Ricardo's Life
Political Background
In September 1973, the military led by General Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile in a coup d'état, dismissing democratically elected president Salvador Allende.
A ferocious dictatorship followed, which ended only in 1990, from which the parents of Ricardo Villalobos, who had just turned three, decided to save themselves by emigrating to Germany. Both university professors, they would have risked their lives immediately identified as enemies of the new regime, forced to return to their mother's homeland to escape torture and interrogation.
The first musical steps
Ricardo was born in Chile, naturalized German (like the marked accent that distinguishes his voice), and from South America he always keeps warmth and rhythm in his heart. He inherited them from a family who invited friends into the living room to dance the night away, in love with Latin music and its festivity. It often happens that the Villalobos gentlemen take the little one to concerts and, knowing the organizers, they all meet at the latter's home for endless jam sessions, percussion and voice, enough elements to make a domestic club hot up to the lights of the four walls sunrise.
One of the promoters would have given the young promise his first conga, unknowingly routing him to the love for drums replaced, in the years to come, by that for drum machines.
Influences and first performances
His parents save enough to give him a console and he is chosen to play at the Institute party, the first public performance that history can remember. It is a small event, in times when technology was not widespread enough to shoot videos that immortalized the moment. It was the Eighties, when Ricardo from the disc approaches the new wave to the point of making it a religion embodied by a sensual pagan god: Dave Gahan. Villa is, in fact, one of the biggest living fans of Depeche Mode, to whom he pays homage both from a very young age with amateur experiments (mixing vocals and bassline with a synth and a Roland), as well as throughout his career composing, in his own way , as many pop works. His edit of "The Sinner In Me", for example, is shirt-tear stuff. As a teenager he follows a fairly common path for anyone who keeps the dream of becoming a DJ in the drawer: he doesn't have enough money to buy a synthesizer or records, but spends days toiling on mixtapes to resell at school.
The consecration
Above all, he is a flamboyant soul raised on salsa and samba that does not reflect the typical characteristics of Germany of which he is adopted son: he is always late, undisciplined, uncontrollable like any genius who gives birth to miracles from his own hands. Dualism is one of its main traits, alternating like Clark Kent an ordinary life as a family man (of two children, he had with his German partner), to that of a world mega-star in a twelve-hour marathon set at Fabric, reduced worse. of the sweaty tank tops he's wearing. Ricardo is a nocturnal animal who over the years has been able to educate himself and love himself, continuing to travel the planet on the crest of the wave not to collect more success, but to feel alive and carry on the love of a lifetime. The family becomes the corrective limit that has never been set before, returning home to her children by giving up an after is the cure for abuses that she has never made a mystery of. He is a hedonist who acts without bad intentions, walking on the clouds with that dangling gait that has become his trademark.