journey will end in Los Angeles in the spring of 2023, where Carl Craig will inaugurate his Party/After Party exhibition at MOCA, the famous Museum of Contemporary Art which he will transform into an underground club.
 

“Detroit and its music have a soul.

We gave a soul to the machines, that's how techno became what it is today”.

Carl Craig

Why this film

Carl Craig. This name will speak to different generations and to different audiences. For some, the name will evoke memorable parties deep into the night. For others, it will be synonym of unexpected shows with classical orchestras at Carnegie Hall or at La Cité de la Musique in Paris. And some others will know Carl Craig not as a deejay, but as an artist they can find at Dia Beacon, Art Basel and soon at MOCA at Los Angeles.
 

To understand why Carl Craig is so popular, you just need to attend one of the deejay sets. You will find a crowd of forty-something, who have been listening to his music for three decades, mingling with a younger crowd. This is the reason why I am convinced about the potential of this film I have been wanting to make for a long time.

Techno music was the soundtrack of my teenage years and of my first steps into adulthood. It was the music of the party I was attending the day I met my wife. And it is the sound I escape to when I return from reporting in conflict zones.

Many of us have an intimate relationship with techno music. And Carl Craig is definitely one of the biggest names in that field. He is not only one of the creators of the sound, he also stands out as its thinker. To Carl Craig, techno is not just a party beat. It has been a rhythm and way of life. It is also the sound of rebellion in the city of Detroit, where a generation of young Black people decided to transcend a still segregated society in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

RHYTHM OF TOMORROW, the name of the film, comes from an expression coined by Alvin Toffler, an American writer and futurist who spent his life studying the impact of the digital revolution on our society. “Millions are already attuning their lives to the rhythms of tomorrow”, he wrote in 1980 in his book The Third Wave. Others, terrified of the future, are engaged in a desperate, futile flight into the past and are trying to restore the dying world that gave them birth. The dawn of this new civilization is the single most explosive fact of our lifetimes”.

Spending time in Detroit, allowed me to understand how Carl Craig’s music was the soundtrack of the new civilization described by Alvin Toffler. This is also how I conceive the film and portrait of Carl Craig. It will be musical and will have a singular aesthetic, with animation scenes inspired by the world of science fiction to which techno is closely linked.
 

Director's statement

Carl Craig’s music and Detroit techno more broadly has been the soundtrack of my life since my late teenager years. I used to go and watch Carl when he mixed in a now defunct club in the city I grew up in Switzerland. Since then, his mind-blowing sound has been the sound I would escape to after covering tragedies around the world first as a reporter then as a filmmaker. When I moved to Brooklyn, in the early 2000s, I was often drawn to stories in Detroit because I wanted to explore the city that had given birth to music I appreciated so much.

When Carl agreed to make this film with me a couple of years ago, a dream came true. But after the joy came the sudden realization that being trusted with such a groundbreaking sound and life’s story, was a major responsibility. That trust is a precious gift for a filmmaker and I felt I had to live up to it. 
    
I was determined to make a film that was as creative and as interesting as Carl’s music. I did not want “Desire: The Carl Craig Story” to be a chronological account of his career. To me, what Carl had created and how he had created it, was always more important than the question of when he had done it. I wanted people to embark on a musical journey with Carl so that by the end of the film, they could truly appreciate his pioneering sound for what it is and how it came to be.

The production has been an incredibly enriching experience. The crew and I followed Carl all over the world at a breakneck pace. We got to see the other side of the party, when the lights go out in the club and Carl only has a few hours to rest before heading to the next event. We were afforded full access to an artist whose humility rivals his creativity. We created a film driven by an extraordinary soundtrack around “Desire”, a magnificent track that defines Carl and that lent its name to this film. Because ultimately, this film is about our desire to move people in the same way Carl has for more than three decades.