10. Robert Hoodfabric 39
This probably stood out because it was another first for me. I think I’d have first listened to it only a couple of months after the Surgeon mix came out and it was my introduction to Detroit techno, and techno as something more stripped-back, repetitive, funky and deep. It was a totally different kind of techno to what I had discovered in Surgeon, and spoke to me just as strongly. I remember feeling at the time that this was the distilled essence of techno and it set the stage for me exploring the genre even further. It was a good jumping-off point for that.
I went in totally blind on it because I really had zero idea about techno’s history and how much of a pioneer Robert Hood was at that point. I remember running this little basement club night while at uni in Oxford, getting this Robert Hood mix, and thinking, ‘Wow, this is really cool, maybe I could book Robert Hood!’ I told my friend who had been into techno for longer than a year and he was like, ‘I think he’s kind of big, I think he’s kind of a legend’.
This is another one that I remembered quite differently to how it sounded when I returned to it the other day. I remembered it having much quicker, rougher mixes in the old Jeff Mills style, but when I listened to it again, it was much more gentle-paced and patient than I recalled – letting the tracks speak for themselves.
