Delayed with... Craig Gonzalez
Some DJs treat genre boundaries like walls; others see them as doors. Craig Gonzalez belongs firmly to the latter camp. A staple of Detroit’s underground and a resident DJ at Paxahau’s Third Thursday monthly, he has long been drawn to what happens when techno’s linear propulsion collides with the restless syncopation of drum & bass. That liminal space, the “grey area” between the two, has become one of the most fertile playgrounds in electronic music over the past decade, and Gonzalez shows why. In this mix, recorded as the opening set on the Movement main stage, he handles tempo as a fluid variable, shifting gears without friction and letting polyrhythms function as the connective tissue. It’s the kind of approach that resists the obvious peak and instead builds a topology of groove, a groove that bends but doesn’t break, carrying dancers across time signatures almost without them noticing.
And while opening a stage that would later host Deepchord, Sama’ Abdulhadi, Octave One, and Jeff Mills could be seen as a daunting warm-up role, Gonzalez treats it less as preparation and more as architecture. Across ninety minutes, he layers patterns with patience, calibrating intensity so that tension rises and releases without tipping into spectacle. The set moves like a conversation that shifts from whispers to declarations, never overstated but always persuasive. It’s a reminder that flow is not just sequencing but narrative logic, and that true mastery lies not in domination of a dancefloor but in shaping the conditions for everything that comes after.