Whether it’s been a need to constantly create and destroy or the low boredom threshold of an artist’s perspective, Robert Hood remains one of techno’s most evolutionary and revolutionary voices of the past 30 years. His Floorplan project, now augmented by his daughter Lyric, is another demonstration of his deft sonic body swerves. Ahead of a new Floorplan album this summer, Hood explains his shape-shifting ways to Jonas Stone, and details why his partnership with his daughter has given him a new lease of creative life. “This is an invitation to eternal salvation,” he notes…

Over the course of his three-decade-plus career, Robert Hood has evolved and grown into one of techno’s most unique and consistently shape-shifting artists. His beginnings as a producer were fuelled by Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad production team and the Art of Noise’s sampling ethos – when he was the hip house man with a message Robert Noise. He was then propelled front stage as an MC hype man alongside Underground Resistance’s Jeff Mills and Mike Banks’ early live shows.

Early productions as The Vision or as part of the inter-planetary X-101 series (alongside Banks and Mills) and the subsequent harder-edged aliases he adopted for his Hard Wax label (Dr. Kevorkian, The Mathematic Assassins, Missing Channel) raised his profile, but it’s as the inventor and master of minimalism that he is often most revered. 

Yet, whilst 1994 was bookended by minimal techno’s twin blueprint monoliths, the game-changing ‘Minimal Nation’ (Axis) and the reductive masterpiece ‘Internal Empire’ (Tresor), Hood has continued to resolutely disrupt and change. The following year witnessed the birth of his jazz-infused electronic output with ‘Nighttime World Volume 1’ on Patrick Pulsinger and Erdem Tunakan’s Cheap Records, spawning two subsequent editions (so far). His fedora-wearing ‘jazz head’ has more recently led to a live performance for French TV’s ‘Variations’ series alongside saxophonist/afrobeat legend Femi Kuti in 2019. 

As well as the myriad productions under his own name or his conceptual alien ‘Monobox’ voyages we also, inevitably, arrive at the dancefloor juggernaut that is the gospel house, spiritually-voiced Floorplan. Now operating as a duo alongside daughter Lyric (Hood is all about family) the pair have interlaced dancefloor euphoria with an ‘Almighty’ message (Hood is an ordained minister) to devastating effect. Following a string of albums littered with triumphant cuts, the pair are set to release new album ‘The Master’s Plan’ on Classic this summer. Once again, Robert Hood’s constant studio flux continues to show that he will not be put in a box. 

Graduating from Detroit’s Cooley High in 1983, Hood began to notice a change in the Seven Mile urban landscape he traversed on a daily basis. Whilst kicking about “as a fly on the wall” at day-time parties in his school friend’s basements and trying to emulate gangster’s dance ‘The Jit’ to the strains of new wave, ‘progressive’, funk and disco acts, Hood noticed a darker presence filtering into inner city life. 

“We were just regular school kids, growing up in Detroit,” he recalls. “We were just listening to music and going to the school dance. I was into art. I was an artistic, creative kid. And just trying to navigate Detroit. We always had gang activity in and around Detroit with the Seven Mile Dogs, the DKs and the Erol Flynns but when crack came along, the level of organised crime in the Black community just took giant steps.”

Before that, Hood observed that most people led normal, everyday working-class lives around the chaos but now the chaos had permeated into everyday normality. “Everybody was living the American dream, so to speak. Most of us had mothers and fathers, a two-car garage, three-bedroom home. And everything was normal. But with the advent of crack cocaine the family structure began to fall apart. And there were a lot of school shootings.

“Looking back on it now, it was traumatic, what it did to our mindset. What that means is, we have to escape from here. It was dangerous before at times and in certain neighbourhoods. Now the danger is pretty much everywhere. Music and art and sports – that’s always an escape for Black kids. Yeah, of course, there’s college and higher education but sometimes, you know, in most Black neighbourhoods, and especially in the projects in
the ghetto, you really can’t see that. All you can really see is you either selling crack cocaine, or becoming a basketball player or a football player, which was a far-off dream. So how do you get out became the question. That was our escapism. That became the idea.”

The daily Midnight Funk Association Show on WJLB provided one such outlet for Hood to escape the everyday drama, as he then started to train as a commercial graphic artist (his father was also an illustrator as well as a jazz musician) at Crockett Tech Centre.   

