Floorplan: A spiritual encounter

It’s nearing the end of Last Night A DJ Saved My Soul, a party devoted to exploring the time-honoured connections between the club and the church, between rhythm and religion. Held at New York dance emporium Output, the affair has already seen rapturous sessions from house belter Kenny Bobien, Ann Nesby of the gospel-oriented Sounds of Blackness ensemble, and the Joubert Singers (of ‘Stand On The Word’ fame), among others. In fact the crowd is visibly spent, ready to call it a night. But then the lights dim and a thumping house beat, funky yet driving, draws attention toward the booth.

Barely visible in the darkness are a pair of figures, both dressed in black. After a while, we can make out the taller of the two, the pioneering Motor City techno minimalist Robert Hood. The smaller one is Hood’s 19-year-old daughter, Lyric. Only a clued-up few seem aware of her identity tonight, but soon, everyone with an ear for rock-solid, foot-stomping house will know: she’s now a full-fledged partner in Floorplan, the persona of techno legend Robert Hood that’s reserved for his housier, more spiritual tracks, and not only travels the world to DJ alongside her revered dad, but serves as co-producer on Floorplan’s new album ‘Victorious,’ released on Hood’s long-running M-Plant label.

Mid-morning the day after the party, father and daughter are sitting in the lobby of a downtown Brooklyn hotel. Robert, of course, has a seriously crucial musical biography. As the 80s morphed into the 90s, the Detroit native joined forces with Jeff Mills and Mad Mike Banks as part of the militant techno crew Underground Resistance; working on his own, he pioneered the very idea of minimal techno via 1994’s ‘Minimal Nation’ LP, he’s spent the years since building a discography of machine-age tracks that range in feel from exacting and steely to rich and jazzy; and he’s generally considered one of the bedrocks of electronic club music as we know it. He’s dressed in a similarly dark-hued T-shirt and jeans to the night before, and speaks in a voice that treads the line between deadly serious and warmly welcoming. Lyric is a bit more colourful; she’s sporting a blazing-pink terrycloth jumpsuit and a sparkly Hello Kitty pendant. She’s full of smiles, but quiet and polite to a fault, her father repeatedly encouraging her to speak up in conversation.

They’re both surprisingly bright-eyed, considering they were slinging beats over Output’s booming soundsystem only hours before. The gig was originally slated to take place in an honest-to-God church, but during the soundcheck the ceiling began to collapse. Output is a great venue, but it’s no church – it’s more of an austere, bunker-meets-warehouse kind of place – and though the gospel-fuelled tones of the Jouberts and Ann Nesby certainly revved up the crowd, Robert, an ordained preacher since 2009, found the space a bit difficult to work with. "In the beginning it kind of felt a little bit sterile," he admits. "It took us a little time to stir up the spirit."

Lyric had her own issues: "I had never DJed on CDJs that were up so high," she says with a slight southern drawl [The Hoods relocated to Alabama 12 years ago]. "And I’m very short!" But a few tracks into their set, a pair of classics – Barbara Tucker’s ‘Beautiful People’ and Cajmere’s ‘Brighter Days’ – won the crowd over. "That was Lyric – she dropped those two," says Robert proudly. "I was struggling, and I really believe it was my daughter who locked into the spirit and ushered it in. She’s the one who made it happen."

It’s that kind of confidence in his progeny that led Robert to include Lyric in Floorplan’s current iteration, but it’s been a long time coming: Floorplan’s debut, the ‘Funky Souls’ EP, came out in 1996. "That was before I was born!" Lyric exclaims, as if in disbelief that anything that old could be relevant. "But it’s on my flash drive right now," she adds. "I’ve been playing it a little bit. I like it."

Right from the start, Floorplan’s basic sonic template was in place. When Hood’s in techno mode, his propulsive sound has a fractal quality to it ("rhythms inside of rhythms inside of rhythms," as he’s described in the past), but Floorplan’s music is a more straightforward affair. The rhythms, while still full of forward thrust, are chunkier, there a more liberal use of vocal samples, the bass is rounder and the chords are warmer.

