hasnt he been the #1 most viewed review on pitchfork since last year?

that stupid list never changes and doesn't reflect anything that people are reading on the site.

I sent Pavement Ist Rad a Ricardo Villalobos album once.

I think he liked it.

"..I hate it when a nice track is over. I'm addicted to music and what music is giving me, emotionally, without thinking about it, acting on different levels of the brain. And when this is stopping, I’m frustrated, you know? In club music, the surprising moments are very important, but to have the surprising moments you need a certain time of tension. You can’t deliver one surprising moment after another because then it’s boring. So to find context for the surprising moment, you have to find a frame for it. And this frame has to be big. This forces the music not to be like orgasm after the other, really compressed and concentrated: everything is a little bit stretched to be mixed with other stretched music”

I'll try and get around to scanning and upping the interview with him from this months Wire later on.

Would love to read this if you have it/are getting it later.

Time out of Joint

With his 24 hour party schedules stretching across multiple time zones and ever expanding dance tracks, Berlin's busiest Techno minimalist Ricardo_ Villalobos is in it for the duration. Words: Philip Sherburne.

It Is a rainy Sunday morning in Berlin- 1:38 in the afternoon, actually, but here that counts as morning -and somewhere, RicardoVillalobos is playing an after-party. There is a private loft party called Beat Street planned for today, and if he is not playing there at this moment, I imagine he is on his way to it from Ibiza or London or Warsaw or a beach rave in Croatia; or maybe he will arrive fresh from the SonneMondSterne festival, located a few hours from Berlin. After all, I saw him playing there some 30-odd hours ago. and it is not inconceivable he is still there, still playing. If he will not make it back in time today, we can presume there is another after-party somewhere, Tokyo or Sydney or Santiago de Chile, somewhere not more than 30 hours from Berlin, give or take the difference in time zone, and that he is happily ensconced behind the decks wherever he may be.


If weekends are one uninterrupted round of partying, Villalobos's weekdays - "every Tuesday through Thursday", he tells me - are reserved for music making. Wrapping a scarf around his neck, he'll gather his keys and maybe the odd percussion instrument, climb behind the wheel of his black Mercedes and drive to his recording studio, located in the basement of an ex-factory a few kilometres away, for an afternoon of beat making, improvisation, composition; the long and unbroken odyssey that counts as his profession, his pastime, his musical life. Which is to say, his only life.
Two days later, we are sitting in that studio, surrounded by computers and gear boxes and MIDI controllers and stray percussion galore, buffeted by sound from two enormous white Martion horn speakers, easily the rnost amazing looking musical contraptions I have ever laid eyes upon. The wind pouring out of them would have blown the champagne-sipping yuppie of Maxell's iconic TV commercial right out of his easy chair and into the next room, "Always, always," Villalobos is saying, describing his work habits, "it's like a motor, an obligation. I can't not do it." Indeed, Villalobos is something of a machine, not necessarily for his rate of production -though with some 20-odd solo EPs, dozens of remixes, three official mix CDs and between three and five albums (depending upon how you count double 12" releases) to his name, he hasn't exactly been slacking - but rather for the automated way he takes to music making. Receiving a phone call in his studio, he never once stops twisting knobs and tweaking envelopes as he monosyllabically keeps up his end of the five-minute conversation, the other caller seemingly a momentary distraction, a mere blip of line noise to be filtered out while the music keeps growing.
For better or worse, Villalobos has become a sort of icon, a pop star for those people from Helsinki to Santiago who consider 'minimal' - a nebulous strain of House and Techno whose definition becomes blurrier every year - their unifying musical/cultural experience. For most of them, Villalobos is minimal,| "I hate it," says Villalobos of his rising status, but that's beside the point. In a few short years, he has gone from being a cult favourite among fans of heady electronic dance music to being one of Techno'^ biggest stars, headlining virtually every major European festival and gigging the world over three or four nights a week. A generous performer and an enthusiastic celebrant, for fans and detractors alike he has become the face of a decadent subculture with one foot in the traditions of classic rave and the other in a new, globalised leisure marketplace. It doesn't help that Villalobos has on several occasions| simply not turned up for gigs, in some cases because he was still ensnared in the previous party. In his defence, he says, "Sometimes one finds oneself in a party and you simply can't leave."

