ROBERT HOOD: MINIMAL NATION (M-PLANT)

In 1994, an album was released that shook a stale, drug added techno scene to its foundations. A series of grooving, warping, strangely alien tracks all rooted at around 138bpm with only the loosest connection to anything previously heard. It forced established producers around the world to rethink their approach to making music, inspired a generation of young, hungry composers and invented a genre of music ten years before anyone else caught up. The artist responsible was Robert Hood, the music was minimal techno and the album was Minimal Nation.
From his time as Minister of Information with Underground Resistance, right up to
last years pounding Fabric mix and beyond, the M-Plant label founder and one of Detroit’s three kings can safely be labelled a pioneer in every sense of the word. With a history entwined in cutting edge D-Town music, from abstract MCing in the eighties, to the continued development of modern techno, his influence throughout electronic music is undisputable.
Now widely revered as one of the most important and defining techno records ever made, Minimal Nation was Hood’s protest, a forty minute fist raised at a musical movement he saw as having been reduced to, in his own words, “one big sample”. The album saw him strip his music of much of its bulk, and using a Juno 2 keyboard fuse a much replicated but never bettered collection of sounds with furious, insistent beats and other-worldly effects with mathematical precision.
Now re-released with unheard tracks from the original sessions and backed up with a healthy world tour, Minimal Nation has worn its fifteen years well. Much of the music retains a looped, acidesque flavour of the era, yet when heard in their original context, the noises that have been copied, borrowed, stolen and re-hashed by an army of subsequent artists, are as fresh and livid as ever. Tracks Rhythm Of Vision, and Unix use their distinctive hypnotic chords to create urgent, unsettling soundscapes, while One Touch with its filters cycling the grooves down to nothing and then back again, slowly teases the elements in and out of the mix, constructing a deeply complex and downright funky mantra from the simplest of building blocks.
On the other side of the coin, Station Rider E features a reverse-delayed warbling melody underpinned with a groovy as fuck mutating bassline and gradually layered beats and Museum unleashes nothing more than four chords and an almost playfully perverted synth line over skittery hats, a bellowing kick and an intense ride cymbal to prove that, to quote Hood again, “in order to maximise the feeling of the music, sometimes we have to subtract”
Though the stuff today labelled as ‘minimal’ often has more in common with the bloated, complacent music that drove Hood to write his masterpiece, it’s not hard to draw an almost straight line connecting this album and the music currently being danced to by an indeterminate number of skintight prada sporting Italians fifteen years later in pacha. It revealed the soul in the machine, shows that when you flay the effects, layers, samples and vocals from the bones of techno, there is, still beating, a heart of pure energy with the ability to connect with the deepest and most primal part of the human psyche: the part that loses itself in repetition, patterns and the unfamiliar becoming familiar; the part that yearns for simple shared experience; ultimately the most human part of us all.