Rhythm, Roots and Spirituality: Connecting the Dots with Robert Hood

Detroit techno is many things to many people. It’s a form that has evolved from the earliest experiments of Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson – through the fast-paced and militant interpretations of Underground Resistance, the space-gazing otherworldliness of Jeff Mills and the infinitely diverse musicality of Carl Craig. Each producer has applied their own flavour to the sound; each has acquired their own place in its history.

Yet, if you’re looking for a figure that has increasingly carved a solitary path through several eras and myriad permutations of the genre, Robert Hood seems a particularly fitting candidate for the role of techno’s lone wolf. Having entered the scene as a collaborator with Mills and ‘Mad’ Mike Banks as UR, Hood’s career has since been marked by a particularly inimitable personal vision – one which has seemingly evolved in ever more spiritual ways over the years.  

“I guess I compare myself with Robert Neville from The Omega Man,” says the producer down the phone from his base in Alabama – a rural outpost he has held for the past decade or so, many hundreds of miles away from techno’s decaying urban birthplace in Michigan. His identification with that character played by Charlton Heston in the 1971 sci-fi film comes as no surprise – in 2010 Hood produced the Omega album which was intended as a reinterpretation of the film’s score. The story, one of a man who finds himself on his own in a post-nuclear landscape, strikes a particular chord with Robert when he thinks of how his approach to music developed from early on in his career. “I felt like I was alone in my own world at that time, and I still am.

“A lot of people probably have felt that way, at some time or another. Nobody else can really understand your vision and the way you see things. For me, it’s been a one man journey, literally, in trying to express myself and convey to the listener just who I am as an artist – not just somebody that’s in a group such as Underground Resistance, or belonging to this camp or this record label.”

That’s not to say Robert doesn't cherish the time he spent working with UR and his early forays into production – he speaks warmly of how emotional it was recently, to see for the first time a video of himself performing live with Mills and Banks on stage. But it’s from the time at which he stepped out on his own that we can really pinpoint the makings of Hood’s career in techno – namely his influential involvement in the minimal scene.

Stripped back, rhythmic, but always imbued with soul, the minimal techno sound advanced by Hood has become his defining contribution over the years. His 1994 record Minimal Nation became more or less the blueprint for an explosion of minimal music in subsequent years, though much of it was lacking the Detroit producer’s ingenuity and depth. When asked about such watered down imitations, Hood rather commendably avoids directly critiquing the work of others, in favour of reinforcing the philosophy which guides his own work. “Minimal is artistic expression”, he states assertively. “It’s diminutive, simple artistic expression and to me it’s like a place of solitude.

“It’s not just about [using] a kick drum, a hi-hat, a bassline or some Morse code sound, for the sake of being minimal. It’s about identifying with your soul and with your spirit and finding a way to convey that and express that to whoever is listening. It’s about finding rhythm inside rhythms. If you listen closely to some of those tracks, such as The Rhythm of Vision or Unix and Station Rider E, you sort of find other hidden rhythms inside of the rhythm. It can be very hypnotic. To me that’s the true trance music; you find yourself really lost in it.”

True, more than most techno producers, Robert Hood sculpts engrossingly repetitive tracks which draw you in fully, each miniscule development allowing you to reconceptualise the last, until it seems there is much more to be found in this music than there is, perhaps, in more varied arrangements crafted by less gifted producers.

“I’ve always been drawn to the simplest beats,” Robert explains. He talks of a love of the most basic elements in songs such as Tainted Love by Soft Cell or the music of Man Parrish and Gino Soccio. “I would sit and watch people at basement parties and watch how they reacted to the breakdown on some of these records - 70s and 80s soul records. It’s almost psychological, but it’s also spiritual.”

Spirituality is a prominent theme, both in Hood’s personal life (he is a trained minister) and increasingly in his music too. Where it was perhaps always possible to speak of a general spirituality in his mesmerising music and the way people connect with it, Robert’s personal faith in God has more recently become much more evident in his productions. His increasingly popular Floorplan alias – a warmer, housier take on techno which merges elements of disco and gospel music – has taken Robert in a much more intimate direction musically. This development is one he strongly attributes to becoming more spiritual and he clarifies this by recounting a now familiar tale. “God literally woke me up in my sleep one night,” he affirms with conviction. “He spoke to me and said ‘I want you to put the Gospel message in the music.’

