A Produce is Transported R.I.P.

by John Diliberto 9/10/2011

A Produce A.K.A. Barry Craig Passes

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Barry Craig passed away on September 4, 2011. You may not have known him by that name, but you might be familiar with the music he produced over the last two and a half decades as A Produce.  He was featured heavily on Echoes, especially in the 1990s when he was most prolific.

It’s sad to take note of Barry’s passing since he’s in the Echoes generation of musicians if you will; artists who are about my age who grew up listening to the same music.  Steve Roach, Robert Rich,  Michael Stearns, Steve Tibbetts are all artists who fall into this group, the now 60-somethings, and that’s much too early to leave the planet.  As A Produce, Barry Craig created sweeping expanses of sound that owed a debt to Steve Roach.  But unlike Roach, A Produce usually had a hint of melody in his music, even in some of his most abstract, drone-zone works.   I interviewed Barry in 1996 and looking back on it, it seems to sum up this musician as a man and as an artist.

Sitting in his apartment at the corner of a busy intersection in Glendale, California, it was a different kind of ambience that dominated the room. “That’s ambient traffic noise out there,” said Craig sardonically. “People are waiting to turn at the stop sign there and have their radios cranked. And the windows down.” It was a wonder how he made his music amidst the noise. “I sort of wait for the spaces in between,” he said. Once I’m into it, I’ve got the volume up a little bit, I can tune out the rest or tune in more of what my sounds are.

Before he lost his hair, but following the demise of After Image, A Produce began making the move away from guitar. He was seduced by synthesizers and their possibility to create landscapes of sound. The early results can be heard on his 1988 debut album, The Clearing. “The Clearing was a very minimalistic album,” observed Craig. “At the time I described it in a stuff I sent out with the promo copies as a… What did I call it? Something about an abstract, well, I forget, but anyway it was an exploration in abstract sound or conceptual space, that’s what I called it…. I had played guitar in a band here in Los Angeles in the early 80s and really hadn’t done much with keyboards or synthesizers and I’d just started to get interested in that and so it was very much a transitional album going from a rock environment in to more of an ambient one.”

Since The Clearing, A Produce released dozens of CDs on his own Tranceport label as well as the Hypnos label. If his influences aren’t apparent in the music, he reveals them in his instrumental credits.  He gives his sounds names like Wavestation, Hassell Air, Somber Reptiles and Fripp Vs Room, nodding to the first generation of modern ambient musicians.

By now, you might be wondering why Barry Craig was known as A Produce.  He says it was given to him by another musician who wanted Craig to produce him. “Then, when the band later got together he started giving everybody names,” recalled the synthesist. “He was R Dash. There was another guy named I B Morgan. I was A Producer. And we later dropped the “r.” I told you it wouldn’t be that interesting but that’s how it happened folks.”

Whether he went by A Produce or Barry Craig, he never became a household name, even within the limited world of the ambient scene.  But A Produce did slowly build a following, selling a couple of thousand copies of each record, mostly thru word of mouth in the pre-social media times.  With a studio in what would normally be a dining room, he was content to create the soundscapes of the unconscious. “I see myself as doing a deep listening kind of music,” he avers. “Music for contemplation, meditation. The name of my label is Transport, something that transports you out of your daily routine and puts you into a space where your thoughts can travel.”

Barry Craig died of natural causes on September 4, 2011 in Los Angeles, CA. He left behind his wife Jane, parents Jim and Doris, and sisters Cheryl and Laurie. His most recent CD release in 2011 was INTANGIBLE, performed by A Produce & Loren Nerell. His catalog is currently being reissued by the Independent Records Project,

A Produce transported us for years.  Now he’s been transported himself.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))