Internal Empire

Robert Hood’s Internal Empire from ’94 saw him further purging his music of chords and melodies, celebrating repetition, fetishising the sheer relentlessness of his grooves and the musical possibilities of using just one or two notes. Most tracks here are truly lean and stripped-back, a skeletal distillation of techno rhythms, producing bare, functional, mechanical music. It’s so sparse that when, seven tracks in, he finally allows a single chord, and then a second one, in “Home,” it’s like an ecstatic relief — but it’s a single lush moment in a sparse, cold album. Intense, influential and challenging.