Robert Hood's sanctuary in techno

In the early hours of the morning on November 10, 1938, anti-Semitic rioting raged across Nazi Germany, in a pogrom that saw more than 100 Jews killed and 267 synagogues destroyed by SA paramilitary, alongside thousands of Jewish businesses. The violent attacks, which would go on to become known as the Night Of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht, saw Jewish homes, hospitals and schools burned and looted, as German authorities watched on. The events would eventually lead to the Holocaust, one of the largest genocides in the history of humanity. It remains one of Europe’s most devastating acts of state terrorism.

On the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, Detroit techno pioneer Robert Hood stands at the altar of the church of St. Thomas in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, delivering his first European sermon to an almost 2,000-strong crowd. “We need to remember that day and make sure events like that are never allowed to happen again,” he booms across the towering neoclassical building, which is bathed in deep blue light, his voice echoing around the looming ceilings. “Let’s come together and stand up against anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, and any form of hate and discrimination in this world. Let’s light a beacon of love today.

“However, it’s not only [the anniversary of] one of the saddest days in history,” he continues. “Almost 30 years ago, the Berlin Wall began to fall. On that day, not only a wall made of stone and barbed wire fell, but also a symbol. A symbol of separation. A symbol of oppression. Today we also want to remember that day. We want to shout out that we don’t need walls, no barriers in this world, nor in our heads. So, let us share together, tonight, against borders, and against any kind of social or racial exclusion. Let’s build bridges of love [against] the walls that mankind has built.”

A founding member of revolutionary techno collective Underground Resistance (UR), and with a career producing music that spans almost 30 years before becoming an ordained minister in Detroit, Hood built his legacy as a — if not the — forefather of Motor City minimal techno, with an earth-shattering sound that’s in equal parts deep, hypnotic and heavy. After the sermon, he delivers a DJ set alongside music from a gospel choir that includes classics from Floorplan (the alias he began over 20 years ago, before his daughter Lyric made it a duo in recent years). The set includes ‘We Magnify His Name’ and ‘Never Grow Old (Re-Plant)’ (which sees the voice of the late Aretha Franklin boom around the towering church building just months after her death).

Hood speaks a matter of days after the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in American history, at Pittsburgh’s Tree Of Life synagogue, left 11 people dead and seven injured. “There’s so much ugliness in the world, and so much hate,” he laments in a small back room of the church shortly after delivering his sermon. “But we go about our day-to-day lives like everything is alright. Going to the grocery store or on vacation like nothing is wrong. This world is like a fragile egg, and it’s at the edge of a table. Anything could tip it off at any moment. We can’t keep going the way we are. We’re headed for destruction, and we don’t even know it.

“We see hate coming to a boil, and if we’re not careful it’s going to encompass all of us,” he continues. “In politics there’s so much division. For us, the music is that bridge to bring us together. So, we boldly play these tracks to plant seeds in people’s spirits. The music we’re doing is symbolic of tearing down walls. We’re agents of change. We’re about spreading love, the gospel and good news to a lost world.” Hood constantly refers to St. Thomas’ as a sanctuary, and goes on to discuss the parallels, through history, that can be drawn between churches and clubs in the present day as spaces for young people to find that sanctuary.

“People need answers,” he enthuses as the church’s bell tolls overhead. “So we’re seeking refuge. We’re seeking escape from all of the heartache and misery in the world. I remember the Music Institute in Detroit, and one of the first thoughts I had is that it’s like a congregation, and the DJ is like the minister, the preacher. The music was healing people. The music was ministering to the people’s souls. I remember watching how people’s spirits would light up. You’d see the joy on their face. It took us somewhere else. And it was very spiritual, very unearthly, very heavenly, at times. So, it’s almost like a revival. This music and church provide that sanctuary of peace.”

SANCTUARY

Immaculately dressed, Hood wears a black denim shirt, loose-fitting charcoal trousers, black leather boots and a brown Stetson. Married to his wife Eunice Thompson-Hood since 1996, he’s softly spoken, but delivers his answers with clear passion and intent. At 53 years old, he has the relaxed demeanour of a man very much at one with himself — but he goes on to explain how techno saved his own life, offering him sanctuary at a time when he struggled to find answers. “I was so depressed at one point I tried to take my own life,” he says. “I never shared that with anybody. I felt I didn’t have any reason to live. I took some pills hoping I would go to sleep and not wake up. I felt like nobody loved me.”

He apportions his suicide attempt, which happened during his early twenties, in part to unresolved issues from his childhood. Hood’s father, a jazz musician, was murdered when the Detroit techno pioneer was just six years old. “The thought of that was very traumatic for my whole family,” he says. “So it was very rarely talked about in the house, which meant I knew little about it, except that he was found naked with a plastic bag over his head — he’d been asphyxiated. “My father was gone,” he continues. “And I needed him. It was a very formative time in my life. I needed someone to listen to me. It seemed like nobody was, and that nobody cared.”

