ricardo villalobos

It certainly flows as a proper "album" experience to me also (which was why it seemed so wrong and less impressive when i accidentally listened out of sequence!)

http://www.discogs.com/release/635613

also, is minimal techno the new post-rock?

what does that mean? without explaining the question, it just sounds like "is minimal techno actually a bunch of boring and pretentious shit that's tricked us into liking it?"

with that said, i sort of liked what i heard of the autechre tortoise remixes (although i only have them in memory), and i see the similarities, but i think achso has so much more to reveal. all of the tortoise remixes i heard (by anybody) always seemed flat, like they weren't holding anything back, everything laid out for you to see and not really being a very interesting scene. i always liked the original tortoise versions better.

and i don't mean to bring this up as a sociological attack on the listenership or anything, because after awhile, i started to agree with the author. in fact, to this day, i would say "confield" is probably the last great post-rock album. pretty much every track on confield deploys one or more postrock strategies. i don't have the presence of mind to list these out, i may or may not at some time, but i really really think that EP7 and confield are more or less working in post-rock idiom and exploring post-rock structures and tricks.

now, i am just struck by the similarity in sound between recent villalobos and that era of autechre's work, and also by the similarity in mood and artwork and song title and so on between lots of late postrock and the current minimal techno crop (i guess you could even draw parallels like villalobos camp = chicago, kompakt = sigur ros, etc) and i'm just wondering if we could brainstorm on this a bit.

i definitely agree with the villalobos - chicago comparison, though. they are using very similar strategies, and their aesthetics are also similar in sounding both improvisational and structural. i like them both for that reason.

i have to go to bed because i'm too tired to think anymore.

Whoa -- I just went to Bleep to grab EP7 and they're selling Achso now! In 320kbps mp3s, no less. For anyone who wants a legit non-vinyl copy, this is pretty reasonable..

or is minimal techno?

one does not equal the other.

I have no doubt loads of people really like villalobos, people who like minimal techno and people who post here etc. I just meet so many people who say "yeah villalobos" and I doubt they have ever heard him, I realise this is cynical but it'd be fine if people say this about m.a.n.d.y. or mayer cos essentially it's house/techno but villalobos doesn't really fit the crossover mould......

I have no doubt loads of people really like villalobos

okay whatever

This isn't incompatible with the notion that a lot of people listen to Villalobos privately, but that distinguishes him from a lot of other dance music producers, who are probably "listened to" more by people out dancing or downloading DJ sets than by people buying or downloading specific 12 inch tracks.

As I suggested upthread, I hear a lot of references to villalobos which strike me as using him as a stand-in for the notion of creativity in dance music, far over and above artists like booka shade or dominik eulberg or anyone else who is undoubtedly more ubiiquitous on dancefloors.

I guess in some ways what's exciting for me about alot of electrohouse is that it is blatantly obvious what the point of it is, and while it may not be doing massively different things on a literal level to house and techno down the ages (ie people dancing, in clubs) it continues to bring new sounds from different things into these two genres.

I know it's a fairly hardline stance but as a result of the sort of tension and fight between house and experimentation I think the non house output of these artists is kind of irrelevent, to me anyway, it's like......what is it part of, who does it represent?