Inside the world of contemporary techno, Ricardo Villalobos is a guru: Fans worship him, skeptics think he's a crackpot, and he doesn't seem to care much either way. Parts of his discography read like Spinal Tap for dance music: In 2006 he released a track that looped Serbian brass bands for about 37 minutes, and a year later, he made a mix for the London club Fabric consisting entirely of new Ricardo Villalobos productions, which is like giving a toast at someone's else's wedding about your own marriage. Halfway through the mix, a woman starts angrily delivering her opinions on how to deal with chicken giblets. Then the big Japanese drums come in. From where, it's unclear. In Villalobos tracks, all doors are trap doors. The music he makes is loose, chaotic, and highly detailed, but the overall effect of it is like watching traffic: In the end, nothing really happens. His gift, though-- and this is where the worshipers start to worship-- is that a different kind of nothing seems to happen every time.
His output from 2006 to 2012-- which is basically the moment he waded into the deep end-- is a catalog of extremes: On the one hand, you get these long, linear, endlessly unfolding pieces of music like his Fabric mix; on the other, you get 37 absurdly repetitive minutes of Serbian brass bands. Dependent and Happy-- a series of five vinyls or one CD that picks up where the Fabric mix left off-- is his most substantial solo release in five years, and basically an extension of the kind of music he started making on the Fabric mix. Over the course of its 80 minutes, we hear people talking, cars honking in the street, and someone playing the bongos. Naturalistic sounds blend into synthesized ones, and synthesized sounds imitate the natural world. Villalobos wanders in to play a few notes and then disappears again.
There comes a point in listening to his music that almost any sound feels like it might belong. That's the exciting thing about it. That's the disorienting thing about it, too. Dependent cements a slow evolution from left-field house music to something like sound collage or electroacoustic composition pinned to a house beat. Every element is carefully managed, but the outcome mimics that haphazard feeling of real life. And like life, Dependent moves in a straight line. Whatever repetitions are there feel accidental, like a trick of perception. (Your brain, after all, craves patterns, and will make them whether you like it or not.) Even drums-- techno's anchor-- can vary from bar to bar, sprouting weird extraneous noises as they go.
Given the open nature of the music, the tracks that seem easily excerpted from Dependent are also the ones that feel most out of place while listening to it as a whole. "Put Your Lips", for example, is as good a place as any to sample what it is Villalobos sounds like in 2012, but when it comes up int he course of the album it feels self-contained-- a strange quality when the beauty of the music is how radically open it sounds. In the end, it's the looser tracks that form the album's backbone. When I first put the needle down on "Tu Actitud", I thought the record had been cut wrong. The music seems to start in medias res-- like it's always been there, but you, the listener, just fell into it.
I hesitate to be prescriptive about these things, but both the vinyl and digital experiences are great in their own ways: Digitally, you can just let the music run, which can be more hypnotic; on vinyl, having to change sides every 12 minutes or so is a constant reminder of just how substantial the set is. Over the past few years, Villalobos has become almost mystically preoccupied with sound. "There is a fairly strictly limited range of frequencies available for the production of electronic music," he mused in a 2011 interview, surrounded by very nice-looking speakers that resemble the bells of trombones. "When you 'marry' these with all these acoustic recordings that have all these atmospheric spaces, it is in some ways a complementation of the things that electronic music lacks."
In other interviews, he's talked down software like Ableton, which offers pre-programmed instruments at affordable prices that Villalobos, with his impossible ears, can identify in "two seconds." Instead, he uses modular synthesizers, building each electronic element from raw wave forms. Bar soap? No. He makes his own. (Maybe now is the time to mention that the vinyl edition-- i.e., the one for the hardcores-- has three extra tracks, all of comparable quality to anything else on the CD version. Villalobos, of course, encourages attentive listening; most of the vinyl only has one track on each side, which is a very different experience from listening to it as an almost continuous block of sound.)
Basically, he's a snob. He's monkish in his austerity. There's also nobody making the kind of music he's making right now. Like last year's collaboration with Max Loderbauer re-imagining tracks from the catalog of German jazz label ECM, Dependent breaks down genre and expectations, but does it with a polite kind of confidence. It recalibrates the ear. Maybe it's appropriate to assess it like a drug: Side effects may include a heightening of sensitivity to the sound of the world around you. Call his tracks "environments"-- my guess is, he would. In them, even melody-- one of the most basic components of music-- can sound totally foreign. It's true that destruction can be an act of creation, but the same goes the other way around: In building, Villalobos, with his big ideas and cheerful disposition, tears down.
Written by Pitchfork
Tracklist
01. Mochnochich
02. Timemorf
03. Grumax
04. Ferenc
05. I'm Counting
06. Put Your Lips
07. Samma
08. Tu Actitud
09. Zuipox
10. Koito
11. Die Schwarze Massai
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