In many ways, Villalobos is the scene: its fulcrum, its still and restless centre, its own best image and worst cliche. A satirical site called Ubercoolische sends up Berlin's minimal Techno scene in rudimentary ] soap-opera format in which Magda makes endless cups of tea while Hawtin abstractedly philosophises and Villalobos compulsively buys T-shirts and strokes j his artichoke. A South Part-style cartoon-Ricardo asks, "Hey Richie, isn't it just fucking great to be minimal?" And cartoon-Richie responds, "It sure is, Ricardo... it's simply minimalicious!" In a scene as hyped as minimal, many fans have putVillalobos on a pedestal of vicarious hedonism, embracing him as its necessary dark side.All of which is curious, because Villalobos, who has been DJing and producing music for 15 years, is also the brain and the hands behind some of the most challenging, experimental and flat-out bizarre electronic music of the decade. He's also an unusually political voice in a scene associated with sunglasses and afterhours. He refuses, for instance, to perform in the United States, at least until the Republicans are out of office. He alleges to have been severely interrogated by US Customs officials on a flight through Los Angeles shortly after 11 September 2001, and says that the officials, upon scanning his passport, began grilling him as to the reasons his family fled Chile after Pinochet's CIA-aided 1973 coup. Villalobos's own dark side might be his almost crushing certainty of a New World Order calling all the shots. He disavows conspiracy theories, but an ominous tone creeps into his voice when he says, "What happened in Chile is one part of this game, what happened on September 11 is another, and Afghanistan and Iraq - everything is part of a system, and it's completely controlled. And there are people who know, who have information about what's going to happen in the future. We don't have a clue." But maybe that paranoia is an essential part of Villalobos's music, as well. He takes that "black energy" - his words - and translates it, via sequencers and samplers and drum machines, Logic Pro and ragtag hand percussion, into 128 bpm four-to-the-floor tracks that somehow make the world buoyant and full of light.


Villalobos was born in Chile in 1970, but his days in his native country were numbered. Shortly after General Augusto Pinochet toppled Salvador Allende's democratically elected socialist government in a bloody, illegal golpe del estado, Villalobos's family joined the thousands of leftists and intellectuals fleeing the country. They wound up in Frankfurt, in his mother's native Germany, where his upbringing blended together Western European and Chilean values. Not until 1986 would Villalobos return to Chile for the first time. "But the Chilean culture, language and sense of humour always was there," he insists. "Our parents never totally adapted to Germany. And always, all our lives, absolutely everybody listened to South American music at home. Because for those intellectuals, all those people who lived quite painfully outside of Chile, the only thing that remained was the culture and the music - getting together with other Chileans and other South Americans to listen to music and dance, the typical situation of the exile. But dancing, partying - a party could occur in the kitchen at any moment. It was a very special situation."
Villalobos absorbed the musical lessons of both cultures - first studying Latin percussion in Cuba and Brazil, and later immersing himself in Frankfurt's nascent rave scene. By the early 90s, he was visiting
Chile every European winter, taking advantage of the South American summer and funnelling records, gear and technology to a country that, pre-lnternet, had little connection to Europe's thriving electronic music scene. He wasn't alone -indeed, fellow Chilean-in-Germany Martin Schopf, aka Dandy Jack, was one of the first to show him the ropes of electronic music production - but he became an important conduit for inter-hemispheric communication, tutoring the young Swiss-Chilean Lucien Nicolet (aka Luciano) among others. In 1994 Villalobos was booked to play a massive eclipse rave in the Atacama desert, along with other Ongaku/ Playhouse DJs and even North American legends like Stacey Pullen and Derrick May, an event he views as one of the major catalysts for Chile's enduring electronica scene.

