Robert Hood — founding member of Underground Resistance and the man credited with distilling Detroit techno down to its minimal essence — returns with Mirror Man, his first album for Rekids and his most aggressive record in years. Fourteen tracks long, it swings between pure machine techno in the vein of Nothing Stops Detroit and A System Of Mirrors and beatless kosmische interludes that let the pressure off between storms. It’s techno stripped to the bone by the man who helped invent the approach — and nobody does more with less.
Nothing Stops Detroit sets the tone — a punishing, loop-based groove that locks in from the first bar and refuses to let go, all clattering percussion and a bassline that drills into the floor. Fear Not follows with a straighter four-to-the-floor drive, Hood’s deadpan arrangement leaving the raw power of the drum machine to speak for itself. The centrepiece is A System Of Mirrors: nearly eight minutes of coiled tension that never quite snaps, a masterclass in building pressure through subtraction rather than addition.
Between the storms, Hood offers breathing space. Through A Looking Glass Darkly opens the record with soft, decaying drones that sound like the inside of a machine thinking to itself, whilst Freeze, at just over two minutes, and the 56-second A Shattered Image are crystalline shards of ambience. The interludes are short but essential — they’re where the album’s reflective, almost paranoid mood takes shape, and they give the harder tracks room to land.
Mirror Man is Robert Hood's first album for Rekids.
The mood stays dark and physical throughout. Black Mirror and Falling Apart share the same claustrophobic pressure, the latter’s pads smearing across a tight, muscular groove, whilst Run Bobby, Run is as close as the record gets to funk, all swung hats and coiled energy. Ignite A War lives up to its name with a relentlessly escalating riff, and closer The Cure finds Hood at his most melodic, a warm chord sequence rising out of the machine noise like a Detroit dawn.
Mirror Man arrived to the kind of press attention rarely afforded a techno veteran of three decades — Resident Advisor, The Quietus and even The New Yorker all took notice. Rightly so: this is Hood at his most focused and most ferocious, a record that honours the Detroit lineage he helped build whilst sounding utterly of the moment. For a first outing on Rekids it’s a statement of intent, and for anyone who thought the old master had nothing left to prove, it’s a reminder that the machine still runs.
