Available on: M-Plant LP

Robert Hood is one of the more controversial Detroit figures, one who invites as much invective as he does blind, reverent praise.  Predicting the “minimal” movement in the mid-‘90s with his landmark Minimal Nation EP, his descriptor would go on to define an entire world of music that was both out of his reach and far away from his original intention.

For Hood, minimal was not microhouse or minimal techno, with producers one-upping each other to get the tiniest, most microscopically chopped-up beats.  Minimal was techno stripped to its barest essence, as few elements as possible making up banging techno tunes instead of a heady bouquet of labyrinthine drum patterns and silly FX.

However, Hood’s uncompromising stance and pseudo-megalomania has angered more than a few people, while others find his minimal techno sound clinical, emotionless and unmoving.  It’s true that Minimal Nation even now sounds almost fatally austere, but the work surrounding it (namely debut album Internal Empire) was more accessible, and Hood’s seventh artist album finds him beefing up his sound with a few flourishes while still keeping that pummelling simplicity at the centre of its groove.

To enjoy Omega, you’ll probably have to get past the overbearing concept, but thankfully that concept is only present in the hammy intro, and of course, the track titles.  Sonically there may or may not be a little bit of a story arc, but Omega is easily enjoyed as “just another techno album” rather than some grand socio-political commentary piece.  Things start out near-ambient with the gorgeous ‘The Plague (Cleansing Maneuvers)’, which paints a desolate landscape with sheets of synths, echoing, homeless beats, and a surprisingly affecting whirring mechanical whine that sounds like a lonely machine crying out for companionship.  The emotion quickly dissolves into a kick drum as the album transitions into ‘Towns That Disappeared Completely’ for a throbbing industrial acid workout, almost the militaristic survey of a burned-out shell of a civilization Hood is ostensibly aiming for.

Both ‘Alpha’ and ‘Omega’, a double-A-side single preceding the album, are present here, the former a jacking stomper with blistering percussion, and the latter a bass-driven number that dips precariously low while juggling an anxious sci-fi riff.  But Omega isn’t about individual tracks: pull any one track out of the running order and examine it on its lonesome and it’s probably not going to blow your head off.  Put together, the album is a journey through automaton jungles, where the mechanical scenery makes as much of a racket as the robotic animals, for a pseudo-naturalistic look at techno music. The opening track may sound like a machine love song, but the rest is surprisingly capable of evoking the barren dystopia that Hood so ham-fistedly wants to create.  The thumps, scrapes and clicks reverberate off of deserted warehouses and structures reduced to rubble, overcast skies casting a desperate humidity over everything as the bass threatens to take over several times through Omega’s course.

For once, Robert Hood doesn’t feel like an old fogey or a crotchety conservative.  Whether it’s the scene catching up to him or just softening with time, his music fits surprisingly well with the current techno continuum.  Hood hasn’t created anything new here, but the execution is so near-perfect it’s hard not to get emotional and heavy-handed about it; it’s so contagiously triumphant.  Late-album highlight ‘Saved By The Fire’ is exemplary of this, pairing a hard, driving progression with surprisingly soft, rounded sounds, or the way those rounded sounds are re-appropriated for the hard-swung ‘The Wheels of Escape’ – it’s this sense of transformation and metamorphosis of basic elements that makes Omega so exciting, especially when contrasted with the repetition of Minimal Nation.

Even for those who decried Minimal Nation as a step too far into esotericism, Omega is surprisingly welcoming and appealing, dressing up the sound without resorting to superfluous ornamentation or sonic pretence. If the last decade was all about relentless, driving innovation and technological splendour (and all its excesses), this new decade in its infancy is all about refinement, perfection, maybe even asceticism. There’s a fine balance between between honed, purposeful minimalism and arbitrarily forced experiments, and Robert Hood seems to have found it all over again in 2010.

Andrew Ryce

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