“Our escapism was Electrifying Mojo,” Hood says. “He was very important for us as dreamers and artistic, creative people. And not just the creative people but for the entire city. Because everybody in the city of Detroit listened to Electrifying Mojo at 10 o’clock every night. That was just something you did. It was like a ritual. It was like going to church.” 

Whilst Charles Johnson’s alias ‘landed the mothership’ every night, Robert Hood was beginning to build his own musical vehicle. In 2008, his third ‘Hood Music’ EP on N.E.W.S. captured the moment: ‘And Then We Planned Our Escape’.

Hood’s work as a graphic artist led to him creating the artwork for Members Of The House album ‘Keep Believin’’ which featured session musician Mike Banks. When Banks teamed up with local DJ Jeff Mills aka ‘The Wizard’ and formed Underground Resistance, Hood’s musical curiosity was already well tuned into the fledgling sounds of Detroit Techno (or as he remembers ‘Metroplex’ or ‘Transmat’ music before the term had stuck) and he began to see these new electronic sounds as a way to express his artistic leanings. 

Falling closer into the UR orbit as a kind of office gofer (day-to-day label operations involved everything from mailing out records and writing press releases to answering the phone) Hood began to piece together a small studio set up with pawn shopped gear and a 909 bought from Drexciya’s Gerald Donald. Whilst his Robert Noise alias had fused Public Enemy-style disruption with his love of futuristic production sounds, 1991’s ‘Gyroscopic’ EP (UR) as The Vision saw him fully connect with the new techno party. Tracks such as the acid-drenched ‘Liberation Radio’ found Hood literally tweaking the dial for his musical freedom. Yet whilst UR’s militant boot camp of early abrasive releases were beginning to catch fire in Europe’s rave scene, Hood recalls the germs of creating something at the time that was to later help galvanise his own unique voice. 

“I remember Jeff and Mike being in the other room, they were probably counting records or T-shirts or something. I made this long track, probably 10-15 minutes long. It sounded like something that would be played on WJZZ (Detroit’s jazz station) where you could hear artists like Michael Franks, Jean-Luc Ponty, George Benson and even Larry Heard. They were like: ‘You started to get something going’. So, I can see the evolution. And I’ve always wanted to do something aside from normal dancefloor beats just to expand my potential, shifting from one thing to another. That’s just my nature.”

With Hood experimenting with new musical realms that were to fully fledge in the next few years he created the hard-hitting Hard Wax label in 1992, which he saw as a UR offshoot in the same vein as Wu Tang Clan’s side projects ‘Sunz of Man’ and Killarmy. Unleashing a slew of aliases such as Dr. Kevorkian, Missing Channel (with Claude Young), The Vision and even Jeff Mills’ ‘H-Bomb’, he saw the label sound as a contorted take on rave music.

“I remember being in pretty close contact with Lenny Dee,” (from New York’s Industrial Strength). “His raw distorted kicks in production I loved, but at the same time I was sick of rave music. I wanted to give my sort of twisted take on that music. But with a Detroit state of mind and with a Chicago state of mind. I was experimenting at the time, I was just learning my way and trying new things and probably had too many aliases. It wasn’t until H+M, the first Axis record, with the track ‘Sleep Chamber’, where I found my voice.”

With Mills relocating to New York, playing blistering techno sets at the Limelight, Hood chose to “remain grounded” in Detroit whilst the pair maintained close contact, planting the seeds of a new, more conceptual form of techno that was to germinate under Mills’ new Axis imprint. 

“We had a lot of discussions that went on for hours. We went through this period where we would almost be battling each other for the entire weekend. We probably started Friday and be calling each other every 15-20 minutes. ‘Hey, listen to this. Wow, listen to this’, you know, just bouncing back and forth and having discussions about the state of techno and where it’s headed and how can we steer it this way? Where do we need to take it?”

Out of these discussions came ideas for Hood’s seminal take on a new form of reductive techno with the landmark album ‘Minimal Nation’. Originally released as a single blue label test press, Mills’ feedback from playing a lacquer at the Limelight caused them to re-think and expand the project to a double-pack. “He said people were dancing to it. And then, all of a sudden, people formed a circle and there were some guys breakdancing to it. It had this kind of tribal effect on people.”

Whilst Hood had reduced a track to its key components and focused his production on the main hook, he extended the break in the same manner as early hip hop DJs like DJ Kool Herc, whilst emulating the ‘Jit’ dance he copied from high school in the 80s. Yet there remained layers of rhythms within rhythms and a certain intricacy to the simplicity. 

