As with virtually any genre, there's no single point of origin for minimal techno. (Chicago's first house tracks were themselves shockingly minimal by contemporary pop standards — as well as much of what goes by the minimal tag two decades later). But Robert Hood's 1994 album Minimal Nation deserves its status as one of the subgenre's key founding documents. With a title that seemed more like a call to arms than a simple description, the album rendered the familiar thump and squelch of Detroit techno even stranger, subtracting all remaining traces of disco and R&B and imagining rhythm as a kind of chattering conversation between sentient machines. Traces of jazz remain, but only as a kind of false memory, with the clash of fixed-interval chords undercutting conventional key signatures.

Instead of being funkless, the mutations have just the opposite effect: intricate syncopations and miniscule degrees of off-beat swing, as well as careful, hand-turned filters, give tracks like "Unix" a powerful, sensual lurch. Hood has cited the bleakness of the music as a reflection of his burned-out hometown, but there's also a strong utopian sentiment here, as gleaming, metallic sounds and breathtakingly complex structures suggest the futurist architecture of the city that… read more »