Carl Craig, Detroit techno's finest

Detroit techno ace Carl Craig likes to tell a story about the time he and his ex-wife were buying food at a local deli. As they were leaving, they noticed three sandwiches in the bag instead of two, and when they looked closer they saw the words "demo tape on rye" scrawled on one of them.

It turned out that the man behind the counter wanted to get his music heard in the most original way he knew how. "I don't know if he'd thought of it the night before or saw me walk in and decided to do it," says Craig. "But anybody who had that inventiveness had to have the imagination to make good beats."

Craig has long been widely considered one of dance music's most influential musicians. He operates predominantly within the field of electronica, and can generally be labelled a techno artist, in part because of his origins and heritage. However, he is much more than that.

Working under a number of aliases and pseudonyms, Craig has been involved with many musical projects, both by himself and with collectives, that constantly defy categorisation. Apart from being a techno master, he's a jazz composer, a creator of ambient soundscapes, and an early producer of drum'n'bass and breakbeat. Hong Kong's electronic music fans will get to hear him for the first time on November 15 at Zuma in Central, where he will be performing with German techno duo Pan-Pot.

Born in Detroit in the summer of 1969 to a teacher assistant mother and a postal worker father, Craig felt a natural disdain for school, and by age five had begun rooting through the family record collection, dancing to the Jackson 5's Dancing Machine when his parents were out of the house. Five years later, he bought his first record: The Ohio Players' Honey.

As night fell over Detroit, the influential radio show hosted by the DJ known as The Electrifying Mojo provided Craig's musical education, exposing him to artists as diverse as Talking Heads, Prince, Blondie, Herbie Hancock, Kraftwerk and James Brown, along with a range of hip hop and Italo-disco. Before long he had picked up a guitar and his first synthesiser, a Prophet 600, and by the time he had entered his teens, Detroit was on the verge of giving birth to a new form of music: techno.

In 1983, the nascent electro scene was in full swing with local artists such as Cybotron playing at parties across Detroit. By the middle of that decade, the "first wave" of techno artists emerged. Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson — known as the "Belleville Three" — were five or six years older than Craig, but that didn't stop the teenager trying to get in with them. Luckily, one of Craig's cousins had connections to another formidable techno artist, Jeff Mills, and Craig was already checking out the nightclubs. By 1989, Craig had become the unofficial leader of techno's "second wave".