The murder of Hood’s father came only a few years after his grandparents saved him from almost bleeding to death in his cot after being left for dead as a one-year-old. “They thought I was gone,” he says. “A babysitter had abused me. I didn’t know it all my life, but my grandmother explained to my wife: This is why he’s having some of his issues. Because they’d been unresolved. When my wife told me, it helped me deal with some of my problems and burdens. I was carrying some I didn’t even know about.” Hood says music made him feel he had a reason to live again. “It was my friend when I didn’t have a friend in the world,” he says. “I could put on my headphones and escape. Music gave me something to dream and hope for, and to aspire to. I wanted to be a DJ and a musician. My father was a jazz musician, but I wanted to do this new thing. So, techno and house music gave me that outlet. Those sounds provided me comfort.”

“I knew the experience was invaluable and what I was learning was precious, watching the speed and the accuracy of how [Mad Mike Banks and Jeff Mills] worked, and how many hours they put into their studio time. They were making history, and that was my example. I wanted to be like that”

After spending time in hospital following his suicide attempt, Hood began recording demos on some rudimentary equipment he bought from a pawn shop. By a stroke of fortune, one of the recordings made it into the hands of one of Detroit’s leading techno figures, Mad Mike Banks, who, along with Jeff Mills, he would later go on to form Underground Resistance with. At first, Hood worked as what might now be described as an intern there, running things on the admin side while Mills and Banks were touring: answering the phone, dealing with distributors and, whenever possible, gaining an education in producing techno from two of its early masters.

“I knew the experience was invaluable and what I was learning was precious,” Hood says on his early years in Underground Resistance. “Watching the speed and the accuracy of how they worked, and how many hours they put into their studio time — they would go all day and all night — they were making history, and that was my example. I wanted to be like that.” But Hood’s biggest opportunity was almost sidelined again when he was shot in the face while working at a record store, shortly before Underground Resistance’s raw, four-track techno aesthetic became the talking point of the New Music Seminar in New York. “I had an altercation with a former employee and got blamed for something I didn’t do,” he says. “He pulled out a gun, and as he hit me, [the gun] went off, and I caught some shrapnel in my head. I remember wondering if I was going to make it — I thought I was going to bleed out.”

Fortunately, he survived, and, after Banks and Mills had helped him learn how to stand on his own feet as a producer instead of co-producing his tracks for him, Hood began to develop his own take on Detroit techno. “They were concerned about me as brothers,” he says. “So, I said, ‘I’m going to do this. What elsehave I got?’ I’d been shot in the head. I’d been in a mental hospital. I didn’t have anything else. So, it had to work.”

MAKING CONNECTIONS

Following the interview, Hood spins at iconic Berlin club Tresor, where he first performed live as part of Underground Resistance when they initially started touring outside of the US in the early ’90s. And there must be few better places to see Hood spin, with the famous jail-like iron bars of Tresor — a club now housed in a former power plant in Mitte that’s hugely revered but intimate in size — the perfect aesthetic for his sparse but hard-hitting sound. After walking through the maze of strobe-lit corridors that lead to Tresor’s main room, Hood is stood in the booth, bathed in red light and deep in concentration. Calm and collected behind the decks, he gives off the air of someone who’s plied his craft for years. Slowly chewing gum stood directly underneath a Detroit Techno Militia sticker, one of the many artists and collectives Hood has helped inspire over the years, he EQs the mixer delicately, as hi-hats chatter overhead and snares seem to circulate the room. It’s hot. It’s dark. It’s an intense dancefloor experience. But Hood, who has changed his shirt and Stetson from earlier in the day for a fitted white t-shirt and baseball cap, meticulously rolls out his distinct minimal groove as a lone strobe jitters overhead. 

Tresor are set to reissue Hood’s seminal minimal masterpiece ‘Internal Empire’ in February, alongside four other vital Detroit techno records from Jeff Mills, Juan Atkins, Drexciya and Scion. Speaking to Hood, who hails from the city where techno began, in Berlin, which has done so much to invigorate its renaissance in the last 15 years, he points out a number of parallels between the two cities.

“There’s definitely a connection with Detroit coming out of the riots, as the techno artists I came through listening to wanted to escape that, and build something new, and Berlin coming out of the ruins of World War II, trying to create a new future,” he explains as he leaves the church earlier that afternoon. “The same thing for Berlin, leaving the ashes of its past of being separated. That’s where the connection is. They wanted Western culture, but with a new identity aside from being labelled Nazis. We wanted a new identity aside from being labelled black people who were going nowhere. So, it all comes together, that escapism, and trying to build something new on both sides of the Atlantic.”