Ricardo Villalobos 101
Introduction to the Best-Known Micro House, Minimal Techno House DJ
Whether it's called micro house, minimal techno or minimal house, this dance-music style has become popular thanks in large measure to one Berlin-based DJ.
Chilean-born, German-bred DJ Ricardo Villalobos is arguably the most influential proponent of the dance-music sound that is alternately known as micro house, minimal techno or minimal house.
Because minimal techno/minimal house requires, as the modifier suggests, a stripping down of the music to its minimal component parts, it takes a skillful hand to choose songs that can be thus stripped without losing their charm.
Influences
Part of Villalobos’ recent popularity has been the result of his fascination with the accessible Depeche Mode. Villalobos’ “Conclave Mix” of Depeche Mode’s “The Sinner in Me” lingers on the purity of lead singer Dave Gahan’s vocals before finally, agonizingly, releasing the song into its haunting melody.
“For me [Depeche Mode]...were like the Beatles of the eighties, with electronic instruments. It was one of the bands responsible for making electronic music popular,” Villalobos has said of his influences, which also include Chicago house godfather Derrick Carter and Detroit techno innovator “Plastikman” Richie Hawtin, as well as Brazilian samba.
To date, Villalobos’ magnum opus is his 18-minute “Apocalypto Now” remix of Shackleton’s “Blood on My Hands.” The song is already somewhat eerie and unsettling with its refrain of “when I see the towers fall.” Released on UK dubstep label, Skull Disco, “Blood on My Hands” has the straightforward lounge-house feel, mildly tempered with tribal beats, that is typical of dubstep. In Villalobos’ hands, the Shackleton piece becomes a mood-altering, time-and-space-bending piece of aural complexity, menacing in its unrelenting immediacy.
Critical Reaction
Because Villalobos’ offerings are often cerebral—which is to say, they rely on a developing theme in the way that jazz or orchestral music does rather than focusing on the booty-shaking, four-to-the-floor beats more representative of disco—they originally appealed to the purists of techno and of Intelligent Dance Music, or IDM. (The “intelligent” was a reference to the genre’s preoccupation with artificial intelligence as applied to electronic music, and not to the IQ of the music’s purveyors or of its listeners—although this point has subsequently become blurred.)
With his intellectual puns in titles like “Théorème d’Archimède,” from the album “Thé au harem d’Archimède” (“Archimedes’ theorem” and “Tea in Archimedes’ harem,” pronounced similarly in French), Villalobos seized hold of the critical imagination. “I hear some people saying that music is like ‘the mathematics of feelings,’ he has said. “I believe there is something like a brotherhood between music and mathematics.”
Villalobos’ songs also mix well on dance floors, where, especially in Europe, they were heralded and where they initiated an onslaught of genre jumpers-on, one that has ultimately led to a backlash against all things “minimal” among its early adopters—the IDMers who originally embraced it.
Current Work
It is not the early adopters who decide the fate of a genre, however, and minimal techno/house music is still very much in vogue in certain circles; in the United States, too, where “Euro” beats can be slow to take hold, it is still gaining ground.
Villalobos’ latest offering, on sale in the United States this month, is Fabric 36, a compilation of his own new artist material released on Fabric Records, the label formed by the London nightclub, Fabric, where Villalobos has held a residency since 2004. (He also regularly spins at several venues in his hometown of Berlin.)
The CD is a departure for the Fabric series in that, rather than the usual compilation of minimal tunes from a particular DJ, this is an artist album, i.e., a compilation of all-new Villalobos songs. “I really prefer for it to be treated like a normal mix CD, with no hype,” he says via the Fabric Web site. “I’m more known for head-y, trippy music, so of course it is still very trippy and monotone...But it is more dancey and housey and summery. I always think of the dance floor when I create music, so it’s a projection, a vision. And it’s not one track after another after another; it develops very subtly.”
