It's easy to approach Versus — a long-gestating collaboration between Detroit's electronic-music deity Carl Craig, the Paris-based Les Siècles Orchestra (under the direction of François-Xavier Roth) and techno-loving classical pianist Francesco Tristano — as the latest attempt to bring club music to the rarefied atmosphere of a concert hall. This desire has seduced many an artist during the recording age — from jazz symphonists, Third Streamers and rock opera conceptualists, to exquisite post-modernists like Jeff Mills and Kendrick Lamar — with varying degrees of creative success. And Carl Craig cops to that ambition from the get-go, in the liner notes, calling these orchestral interpretations of his tracks "a dream come true."
Yet, it's also clear that Versus is a far more nuanced beast. Not only because almost half of its tracks are electronic miniatures, offering sharp synthesizer relief to the symphonic grandeur at its heart; but because some of this music — Tristano's arrangements of Craig's tracks, and, importantly, of tracks originally made as remixes — hints at just what a great marriage of contemporary orchestra, techno compositions and musical brains fluent in both could produce.
"The Melody" opens as a duet between Tristano and a plucked acoustic bass, a majestic jazz song; and when the 4/4 kick arrives, the belief is that we're floating towards comforting jazzy, house music waters. Instead, the drum-machine suddenly settles into an accompanying role, a deeply melodic interplay between brass, strings and woodwinds ensues; and when the house kick returns, it has sliced-up all that's come before, plus injecting a little bit of Prince's purple life into the after-genre party.
"Domina," the album's only major piece without a drum-machine and its longest, moves in a different direction entirely. Underpinned by rich viola drones and played lower in the register than the rest of the album, it is a nod to Moritz von Oswald as composer (he is one-half of Maurizio) and as dub architect. Craig's mix of the bass and brass stabs is drenched in echo, with a tour de force Tristano mirroring the stabs on the piano, then carrying on the rhythm as the piece continues to gorgeously mutate, it's center disintegrating and only the syncopation between the instruments left holding it together.