“It was still super cerebral. There’s a picture inside of a picture behind the picture,” Hood elaborates. “If you listen closely, it’s almost hypnotic. It causes you to listen. Hey, there’s another rhythm hidden in there! And, hey, maybe there’s even a third rhythm that’s starting to come to the forefront. But then you listen again, it’s back to that first rhythm.” And with that, Hood had found his elusive sound. “It was just like the essence of Detroit but in a new way. It was sort of like Juan Atkins’ ‘Cosmic Cars’. I now have my cosmic car. This is my vehicle, my spaceship I can get into and take a departure from Detroit and from this planet.” As Mike Banks remarked more recently in 2018 during a Red Bull Music Academy talk: “To me Rob Hood really defined himself on Axis 007. That’s when I knew Rob had it.” 

‘Minimal Nation’, its follow up ‘Internal Empire’ and the ‘Moveable Parts’ EPs on his own M-Plant label became the very definition of ‘minimal techno’ (Richie Hawtin even named his new label ‘Minus’ after the track from ‘Internal Empire’). Yet Hood’s unique blueprint seemed to bear little resemblance to the sound of ‘minimal’ that was to sweep across Ibiza and the world’s dancefloors a decade later. Whilst Hood’s stripped back production had a grime and funk that gave his tracks a human connection, the flood of subsequent ‘minimal’ productions appeared to, on the most part, be little more than mathematical exercises that followed a collective algorithmic formula or even worse, a melodic tech-house dirge. Regardless, Hood had long since changed tack as his listless artistic muse had already tapped into his family’s jazz background.

During Axis Records’ formative years, Hood had been making tracks for a new collaborative project with Jeff Mills that was to be ‘Every Dog Has Its Day’. “We were supposed to do an album that was just listening music, nothing to do with the dancefloor. I had already made maybe five or six tracks, but Jeff would change his mind from day-to-day. He would take one idea one day and then completely scrap the whole project the next day.” As Mills was to later develop ‘Every Dog’ into a long running solo project, Hood was to take these tracks and deliver another series that was to not only redefine his sound but also reshape the definition of techno.

Released on Austria’s Cheap Records in 1995, Hood’s ‘Nighttime World Volume 1’ was amongst the first techno releases to incorporate the world of jazz on its electronic sleeve. Whilst ‘Electric Nigger Pt.1’ is built around a raw, throbbing techno motif and ‘Untitled’ remains a minimal masterpiece in its own right, its tracks such as the opening swing of ‘Behind This Door’, the jazz drum rolls of ‘Nighttime World’ and perhaps most notably, the introspective melancholy of the piano-led ‘The Colour of Skin’ that really set the album on a unique trajectory. 

“My father was an artist and a jazz musician,” (Hood’s father died when he was only six years old) he explains. “I wanted to display my musical side. But I wasn’t really a traditional musician like my father. But that sort of fusion between jazz and funk was always there. That was driving me. Being a fan of Earth, Wind and Fire, being a fan of Stevie Wonder and all of that being fused with Thomas Dolby’s ideas. I wanted to display that side. And not just make a commodity. Ok, I know how to make techno records now. I don’t want to just start making a product. I want to keep making art.”

There was no physical legacy of his father’s jazz career as a trumpet player. As a live performer there were no known recordings in existence, until Hood made a revelatory recent discovery. His uncle who had owned a record store and was manager of Detroit’s Motown Museum, bequeathed him his entire vinyl collection three years ago. 

“Upon his passing, he left me probably over 3,000 records. These records, I remember just looking at and not being able to touch when they were all at my grandmother’s house. Among those records, I happened to find inside of one of the sleeves, a record that my father recorded. It was jazz funk. Sort of like fusion. It is very old. It’s a test pressing actually and is very obscure.” The discovery of this long-lost rendition of a Parliament/Funkadelic record by Ed Hood and the Lovers was indeed a jaw-dropping moment for Hood himself, something akin to finding his own musical Holy Grail. “Yeah. I’m looking at it right now!” he beams.

Hood’s ‘Funky Souls’ EP on M-Plant offshoot Drama in 1996 yet again hinted at a new house-influenced string to his artist bow. Released under the moniker Floorplan, the hypnotic disco-house track garnered a cult underground following, leading Amsterdam’s Rush Hour to re-issue it in 2010. When Hood re-booted M-Plant in 2009, following a family relocation to Alabama, the idea of picking up his house alias began to resurface with fresh influences coming from his involvement with his local church community. Whilst 2011’s ‘We Magnify His Name’ from the ‘Sanctified’ EP was the first Floorplan release to openly bring gospel music to the fore it was ‘Never Grow Old’ that first aired on Floorplan’s 2013 debut album ‘Paradise’ that was to blow the church roof off. When, 12 months later, Hood elevated the kick drum and Aretha Franklin sample with his ‘Re-plant’ version, the gospel house monster delivered such dancefloor euphoria that Boiler Room would later, describe it as the ‘techno anthem of the decade’. 

