Robert Hood co-founded Underground Resistance with Jeff Mills and Mike Banks in the late 1980s. He left in 1994 to start M-Plant Records and put out "Minimal Nation," the record that named a subgenre.
Hood grew up in Detroit and joined UR in time for the X-101, X-102, and X-103 trilogy on Tresor in 1991 and 1992. The exit was friendly. Mills had already started Axis. Hood's M-Plant followed, and what came out of it was a leaner, more austere take on techno than UR's politically charged catalog. "Minimal Nation" arrived in 1994. "Internal Empire" the same year. "Paradygm Shift" in 2003. The records are quiet, precise, repetitive in a way that pushes the form to its outline. The genre tag came from the title.
M-Plant has run on the same template for three decades: small catalog, vinyl pressings, no marketing. The aesthetic — black labels, white text, no copy — is recognizable from across a record store.
Floorplan is the second project. Hood started it as a solo alias, then expanded it as a duo with his daughter Lyric Hood once she was old enough to share the booth. Floorplan reads as Hood's gospel-house side, openly Christian in its samples and its energy, and structurally lighter than the M-Plant catalog. The "Sanctified" album came out in 2013, "Victorious" in 2016. Floorplan plays Movement most years and tours globally as a father-daughter act.
Hood is an ordained minister. He moved from Detroit to rural Alabama some years ago and runs his church work in parallel with the touring. The biographical detail is unusual in techno; the catalog suggests it has not changed the music materially.
He plays Detroit anyway. Movement bookings have run almost annually since the festival's Paxahau era began. Local rooms — Marble Bar, TV Lounge, Lincoln Factory — book him when he is in town. The afterparty circuit treats him as a perennial.
The minimal Detroit tradition runs through M-Plant. Hood is the explicit lineage: UR, M-Plant, Sandwell District (the late-2000s collective with Function and Regis), Floorplan. The lineage is the bench he set. Producers in Berlin and Detroit who came up through the 2000s and 2010s tend to cite the Hood records as the load-bearing ones.
M-Plant's release cadence has remained steady through the year. Hood plays a Floorplan booking on the Detroit holiday-week calendar in late December.
