In our newest feature we select some of our favourite past, present and future classics of the recorded format. Robert Hood’s minimal nation takes pride of place in our first edition for it’s timeless sound and genre-defying qualities.
Stamped on the run-off of the vinyl version of Robert Hood’s Minimal Nation it says; “Music for the progressive.” What was probably little more than a bit of fun from the producer and his engineer Ron Murphy, would become prescient. By the time Resident Advisor would review yet another repress of the record in 2013; they would claim Hood “codified the sound of minimalist techno for decades to come.”
It’s true, everything based on Techno, and even Trance, can be traced back to that record in some way or another like an Erdös-Bacon number of music. As RA said “every granular element of Minimal Nation is purposeful” and that bears direct correlation to a style of Techno where space and atmosphere is everything and the hypnotic nature of repetition holds the listener/dancer in a transcendent locked groove.
Armed with little more than a drum machine and a synthesiser, Robert Hood not only made one of the most significant records in Techno’s sprawling history, but also coined the term for a whole sub-genre that in part formed out of this record, even if much has lost touch with these roots. Today minimal as a genre has somewhat distanced itself from the formidable presence of Techno in general, but everything brandishing the Techno ensign, could be categorised by the very same characteristics that encompass Minimal Nation. Very few have managed to do it quite in the same way or with the same power as Robert Hood did back in 1993.
At the time of recording the record Hood was “one step away from being homeless” according to an interview with Red Bull Music article. He had been living hand to mouth in Detroit, working in the orbit of Jeff Mills and Mike Banks, but making Hip-Hop under the Rob Noise alias. Listening to an early track called Sins Against the Race, all the ingredients for what would become Robert Hood are there – the unconventional drum-programming, the concentrated focus on making each element count, and the energy – but with hint of the political zeitgeist of Public Enemy thrown in the mix. An instrumental version of this track could be classified as a House track and even with the vocal, this would sit comfortably alongside any Masters At Work record from the same time.
In his RBMA lecture, Hood would confirm that it was the “Sparse minimal production” of records like RUN DMC’s debut that laid the foundation of his own sound as a Techno producer, and as early as 1990 we could hear whispers of the future artist in a record like “Sins Against the Race.”
Hood abandoned his Hip Hop alias almost before it really got a foothold, claiming he didn’t enjoy rapping on his music. Setting his sights on Techno, possibly influenced by Jeff Mills own transition from the wizard, he was hoping to enlist the help of Jeff and Mike on production, but they were busy elsewhere and suggested; “best thing you can do is start to produce yourself, and to get equipment, and to learn how to produce yourself if you’re serious,” according to the Red Bull article.
“The machines I had were pawnshop instruments, like for one hundred dollars or so, and I would have to make it talk,” he reflects in an Attack Magazine article. With a small arsenal of what would become legendary machines, Hood set about making what would become Minimal Nation for Jeff Mills’ Axis Records eventually.
“One Touch” introduces an LP with a sound that emanates throughout. The spartan nature invites even though it pulses at a breathy 130 BPM. “It was about subtracting” and undermining the monolith that had become rave culture as the antithesis of the over-hyped superstar DJ and producer.
Even by 1993 rave culture had reached a height of popularity – possibly shadowed by anything in today’s standard – and people like Robert Hood and Underground Resistance were actively resisting the wave of a trend. “Back in the days of rave culture, I noticed that it became more about the samples and the hype than the soul and the soul was always just so important to me, it was imperative that I inject soul into it.”
For the soul to exist it had to be devoid of any superfluous inflections. That idea of soul was so central to Minimal Nation that even when prompted by the Fader journalist some years later; “Why do you call minimal techno ‘soul music’?” Hood had a well-refined response ready. “Because of its diminutive nature. It’s simple, stripped-down rhythm tracks, and even though it’s focused on minimum structure, it’s focused on maximal soul.”
The soul would have to come from human intervention of robotic machines. “It’s about me laying hands on these machines and humanising them,” he told Attack Magazine. He would compare the machines as the voice, anointed onto him from God (Hood ios an ordained Minister today), with him as the transponder between the physical and the spiritual world. The spirituality aside, the minimal and the repetitive nature of the music would evoke trance-like comparisons not just in the media but from the audiences too. “This is real trance music,” he proclaimed in that RBMA lecture; “ It was hypnotic.”
Robert Hood’s ideas to create “rhythms inside of rhythms” came from necessity. His ”pawn shop“ arsenal of instruments forced Hood to approach the music with a surgical precision to get as much out of each element as possible. That granular sound he created, and that would eventually become his sound was the result of his own circumstances as much as by design. It would still take an outsider to confirm his suspicions when he did fall upon it.
It was the Josh Wink collaborator and super producer, King Britt who would say “Wow, what you’re doing with this Juno 2 and all that – it’s just different. You got something good with this. This is your sound.” That spurred Robert Hood on his quest and directly influenced the track “The Rhythm of Vision” which was Hood proclaiming “this is my rhythm”; Vision being the alias he went under at Underground Resistance.
Finding his rhythm however only went some way in finding his sound and it would be legendary Detroit engineer Ron Murphy, whose subtle final touches completed the LP. Hood places a lot of credit on the sound of the record. It was Ron’s “foresight to add a little reverb here and there where it needed it,” that would become a big part of the record.
The splashes of reverb are faint, but they are just enough to liven the upper parts of the percussion in avoiding bland repetition. It’s Hood’s use of thos interlacing rhythms that provide the space however and the atmosphere in this record. He would often mention his Jazz influences and there are similarities to a record like Max Roach’s M’Boom on Minimal Nation. It feeds from a tradition of experimenting with the reductive possibilities of quite complex structures, and Robert Hood and Minimal Nation is a direct descendant of that ideology.
Would it have the same effect and encourage the same similarities if it was released under its original title, “Axis Authorized Repetition.” I would think so, but Minimal Nation is just the perfect name for this LP. In hindsight it’s significance even surpasses the record, lending its name to a whole subgenre of Techno.
There is no one particular track that stands out, although any could work on a dance floor and still does today. It’s the entire record and the consistency of it that makes this a classic record, one that has some timeless qualities associated with it today and still falls between the cracks of something as omnipotent as Techno. It was a significant record in the genre’s history and yet it transcends the DJ booth and the club context. There’s more to it than the functional demand of the DJ set, but it would still work in the backdrop of even modern Techno, and yet it lives inconspicuously on a set of headphones.
From “One Touch” to “Sleep Cycle”, you still find it difficult to pull away from the allure of this record. It sucks you into its spatial vacuum where time and space dissolve into the hypnotic reverence.