Funk: It's what we talk about when we talk about minimal. The idea, as it was conceived by the music of Robert Hood and Jeff Mills (among others) in the mid 1990s, was never to strip music bare but rather to recreate the hip-wiggle of Kraftwerk, Afrika Bambaataa, and Juan Atkins with as little infrastructure as possible. It's fitting that this efficiency riddle was conceived in Detroit, a capitalist mecca conditioned to such puzzles. It's a concept that deserves a statistic: funk per beat (FPB), perhaps. Somewhere up on the FPB leaderboard would be Hood, an institution of Detroit techno's second wave, and a man whose Minimal Nation release in 1994 helped both name and define the predominant form of techno of the last 20 years.
It was the release that followed Minimal Nation, however, that many consider Hood's high-water mark: Nighttime World Volume 1 retained Hood's trademark austerity, but it was pock-marked with jazz and made sidelong glances at house. It's a concept-- Hood isn't even getting out of bed if there isn't a concept involved-- that he returned to again in 2000 and yet again this year, with Motor: Nighttime World 3. Like many of his Detroit peers, Hood has been a media-shy recluse (the last info I could find had him living in a small, unnamed Alabama town), but unlike those peers he's been an extraordinarily productive recluse. Motor follows long, ambitious full lengths from each of the past two years, and those followed one of Fabric's rawest, most invigorating mixes.
Motor is reportedly inspired by the documentary film Requiem For Detroit, a history of the city's auto industry. Detroit's skyline is tinted and mirrored on the album's cover (presumably to mimic a waveform), and it takes little imagination to read the city's plight into the album's song titles: "The Exodos", "Hate Transmissions", "A Time to Rebuild". As his work has progressed, Hood has eschewed the skeletal, nickel-plated simplicity of his mid-90s work; Motor is his most composer-ly work to date and without qualification one of his finest. It's a rangy, diverse set, its sawing synthesizers romantic and empathetic: Hood's affection for his hometown shines through.
Hood has never overstuffed his tracks, but in the past the space between his beats has felt compressed, cabin air allowed only so nothing suffocates. Motor is more generous. The tracks here unfurl luxuriously, taking in big, deep breaths and exhaling slowly. The younger, more militant Hood might have bristled at this softness; the older Hood understands that softness is required. Indeed, Motor is often ethereal and cinematic: the lush push/pull of "The Exodos", the gutty music box "The Wheel". "Slow Motion Katrina" is one of the most beautiful techno tracks of the year, a chopped and screwed siren laying groundwork for electric pianos to dawdle and spin.
Motor, at roughly 79 minutes, is too long by half, but there's little else to complain of. Hood has been increasingly interested in longform, narrative techno, and Motor eclipses the entries in his similarly epic Omega series. Motor is less funky than Hood's earlier, revered works, but it relies on the same blueprints: spartan rhythmic patterns, no fat, no showboating. Big and contemplative, Motor is based on a cautionary tale, but like so much of the exploitative, journo-navel-gazing that has infested Detroit, it can't help but find some beauty in the wreckage.
