Victorious is a stripped down and speedy yet lush and embracing house music, where the Word is the seed element.
Robert Hood, a demiurge of Detroit techno, now residing in Alabama, is also a man of strong Christian faith. As Floorplan, he strives to fulfill the mission revealed to him in an epiphany, “to deliver this message, the gospel to the people” (for without believers, faith is a tower without foundation) with an unrelenting frontal assault of disco, funk and gospel. During a Red Bull Music Academy lecture in Tokyo, Hood described his efforts as “minimal music for catching the Holy Ghost.”
Victorious is a stripped down and speedy yet lush and embracing house music, where the Word is the seed element. Although widely varying in genre, Hood´s slicing and dicing of the Word has its older cousins in “It’s Gonna Rain” by Steve Reich, portions of Eno & Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and Uwe Schmidt’s shortlived Geeez ´N´ Gosh project. The rhetorical device of triple repetition—most famously associated with Martin Luther King, Jr.´s Free at last, free at last, thank God I´m free at last—provides a focal point for the idea being tripled, and goes all the way back to the Prophets, in whose world, a thing that is said, done or ruled thrice is considered permanent—”Holy, holy, holy,” the angels cried to Isaiah.
Rather than trebling the message, Hood splits off myriad prayer shards, Bible recitations, a reverend testifying and congregants responding and sows them in the wind of his pelting rhythms, reaping a whirlwind of pulpit pounding hardwired directly into the feet—earthly manumission through submission to heavenly-hosted house. Even the seemingly innocuous, hedonistic disco floor filler “Tell You No Lie” stresses that the listener will be “sorry if you pass me by”—don’t forget that religion also makes demands on the acolyte, and judges hard.
In the best spirit of family values, Victorious also marks Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, as for the first time on record, Lyric Hood, his 20-year-old, puts her hand in the hand of the man to coax maximum effect out of minimal means as co-producer.
