If Robert Hood were a type of tea, he’d be Yorkshire Gold. And techno rarely gets as tasty as on ‘Omega: Alive’. For those new in class, let us not forget that Europe’s obsession with minimal techno in the mid-2000s was massively indebted to the hands of Hood. ‘Omega: Alive’ could have quite easily emerged from his Detroit bunker twenty years ago such is its timeless tone.
Raw, powerful and dubbed-out techno means his controls are still manically meditating on minimalism. But this is in fact a live version of his ‘Omega’ album of only last year. And he’s not compromised one iota. ‘Bells At Dusk’ sees him at his visceral best, it’s booming 4/4 with tiny interplays of texture that create the hypnotic dialogue. A similar micro-exploration of sonics can be enjoyed on ‘Unix: Alive’ that heavily harks back to his ‘Minimal Nation’ acid reduction that helped forge his name. But Hood is never happier than drawing out a moment.
Rather than the quick fix of more modern producers where bass drops, staccato vocals and unfathomably elaborate breaks pepper the floor, instead our Detroit man prefers to tease out his ideas over a longer set of loops. On ‘Alpha: Alive’ he flips us through an intense journey of subtle fragments that eventually shimmers into fully realised melody and cerebral strings; and its one of his finest moments across his entire career. Proper techno, from one of its true architects.
8/10
Words by Matthew Bennett
