AMG Review of Sessions

Andy Kellman
All Music Guide

Compiling each Carl Craig remix would be a several-disc box set undertaking. The pool from which to draw is wide and deep, from Nexus 21's 1989 track "(Still) Life Keeps Moving" through Junior Boys' Grammy nominated "Like a Child." Hopefully just the first way of addressing this large stockpile of varied tracks, Sessions is a two-disc set mixed by Craig that focuses primarily on his remixes (of tracks by others as well as himself) while interspersing a few original mixes of his productions. Though the set reaches back to 1992 for Chez Damier's synthetic-handclap-happy "Help Myself," there's a clear emphasis on Craig's more recent activities, with well over half of the tracks dating from 2004 or later. While he hadn't quite pulled a disappearing act during the late '90s and very early 2000s -- 2002's The Workout being one of the most improperly slept-on house/techno mixes of the last several years -- he underwent something of a rebirth around 2003, releasing a string of unpredictable and high-quality productions while developing into one of the hottest remixers on the planet. Most of the big re-workings are here in original or "exclusive," meaning slightly different, form: the low-key hiss-and-ping of Junior Boys' "Like a Child," Faze Action's searing/surging "In the Trees," Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom's spiraling "Relevee." In most cases -- Theo Parrish's "Falling Up" being the one major exception -- Craig's versions outstrip the originals not just by making them more palatable to moving bodies but also by teasing out elements and supplementing them with new wrinkles to make headphone listening as stimulating as dancefloor play. Remaining vital in any field for 20 years is an achievement, but doing so while forecasting and riding the rapid developments in dance music is something else entirely. This release goes some distance -- about as far as possible in two and a half hours -- to acknowledge that notion.