tonight in Athens Bios (pireos 84) EMERGENT presents ROBERT HOOD[ M_PLANT/ UR- DETROIT]

Athens is facing one of the biggest crisis of its history.But even now, it seems that several collectives and individuals are putting efforts to keep going with good events and maintain a ” progressive music approach” , at least as we used to know it before the increased suffering of the society of the city. Even though many of you already criticised this event because of the entrance fee (9euro) and certainly i can imagine that many of you cant afford to pay to enter, this event deserves a separate post here. The people of emergent are bringing some fabulous  artists in Athens, well known to everyone who reads this blog I guess. You can actually read the introduction article where the organisers prepared to describe this event.  You can also visit the event on facebook in order to get the map of the location etc here

* this is one of my favorite tracks enjoy (Robert hood – Detroit: One circle)

Robert Hood needs little introduction. Founding member of the legendary group Underground Resistance as a ‘Minister Of Information’ with ‘Mad’ Mike Banks & Jeff Mills, his seminal works on Jeff Mill’s Axis and his very own M-Plant imprint paved the way for a wave of stripped-down dancefloor minimalism that directed much of techno’s path throughout the late Nineties.Robert Hood makes minimal Detroit techno with an emphasis on soul and experimentation over flash and popularity. Having recorded for Metroplex, Jeff Mills’ Axis label, as well as Patrick Pulsingers ‘Cheap’ label, Peacefrog, and more recently Music Man, Hood also owns and operates the M-Plant imprint, through which he’s released the bulk of his solo material. He has only released 2 ever CD mixes one for French label Logistic, and a mix for the club ‘Fabric’ mix series

In the early 90’s he began to concentrate on his own production ‘Vision EP’, the ‘Riot EP’ and X-102 were big stepping-stones for him as they were the first releases he worked 100% on his own. The X-101 to X-102, were Waveform Transmission projects with Mills for Tresor. He slowly progressed to work more and more on his own, but collaberated on some of the first Axis releases with label owner Jeff Mills as H&M (Hood & Mills) with ‘Tranquilizer EP’ and ‘Drama’.He soon decided it was time for him to start his own label to focus on what was in his soul musically. M-Plant started in ’94. I had developed this “grey area” sound – what I mean by that is that in Detroit, even when the sun is out, there’s something in the atmosphere. I don’t know if its pollution or whatever, but the sky has that grey haze over it. It’s got to be something from the industrial factories there. I’d never really heard a sound like that before and it came from a Roland Juno – it was a chord sound that really went along with my depiction of what Detroit was at that time. A lot of buildings were abandoned and there was a lot of lifelessness in the city, especially downtown. The M-Plant, in minimalism, kind of reflected that. I remember thinking of Detroit like a museum. You know, like a work of art standing still, suspended in time. There wasn’t a whole lot of activity going on.

Although his desire to remain underground has been replaced by an urge to reach a wider audience, Hood remains fiercely critical of artistic and economic movements destructive to inner-city communities and has combined his musical enterprises with outreach and social activist ends. With this in mind the seminal ‘Nighttime World Pt.1’ in 1995 and ‘Nighttime World Pt.2’ in 2000 incorporating Jazz, Soul, Hip Hop as well as Techno and House.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s