Whilst Hood’s inspiration for ‘Never Grow Old’ had involved divine intervention from an awakening dream, causing a fevered 3am run to the studio to capture it, his next move as Floorplan involved a less likely source. When touring Japan with the Red Bull Music Academy, Hood took daughter Lyric to a Q&A panel with Tom Tom Club’s husband and wife duo, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth. “I saw the dynamic of the relationship between Chris and Tina. In their partnership. And I said, wouldn’t it be interesting if Lyric joined me for Floorplan. I’ve got a gifted talent sitting right next to me all the time. It just dawned on me the possibilities and the potential of where that could go.” After talking it through with his wife, some eight years down the line, Lyric Hood is very much an integral part of the musical floor plan.

Whilst Floorplan has been given a new dynamic, Lyric’s solo releases, such as the pounding techno of ‘11.11’ on her debut solo ‘Nineteen’ EP to the jackin’ house groove of ‘Let Me Tell U’ from ‘Woman-Hood Chapter 1’, have proved her production credentials. Unsurprisingly, she initially felt pressure to live up to her father’s name, but their partnership has flourished since he invited his daughter – then 18 – to DJ in the middle of his set at Detroit’s Movement Festival in 2014. “When I first did Movement,” she recalls, “my dad asked me what music I would like to incorporate into his live set and I mentioned Katy Perry and Martin Garrix. I was young! Since then, I have always loved sampling from new and older artists as well as DJing with new and older music. By us working together so closely, it has caused our sound to expand and flourish. Iron sharpens iron, as my dad would say.” 

And as her father will attest, she remains pivotal to the band’s evolution. “Floorplan would definitely not be where we are heading had it not been for Lyric. Her music sensibilities have really changed my ideas about what Detroit house could be. She’s taught me to really pay attention to the details. Of course, I was teaching her and now she is the student teaching the teacher.”

As a firm festival crowd favourite, the DJ pair have travelled the world ‘preaching’ their own firebrand of disco, house and gospel. After numerous single releases with Classic, they now prepare to unveil their fourth studio album, ‘The Master’s Plan’, with the hand of God still very much prevalent. Tracks such as the ‘What A Friend We Have in Jesus’, ‘Taking on Holy’ featuring Honey Dijon, the Dames Brown collaboration ‘Give Us Your Light’ and ‘Help Is On The Way’ with gospel singer Lowell Pye all elevate the Hoods’ continued message from the DJ pulpit. 

“This is an invitation to eternal salvation,” explains Hood of the album’s title. “At some point this natural, earthly body, the shell that we live in, is going to deteriorate. And we’re going to pass away at some point, but we don’t have to, we don’t have to die. That’s what ‘Never Grow Old’ means. ‘The Master’s Plan’ is expanding on that precept that where we’re going, those who believe, are never going to grow old and will never die.”

Hood remains one of techno’s consistent innovators. Just when you think you have him pinned down as the doyen of minimal techno, he delivers otherworldly electronics as Monobox (see 2021’s ‘Regenerate’ album) or afrobeat, jazz-infused electronics with Femi Kuti on last year’s live album, ‘Variations’. His standing as the minimal master has never been in dispute – a decade ago .Cent magazine dispatched Andrew Weatherall to interview him for their ‘minimalism’ issue – and his restless funky-soul continues to wander endlessly. 

“I wanted to do a minimal music. Yeah, I wanted to have it stripped down,” he recalls of ‘Minimal Nation’’s birth. “I wanted to take it back to its truest essence. I thought that rave music was just overdone. I never wanted to be an artist that follows a certain style. I want to create a whole new style. That’s one of the reasons why I got into music. I want to carve out a path and not follow but lead and create something new.”

Does this come back full-circle to UR’s mantra of music being a sonic ‘revolution for change’? “Yeah, always for change,” he finishes. “Always for revolution. Always for being disruptive and for being rebellious. Always walking the path of a progressive artist. That’s still paramount. First and foremost. The only difference now is with God’s vision.” 

A vision with rhythm. 

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