Luke Hess

Detroit native Luke Hess crafts deep, immersive minimal techno marked by pronounced dub textures and shaped by influences including Basic Channel, Robert Hood, and Richie Hawtin. A perfectionist both in the studio and onstage, he has delivered hardware-based performances at such respected venues and events as Berghain, Fabric, and the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. He runs his own DeepLabs imprint, and his output—issued solo or as one half of the Reference duo alongside Brian Kage—has appeared on Echocord, FXHE, Planet E, and additional labels. His well-received first album, Light in the Dark, surfaced in 2009, followed by Keep On in 2012, while he has maintained a steady flow of meticulously produced EPs, among them 2021’s Epibenthos Mbira, recorded with Joshua Harrison.

Born in the Detroit metro area in 1980, Hess began frequenting warehouse techno parties in the mid-’90s, where he encountered DJs such as Jeff Mills, Richie Hawtin, and Daniel Bell. He commenced record collecting in 1997 and made occasional DJ appearances at local gatherings for several years prior to initiating music production around 2006. His initial demo drew no response from the European labels to which it was submitted, yet after he played the material for Seth Troxler, it reached Omar-S. The first two EPs therefore emerged on FXHE, operated by Omar-S, and on Brian Kage’s Berettamusic in 2007; Hess and Kage also established the Reference partnership, which began issuing material the following year. Attention from overseas soon followed, prompting releases on imprints such as Kontra-Musik and Echocord, the latter of which put out his debut full-length, Light in the Dark, in 2009. Hess launched DeepLabs in 2010, and that same year Carl Craig’s Planet E released the Reference Aeonian EP.

Keep On, Hess’s second album, came out on FXHE in 2012. He joined Omar-S for the 2014 Motown Methods EP, while Into the Abyss—a collaboration with Sascha Dive that included remixes by cv313, also known as Echospace—appeared on minimood extra the same year. Shifting toward more cosmic material, Hess issued Star Gazing with O B Ignitt together with Adventures in Deep Space in 2015. A further joint EP with Dive, Polyphonic Minds, followed in 2017, and additional solo records surfaced via Visionquest and Supercinema. In 2020, alongside his brother Jeff Hess, he released The Sea Was No More, whose cover art was created by Detroit illustrator Abdul Qadim Haqq. Echocord Colour put out Epibenthos Mbira, again featuring Joshua Harrison, in 2021.