“It’s more churchy,” is Hood’s explanation – but while Floorplan’s always had a soulful edge, it wasn’t until the release of 2011’s ‘We Magnify His Name’ that the extent of its religious inclinations – specifically, its Christian piety – became explicit. A old-skool piano-banger, the vocals are sampled from the Shekinah Glory Ministry choir’s gospel stomper of the same name, and the tune basically serves as a joyfully luscious hype song for the big man.

Robert becomes animated when asked about ‘We Magnify His Name’. “I was asleep one night and God literally woke me up – my eyes jumped open – and he spoke to me,” he says, his excitement palpable. “He said, ‘I want you to put the gospel message in the music. I want you to use these gospel elements to preach the message to the audience that you are DJing in front of.' Immediately, I’m asking, ‘Well, what if they don’t receive it?’ He said, 'don’t worry about that. Do what I’m asking you to do’.” He reverts to his usual serene demeanour and continues. “So I went into the studio that night and started piecing together ‘We Magnify His Name’. And the song came together so easily; it wasn’t a struggle at all. The bassline, the drum programming, the vocal sample, everything… it all just fit right in place. It was meant to be. And that was the springboard for everything that’s followed.”

At this point in the conversation Chicago’s DJ Pierre, who had also spun at the previous night’s party, strides out of the hotel’s lift along with his manager, Andrea Sutherland, Sounds Of Blackness’s Nesby and her husband, Timothy Lee. Robert and Lyric stand to greet them, and the talk turns to Earl ‘Spanky’ Smith, one of Pierre’s partners in the seminal acid-house combo Phuture, who had surgery the night before and was due for another round that day. Robert, as preacher, soothingly leads the conversation: phrases like “Praise God” and “the power of the Lord” pepper the exchange, giving it the feeling of a prayer session. But the discussion veers off at times – into a comparison of the merits of various ride-on lawnmowers, for instance.

That combination of the sacred and the secular is the same mix that inhabits ‘Victorious’. Disco, boogie and r’n’b samples abound (Team Hood has requested that Mixmag not reveal the source material), and there are plenty of tunes that serve as no-frills party bangers, like the Todd Terry-esque ‘Mmm Hmm Hmm’, the techy bouncer ‘Ha Ya’ and the hard-charging ‘Music’. Perhaps not surprisingly, those are among the tracks that Lyric took the lead role in producing.

“I don’t know how, but when I came out of my mother’s womb the music was just in me, and I knew that it was always going to be in my life,” she says. The track ‘Music’, fittingly, came first. “Lyric came to me with the drum program for that one,” Robert recalls. “I said, ‘Yeah, that’s really tight! Why don’t you tap out a bassline?’ So she laid that out, and I said, ‘That’s really good!’ All I had to do was lay some little embellishments on top. So we were thinking, why don’t we just continue with this and see where it goes?”

“Everything started coming together,” Lyric adds. “Completing the entire album was amazing. Starting with that first track and finishing up on the last track was just an incredible feeling. Its was so much fun.”

Fun perhaps, but in Floorplan’s world, it’s fun with a message – and ‘Victorious’ is brimming with songs that are openly religious. There’s ‘The Heavens & The Earth’, for instance, which finds Lyric and Robert quoting from the Book of Genesis, or ‘He Can Save You’, which features spectral samples of what sounds like a revival meeting. Robert jumps at the word. “Revival –that’s exactly it!” he exclaims. “I don’t necessarily want to do gospel house, but I do want to bring a revival to the club. I want to bring what we experience on Sunday morning, at a church in inner-city Detroit, to the dancefloor.” He elaborates, striving to make the connection explicit. “I can remember when I was a kid seeing my grandmother playing the tambourine in church and she was catching the Holy Spirit. I’d be thinking, ‘What is she on?’ She would be in another world, but she would beat that tambourine like you’ve never seen before – she would tear it to pieces. Disco, house, and even techno are interwoven into that. It’s that shouting; it’s that dirty-bottomed foot, hitting the floor. That’s the kind of feeling we’re trying to bring to the club.’

