Ricardo's Vision
The essence of the underground
Ricardo Villalobos is a name known in every corner of the globe, he has played everywhere and for everyone (Sven Väth says that between 1990 and '91 he saw him wandering around his club in Frankfurt, the Omen, equipped with a bongo that he played during over the years he has moved between Robert Johnson, Fabric, Cocoon, Amnesia and wanting to continue the list would take hours and hours). Nevertheless, any DJ and producer - even the most underground - openly affirms that he is the greatest, an idol, having inspired the path of many and churned out tracks of all kinds, all of the highest quality. Villalobos has not sold his soul to the devil, he chooses not to play in America because he condemns the political and social model, even mindful of the pain experienced by his family; he eschews the technology of social media and the internet age as much as the excess of interviews, convinced that if someone chose to attend one of his sets, they would do so because he is doing his job well, and not because the promotion was relentless.
Innocence
Innocence is, perhaps, the most beautiful aspect of his approach to music and the work he has done with it in thirty years: the party remains the center, the rhythm never passes, people never pass. Time passes, but there will always be crowds gathering together for the same reason, speaking the common language of sound. And being able to gather lovers and friends in the same place for an incredible moment is the goal that he sets himself every time he performs, now as then. The common aspect of all parties is to dance, and dancing is a power that everyone can exercise without distinction: where gentrification raises the prices of clubs or forces them to close, compromising the community sense of club culture that wants everyone together on the same floor, Villalobos fights the classification of the dancefloor. The party is the social institution, whose founding elements are human beings, music, identity and dance associated in a single collective form: "Dancing is inside our body - we spend six months listening to industrial techno in the belly. Our mother's heartbeat, our mother's heartbeat, the gastric fluids that surround us, all together it sounds like a techno production. And the experience in a club is similar to that lived in the mother's womb: you are sheltered, collected at listen to music, "he said.
Emotion and Passion
The compositional process is identical, which Ricardo keeps emotional and based on the reactions to stimuli and events around him. The sound chooses it, approaches it instinctively, it must not be conceptually elaborated in structures that spoil its purity; music explains itself, another reason why he doesn't like reviews of records or tracks, convinced that the role of the journalist is to promote understanding of something and not to harm you with subjective comments. According to physical law, an action corresponds to a spontaneous response, for which Ricardo reacts to the sound unconsciously and, once again, with innocence. It plunges into epiphanies in the emotions to be found as in a treasure hunt, like when for ten years you forget to listen to a track and, rediscovering it by chance, your heart beats among the memories.
Productive Style
In terms of sound, Villalobos is consecrated among the pioneers of minimal techno, that genre characterized by repeated and obsessive loops on the same bassline, melodies reduced to the bone and almost without variations. A scene strongly rooted historically in the Italian Neapolitan (see under Marco Carola, Capriati, Cerrone), but also in that South America of which Ricardo is a native (together with his colleague Luciano), until reaching eastern latitudes in the Romania of Radhoo and Raresh . Also called microhouse, it is a category that divides currents of thought, between those who hate it because it is poor in nuances and those who worship it because it is a real journey for the mind.
Perlon's Influence
In between is the global diffusion by the Perlon label, founded 22 years ago by Markus Nikolai and Thomas Franzmann (aka Zip), who are great friends of Villalobos and have hosted many of his productions on their label. At the Panorama Bar in Berlin, Get Perlonized is celebrated every first Friday of the month! Night, one of the longest-running parties since the opening of the club in 2004, totally dedicated to the minimal sounds characteristic of the resident Zip and Sammy Dee, accompanied from time to time by a guest who has published at least once on Perlon.
The profound experimentation
Given that his sound originally fell into this thing here, Villalobos has moved in every conceivable direction. He has experimented and shown to have a profound musical culture, as well as an irrepressible flair. "808 The Bass Queen" is a track released in 1999 that I watch shared daily on at least one Facebook feed after twenty years. The 2003 debut album, Alcachofa, remains an ageless masterpiece, having given the world the polyrhythmic majesty of tracks like "Easy Lee" (whose bassline was inserted by Ricardo on the advice of his wife, who found the piece too simple), and the swirling hypnotic darkness of "Dexter".
There are very long pieces, like the twenty-eight-minute remix of Mari Kvien Brunvoll's "Everywhere You Go", in which a highly emotional melody evolves powerfully into a club bomb, or the ten-minute edit of "Blood On My Hands" by Shackleton, abstract and cerebral like a leap into the unknown. Discs, exclusive compilations for the London Fabric, EP, remix on remix, a double album (Re: ECM), released on the ECM label in collaboration with Max Loderbauer, in which they reinterpret the label's recordings in an ambient, minimal and almost jazz key .
An eternal dreamer
Villalobos is a madman, out of time and space: he is a surrealist, a dreamer, an eternal child not because he is immature, but because he is sincerely naive and enthusiastic. A visionary artist with an immense heart who wants to be happy in his life: the reason he never sleeps, he says, is to avoid having nightmares. Everyone will say that the reasons are other; I want to believe this version.