Chile boasts a staggering number of accomplished electronic musicians, primarily the children of exiles but also many raised in Chile itself: Schopf, Luciano, Pier and Andres Bucci, Cristian Vogel, Closer Musik's Matias Aguayo, Dinky, Miguel Tutera - the list goes on. Central to any history of Chilean electronic music is also Uwe Schmidt, aka Atom Heart and Senor Coconut, who reversed the typical migration path in 1997 when he relocated from his native Frankfurt to Santiago, where he remains today. "It has to do with coincidence, and it also has to do with the fact that electronic music - like in 94 with the eclipse rave - found a platform in Chile, in comparison with other South American countries," says Villalobos of his country's unique standing in the annals of global Techno. "And it also has to do, logically, with the situation that there was a military coup, many parents left Chile and later returned with their children, who had grown up with technology and the culture of Europe and the USA. With that musical information, they arrived in Chile and influenced other people there."
Today, when Villalobos returns to Chile, he's greeted as a hero - the country stands by its talented progeny. In 2006, when Berlin's Loveparade organisation mounted a Loveparade in downtown Santiago, Villalobos (along with Luciano and Richie Hawtin) played to a crowd of some 300,000 people from every class and walk of life. To close the set, he had prepared a special edit of a song by the Chilean folk singer Violeta Parra, fusing his typically rippling rhythms with Parra's mournful voice and guitar. "It was incredible," he recalls. "The people didn't recognise it at first, but then at some point it began to dawn on them, and when all the electronic elements disappeared and only the original song remained, suddenly the people went Twaaaaaa!' and there was an explosion like you can't imagine."
I can imagine it, actually, because I saw Villalobos do something similar with one of Parra's songs on a Chilean beach in 2005, at the MUTEK festival. A few hundred rather messy-looking ravers danced and cavorted while a few dozen Chileans and their families looked down on us from the promenade with a mixture of curiosity and middle-class disdain. And then it happened: out of the matrix of pulses, a voice unfurled like some exotic flower. It was Violeta Parra's song, gently remixed by Villalobos to nestle comfortably with the rest of the mix. As the music fell away, we were left only with her unmistakable voice, which traversed an eerie modal scale that seemed, at least to a foreigner, not Chilean, not Latin American, but simply and terrifyingly otherworldly. Up on the promenade, though, the song's provenance dawned on the passers-by, and their expressions changed. Jaws dropped. Time stopped. At least, quotidian time, historical time, known time. A wormhole had appeared - both for the ravers dancing in suspended animation but also, more importantly, for the uninitiated spectators who found themselves transported to a year before the dictatorship, before economic restructuring, before the Internet. Villalobos was working his magic, cheating the clock at 128 bpm. All of our hearts skipped a beat.


Villalobos hasn't always made music to transcend time and space. His mid-90s releases, such as his first singles for Playhouse or the material collected on Salvador, a 2006 reissue of his work for the Frisbee Tracks label, are more or less of a piece with other eccentric, minimalistic, slightly psychedelic dance music of the period. But as the decade turned, a new sense of strangeness crept into his music as he began refitting the House template with clipped samples, garlands of untraceable effects and marbled rhythms rolling elliptically around the groove. When it comes to rhythm, Villalobos is certainly one of the canniest producers in contemporary electronic dance music. His youthful training in Afro-Latin percussion explains some of his sense of timekeeping, but it doesn't necessarily address the uncanny quality of so many of his beats, which take shape with the same kind of natural/unnatural ease with which a sunflower sprouts seeds according to the Fibonacci sequence. His repetitions are always shifting and morphing. Even at his poppiest, as with the tracks "Easy Lee" and "Dexter" from his 2003 album A/cachofa, counterpoint melodies circle each other warily, refusing to fall into 16-bar patterns. And while those tunes won him legions of fans the world over, other tracks on the album made no bones about following the most oblong course possible from the heart to the head to the feet, with squelches and treated hand drums reconfiguring the topography of House music in mud and moss.

The Au Harem D'Archimede, which appeared on Perlon in 2004 (say it slowly - the title's play on 'theoreme' reflects his love of multilingual puns) was even stranger. It would be hard to find a 'dance' record more meditative, as his typically understated pulses draw all manner of stray percussion and frayed effects into a cone of focused energy. In 2005 he released the Achso ER a four-track double 12" on fellow Chilean Luciano's Cadenza label. Here, more than anywhere else in his catalogue, and particularly on "Ichso", Villalobos's curious sense of time comes to the fore. Running beneath everything there's a gentle swirl of shakers and gurgles and pings; above that, a rocksteady beat of snare and hi-hat. But it's the melody that's so arresting: a keening string figure that wanders modally for all 12 minutes of the track's length. Profoundly melancholic, it sounds like something that might appear - minus the beats, of course - on the ECM label. Interestingly, Villalobos is a huge ECM fan. When I visit him in his studio, it's not minimal House but Dino Saluzzi's bandoneon that pours forth from the speakers, and when I interview him in his Kreuzberg living room - also equipped with an awe-inspiring surround-sound system, with a cozy, egg-shaped, carved wooden chair seated directly in front of the speakers, like some shamanistic command post - there are ECM CDs scattered all over the coffee table.