“God told me, ‘I want you to do a record that’s blatantly speaking about who God is and magnifying God.’ I immediately went into the studio and started listening to artists like James Cleveland, Andraé Crouch and gospel artists I grew up on like Aretha Franklin. This message started to form easily. It was just heaven sent.”

There is an authentic air of emotion in Hood’s voice as he recalls his eyes filling with tears in the studio when he was putting together Floorplan’s joyous We Magnify His Name and the Aretha Franklin sampling Never Grow Old. “It was recorded in ‘73,” he says of the latter. “I believe it was in LA, in a typical black church setting. To reach back and grab that from ‘73 and bring it into 2013/2014 is just amazing and I could feel the presence of God when he was using me to produce this record.”

Whether you identify with the religious dimension or not, that idea of connecting with the past is something that has always run through even the most futuristic of Detroit techno music and for Robert there is a family link too. His father was a jazz musician and his mother was a singer in the Motown era and he has said there was always music around when he was a kid. Yet, he has also remarked in the past about how his parents and grandparents, while proud of his achievements, failed to make the link between their era and the techno scene Hood was involved in. Is the Floorplan material partly a way for him to make a more tangible link with his roots in things like Motown and jazz and with earlier generations? “Absolutely,” he confirms.

“I guess I can not only speak for myself, but everybody in Detroit techno. Our parents, for the most part, came from the south and came from the black church. They migrated here in search of a better life. They afforded us the opportunity to not only go to college and get a higher education and a better way of life but also, unwittingly, they made a way for us to be creative and be what we want to be.

“Now, me personally, I feel I owe it to my grandparents and to my parents to connect the dots between that period of migrating from the south, and the sharecroppers coming to the north, facing racism in the automotive industry and so forth – and with the civil rights movement. I guess it’s just paying respect to their struggle in order for their children and grandchildren to be whoever we want to be – astronauts, basically. We’ve become space travellers; time travellers. They probably never imagined that we would forge these new paths in music.” 

That Hood has been instrumental in forming new paths in music is without question. This year he celebrates 20 years of his M-Plant label and his vision for that outlet has been as focused as you might imagine. Formed as a way to further establish his own route, rather than following in the footsteps of his contemporaries, Hood says the intention of the label was to “plant new seeds of a new way of thinking as far as how we approach music.” He speaks of wanting to establish a sound that had immediate resonance with the listener – “that way of just attacking the neural system immediately and getting right inside your head” – in a similarly 'potent' manner to James Brown tracks, which Hood points out can be identified as soon as the needle hits the record. Few would dispute that Robert has achieved similar distinction within techno.

Hood commemorates the life of M-Plant this month with a three CD collection of some of his most seminal tracks released over the last two decades. Yet, he is quick to point out that this will be no farewell compilation. “I wanted it to feel fresh and I wanted it to, not only speak of events that happened in the past, but sort of foretell what’s going to happen with M-Plant in the future – lay out new possibilities. This is not just a collection of greatest hits of M-Plant to chronicle this 20 year journey but to say this is only the beginning; the first chapter. The best is yet to come.”

When asked about what we might expect in 2015 and beyond, he answers with one word in a rather declarative fashion – “Monobox.” With a markedly more introspective and dark flavour than Floorplan, this alias dates back to the mid 90s and its reintroduction earlier this year indicates that Hood still has considerable flex left in his approach. He is quick to admit that there may be some persona juggling involved though, in order to properly execute another shift in perspective. “Floorplan has taken on a life of its own and I find myself competing with myself. It’s just a matter of making chess moves and trying to find a way for everybody to co-exist in the same studio”, he says laughing at the thought. “You know, it’s getting a little bit crowded. 

"We’re working it out, but it’s a matter of just meditating on it, praying about it and I’ll let God dictate to me what plans he has for me."