Robert Hood, an acclaimed techno originator and founding member of Detroit’s Underground Resistance (UR) who created the commissioned soundtrack for artist Arthur Jafa’s APEX (2013), joins Jafa in conversation. They discuss the social, aesthetic, and technological relationships between techno and what Jafa refers to as a desire to create “a cinema capable of matching the power, beauty, and alienation of Black music.” The conversation is moderated by DeForrest Brown Jr., musician, representative of the campaign to Make Techno Black Again, and author of Assembling a Black Counter Culture (Primary Information, 2022), a comprehensive history of techno through a Black theoretical framework.

About the Speakers

DeForrest Brown Jr. is an Alabama-raised, ex-American rhythmanalyst, writer, and curator. As Speaker Music, he channels the African American modernist tradition of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual site and sound of techno-vernacular expression. He has released three albums on Planet Mu: Of Desire, Longing (2019), Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry (2020), and Techxodus (2023). His written work explores the links between the Black experience in industrialized labor systems and Black innovation in electronic music. Brown’s debut book, Assembling a Black Counter Culture, was released on Primary Information in 2022. In 2023, he co-curated HOPE, an international group exhibition presented by Museion Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano-Bozen, Italy, as the final installment of the TECHNO HUMANITIES trilogy. Brown is currently collaborating with Tresor on the meta-narratives for Cybtron’s Maintain the Golden Ratio (2023), Parallel Shift (2024), and beyond.

Robert Hood is a founding member of the legendary group Underground Resistance as a “Minister Of Information” with “Mad: Mike Banks and Jeff Mills. His seminal works on Mills’s Axis and his very own M-Plant imprint paved the way for a wave of stripped-down dance floor minimalism that directed much of techno’s path throughout the late nineties.

As he notes, “M-Plant is what I’ve always wanted to hear: the basic stripped down, raw sound. Just drums, basslines and funky grooves and only what’s essential. Only what is essential to make people move. I started to look at it as a science, the art of making people move their butts, speaking to their heart, mind and soul. “It’s a heart-felt rhythmic techno sound. M-Plant is just M. minimal.”

Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, MS; lives in Los Angeles, CA) is an artist and filmmaker. Jafa’s films have garnered acclaim at the Los Angeles, New York, and Black Star Film Festivals, and his artwork is represented in celebrated collections worldwide, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the High Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Luma Foundation, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.

Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions of Jafa’s work include presentations at Luma Arles, France; Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland; OGR Torino, Italy; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark. In 2019, he received the Golden Lion for the Best Participant of the 58th Venice Biennale, May You Live in Interesting Times.

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Tags: Arthur Jafa, Chicago, DeForrest Brown Jr., MCA, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Near North Side, On Techno and Art, Robert Hood