He pauses to think about the implications of that feeling. “I think that when people listen to our music or hear us play, they’re getting a spiritual encounter, one that can start people digging into the world of God. We are agents of change; the music is the catalyst.”

Of course, not everybody in the club is looking for that form of encounter, exactly – and in Hood’s view, that’s OK. "When I’m DJing, I’m ministering, but not in any kind of preaching, condemning way. It’s the whole ‘You may be black, you may be white; you may be Jew or gentile’ thing. It’s universal. I don’t want to come off as a dogmatic preacher, like ‘If you don’t follow these rules and regulations, you’re going to die and go to hell.’ It’s not about that at all. I’m basically preaching a message of freedom. We may not know we are free, but I am free and you are free. That’s largely it, really.”

Lyric nods her head in agreement. "There’s a message to the music I’m playing,” she says. “And just by expressing myself, by being free, that’s a big part of it.” But as she sees it, half the fun of being a part of Floorplan is getting the opportunity to work with her father. “In Alabama, most children go deer hunting or fishing with their dad,” she says. “But I get to do this – produce music, travel all over the world and play music – with my dad. And I know that what we’re doing here is a little different than most fathers and daughters. It’s very special and rare.”

As if to prove that they have a normal parent-child relationship, too, Robert begins to relate the tale of an outing with Lyric. “There was this one time we were camping,” he recalls. “Or attempting to camp, really...” Lyric chimes in. “We started to watch The Walking Dead,” she says, “which was not a good idea. Not where we were, in the woods!” Robert lets out a hearty laugh. “So that kind of all went south,” he says, shaking his head. “But the point was that she’s my hanging partner, and we always do stuff together. We watch cartoons together. We have this unbreakable bond. I mean, I am her father, and we’ll have some situations now and then – but five minutes later, we’ll be laughing again.”

You can’t help but wonder how Robert feels about introducing his sheltered daughter (Lyric is home-schooled) to the world of nightlife; after all, clubland can be a pretty wild place. True to his role as a minister, he views himself as his daughter’s shepherd. “You know, the world is filled with iniquity,” he says. “It’s in the workplace; it’s in the government; it’s in the police force; it’s in church. My job as her father is to guide her and direct her through all of this. She’s going to see lots of crazy things in this world. She’s going to see debauchery and transgression, and my role is to help her navigate through it.”

Lyric, who’s been content to let her father take control of the conversation thus far, becomes bubbly when asked about her home-listening preferences. “I like to switch it up a lot,” she says. “I’m a big pop head, and I love EDM – which I know a lot of people don’t agree with, but I like it! I grew up listening to Prince and Michael Jackson, all the icons. Drake, of course, and Rihanna. Ooh, I really like ‘Panda’ by Desiigner – do you know that track? A lot of people seem to wonder why I’m listening to this stuff, but I don’t really care. They ask me, ‘Why don’t you listen to techno twenty-four seven?’ Well, I can’t do that twenty-four seven. I’d get bored.”

For Robert, Lyric’s youthful enthusiasm is a huge asset for Floorplan. “She’s made the whole thing fresher,” he believes. “That’s why I think ‘Victorious’ is so exceptional. You know, I’m an old dude; my perception is getting stale,” he laughs. “I’m just joking – but Lyric does bring a brand-new energy to Floorplan, and another insight to what Floorplan is. The way she sees sound and music and the world…I look at that youthful insight, and I’m playing off of that. It’s like she’s driving, and I’m pretty much just going along for the ride.”

Speaking of rides, just then a car arrives to take the Hoods to the airport. They’ll be travelling back to Alabama before the family makes a seasonal move to Amsterdam, with a summer full of festival gigs and club sets ahead. Lyric shows us her Hello Kitty pendant, opening it up to reveal a hidden flash drive. ‘This is last night’s set,’ she says. Robert looks on, a smile on his lips and joy in his eyes. The Floorplan trinity set off home: the father, the daughter, and the holy music.

Floorplan’s album ‘Victorious’ is out now on M-Plant

Many thanks to Kirkaldy Testing Museum, the location for our shoot. The Testing Works is one of several unique locations managed by Ugly Duck, a London-based social enterprise which opens up empty and underused spaces for creative use