Villalobos is infamous for the stamina he brings to the party: his DJ sets are usually four hours at the very least, and might easily run to six or eight. But he has recently become just as famous for the increasing length of his tracks. Even at a time when House and Techno tracks regularly stretch to the ten or 12 minute mark, Villalobos's routinely run to a quarter of an hour or more - essentially, the amount of music that can fit on a single side of vinyl while retaining acceptable sound quality. When he DJs, he layers in CD-Rs of his own unreleased music beneath the vinyl; these drum tracks may run to "20, 30, 40, 50 minutes long", he explains, evolving slowly and subtly colouring everything around them. They also drive trainspotters mad, though the geeks may be having the last laugh, as more and more Villalobos music is swiped from soundbooth recordings of his DJ sets and posted online. That's exactly what happened with "Primer Encuentro Latinoamericano De La Soledad", a percolating edit he performed upon a song by Los Jaivas, a Chilean protest rock group from the 60s and 70s. The 21 minute song turned up recently on a popular MP3 blog, and when I inform Villalobos, he is incensed.
"I have the impression that I don't have a private life any more," he complains. "I can't even play the newest tracks from my friends any more. I can't play the best music for people because people are constantly recording me and putting it on the Internet." Where CD-Rs and Final Scratch - a tool allowing digital manipulation of sounds using vinyl records - once offered artists the ability to test studio experiments on the dancefloor, heavily scrutinised artists like Villalobos now must think twice about airing unfinished material before the public, whether for reasons of artistic control or simply abiding by contractual obligations. "This is a dilemma, a contradiction," he confirms. "I can't play my own [unreleased] music and what's more, I can't play the best, the newest shit." Similarly he resolutely refuses to say anything about his upcoming Fabric mix CD, preferring his audience to discover it for themselves.
His recent single "Fizheuer Zieheuer" probably garnered more attention for the fact that it was 37 minutes long - which, as dance singles go, is pretty long indeed - than for its content, which fused the horns of a Romany band with a long, undulating drum and delay pattern. Against critics who charged the song with being over-indulgent, Villalobos gives a very simple, very musical reason for the track's duration. "It was simply a session like I do all the time; it started with a snare drum and a bass sound," all run through a single effect - in mono, which he didn't realise until he had let the modulated filter delay do its thing for 20 minutes. "I tried to edit it and it was impossible because there was always a jump [in the delay pattern]. I was constantly listening to it and it was like a meditation in some way. I was always trying to cut it, and I realised that 27 minutes had passed and I didn't realise how. I had a completely different approach to time - and only because of the track. You get sucked into another level of time, if you really go inside the track, and suddenly 37 minutes pass by, and it's like, 'Huh?'"


Compared with most House and Techno, where digital editing means that the bulk of the composition process entails slicing and dicing, that decision simply to let something be - to respect the musicality of a delay pattern running in real time, and sculpt the rest of the track around its meanderings - is a curiously radical idea. But it's absolutely in keeping with Villalobos's long view of time. When I ask him why duration is so important to him, he doesn't hesitate. "Because I hate it when a nice track is over. I'm addicted to music and to what music is giving me, emotionally, without thinking about it, acting on different levels of the brain. And when this is stopping, I'm frustrated, you know? In club music, the surprising moments are very important, but to have the surprising moments you need a certain time of tension. You can't deliver one surprising moment after another because then it's boring. So to find the right context for the surprising moment, you have to find a frame for it. And this frame has to be big. This forces the music not to be like one orgasm after the other, really compressed and concentrated: everything is a little bit stretched, to be mixed with other stretched music."

