Hypnotic techno from a legend.

Deep Listening is a series where The Vinyl Factory presents landmark albums and songs, spanning both contemporary and classic works, inside the Devon Turnbull Listening Room at 180 Studios.

Designed by New York artist Devon Turnbull and programmed by The Vinyl Factory, the room invites visitors to experience music through a handmade, high-fidelity sound system. Its plush, minimalist setting has become a focal point at 180 Studios, hosting intimate listening sessions and special events with artists such as The Blessed Madonna, Stephen O'Malley, and many more.

Our latest Deep Listening session focuses on APEX, a collaboration between filmmaker and artist Arthur Jafa and Detroit techno pioneer Robert Hood, now available as a limited vinyl edition.

Originally conceived in 2013 and currently showing at 180 Studios' Paradigm Shift exhibition, APEX is Jafa's visceral montage of 841 still and moving images drawn from cinema, music, news and personal archive. Images surge past at a stroboscopic pace—Mickey Mouse, Tupac Shakur, Sojourner Truth, scenes of violence, spiritual iconography, sci-fi elements—all interweaving into something that feels less like a film and more like a fevered visual frequency. Set to Hood's stark, driving techno score, rhythm, rather than narrative, becomes the engine.

In APEX, duration, repetition, and tempo function like instrumentation, registering ecstasy and grief across a century of mass-circulated image production. He demonstrates how the dominant image economy can be remixed and re-envisioned to assert Black life, representation and resistance.

Jafa has described APEX as "Black Visual Intonation," an experiment in translating the intensity of Black musical expression into moving images. In his words, it's "a model for both a film—a $100 million sci-fi epic—and as a kind of pre- or anti-cinema."

A founding member of Underground Resistance alongside Jeff Mills and "Mad" Mike Banks, Robert Hood helped define the political and spiritual core of Detroit techno in the early '90s. After leaving the collective, he founded M-Plant, developing the meditative, stripped-back sound that would come to define minimal techno. His score for APEX is relentless and hypnotic—the kind of techno that doesn't ask permission, it simply pulls you in.

Presented for the first time on vinyl, APEX shifts from gallery installation to home listening . It's pressed on 180-gram black vinyl and housed in a sleeve designed by Jafa. 1000 hand-numbered copies are available now.

Listen above and order a copy of APEX from VF now.

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Watch more Deep Listening videos:

Pacing (Devon’s Room) by Isaiah Collier & Tim Regis

Voodoo Ray by Jeremy Deller & Melodians Steel Orchestra

Vigil by Caterina Barbieri

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