Villalobos's discourse on duration leads him to one of his favourite topics: the club of the future. Something like his Platonic ideal of the nightclub, it is open-air, with open windows and daylight everywhere, nestled alongside a river or in a forest, with food and space to sleep, existing completely outside the timekeeping of everyday life. "When you're in a club, time is not running at the same frequency," he says. "Suddenly one second is a little bit faster if you're listening to House music, because 120 [beats per minute] would be exactly the double of one beat per second." Villalobos almost always works at 128 bpm. "It brings you out of normal time
- sometimes, of course, with the effect of some other 'technical supporters'" - his coy phrase for drugs
- "but the main technical supporter is the music. It's really taking you and putting you in a spaceship."


Given Villalobos's hedonistic life on the road, perhaps it's no surprise that few people mention the meditative, melancholic tinge to his music, but it's there if you listen for it. Perhaps nowhere is it more apparent than in his "Apocalypso Mix" of "Blood On My Hands" by dubstep renegade Shackleton, an associate of the British Skull Disco label. Villalobos was one of the first House DJs to begin folding thelikes of Skream and Shackleton into his sets, and the crossover makes sense: at its most intricate, dubstep plays with many of the same elements as Villalobos's music: texture, polyrhythm, a profound respect for the full spectrum afforded by sound recording at its most refined. The dubsteppers, he says, "are much more into the limit experience of the speaker than so-called minimal or even House music producers". The minimalists "are using less bass, less frequency range, and the drum 'n' bass people say, 'What the shit, I don't care if the needle is really about to jump out the groove, it's not jumping out yet, and we'll go to the limit.' So you see the seriousness of their approach, and you say that these are exactly the people you want to work with." And in any case, the Hardwax record shop, which lies a stone's throw from Villalobos's apartment and which he visits weekly, is basically Berlin's dubstep central.
The story of the remix is the kind of cross-genre encounter that happens all too rarely in dance music these days. Skull Disco had sent Villalobos a test pressing of "Blood On My Hands", an ominous cut that features Sam Shackleton's mournful voiceover as he recalls the events of 11 September; Villalobos put it on and immediately, he says, started to cry. "There was something serious coming from England," he says, recalling the immediate connection he felt with dubstep's avant garde. "Very serious and very good, with another approach to the music. And you are identifying with this person" - Shackleton - "who is taking the music even more seriously than you. So you start to learn from this person, who is writing you letters and trying to find a stronger connection. I'm living a life that is often without time for the important things. So it was absolutely natural to do a remix for them and to put all my energy, everything I have, into this remix - to demonstrate how serious this is for me." Villalobos received no money for the remix; Shackleton will return the favour by versioning one of Villalobos's own tracks. He's not kidding about the seriousness of the affair: with Shackleton's vocals slowed down and swathed in reverb, his 18 minute version rides an uncomfortable triplet rhythm that swings like a burning bungee cord, the midrange swirling like so much hot ash. It's hard to imagine clubbers revelling to such dark fare, but again, that's Villalobos's talent: he brings apocalypse to the dance without seeming heavy-handed.


It's at this point in our conversation that Villalobos detours into a monologue on conspiracy theories and "black energy" - which he says he tried to channel into the putrefied bass sound that dominates "Apocalypso Mix". But doom and gloom doesn't come naturally to him, at least not without its optimistic counterpoint. "I think I found a very apocalyptic bassline," he says, "very dark and very hopeless. On the other hand, we are still alive, and some people still find a way to be happy regardless." It reflects a particularly Latin sensibility that has learned how to endure history's longest, darkest nights. Dancing through them, even.

The Fabric 36: Ricardo Villalobos mix CD Is out this month on Fabric

that's a woman!!!

Contempt, Que Bel Epoque, Fabric 36, and both the Salvador CD and 12" should be good for now, thanks. Feel free to throw any stuff my way you think is essential, too.

Fabric mix. That dude.

i still need to get sei es drum actually. loved fabric

ITS WELL WORTH GETTING. I FOUND A LINK BUT IM SURE YOU WILL WANT THE VINYL EXPERIENCE. NICE NAME/AV/SIG COMBO BY THE WAY.

RICARDO VILLALOBOS - ACHSO



TRACKLISTING:
01 ICHSO
02 DUSO
03 ERSO
04 SIESO

Que Bel Epoque and both the Salvador CD and 12"

SIESO IS PROBABLY MY FAVORITE VILLALOBOS TRACK. THE SONG SURPRISED ME WITH ITS WARMTH AND MELODY.