ricardo villalobos

anyway, without looking up old threads/reviews, i think au'harem has proved to be a real grower for lots of people - certainly for me "hierklon" was the only thing that stood out at first, but now it's one of my favourite albums of the last few years.

also, i feel like "miami" offers lots of possibilities that no-one else has explored, although i'm not really sure how to make that statement more precise.

re villalobos and autechre - i've had that comparison in my mind for a long time (maybe back to au'harem?), but less in the sense of the actual sound and more in the relationship to their peers - e.g. au'harem to the other microhouse i was listening to was somehow like mid/late 90s autechre were to other idm. but possibly this just shows how shallowly i engaged with these genres! i definitely disagree with this trend to single out villalobos as the only innovator in town, but i do think that he was an eye-opener for a lot of people (esp with au'harem).

what else? oh, i've taken ketamine, but only by accident, and i din't find it worked that well with this kinda music (or indeed sound full stop). these days i find that this stuff's best listened to on sleeping pills - stay up really late until your super tired, then take some sleeping pills, stick au'harem on repeat on your headphones and drift off into the warmth...

i had a jazz guy slamming his beer on the table telling me that villalobos was "such shit. not even music. djing is not even playing music..." the other day.

Something about him interests/annoys/intrigues people who don't follow dance music so closely?

although mp3s never do justice to the low end of vinyl records...

ha, i totally misread that at first and was bewildererd as to how you found everything else more accessible.

i can see how he'd particularly annoy a jazz guy.

really? pretty much all i listen to these days is villalobos-style stuff and jazz, so i find that rather odd.

"let we go" is totally k-hole, yes. it's tracks like that and i guess also that mathew jonson/the mole speicher effort that make me want to learn to use ableton and make huge 5 hour mixes (or maybe even just edits) to do pure maths to/listen to when really tired.

Villalobos reminds me of Miles Davis and Sun Ra though.

indeed - i'm sure it only feels like this thread is linking in with loads of others, either real or imagined, but i think this music does raise the issue of there only being so many things that one can spend time and effort gaining an understanding/appreciation of, and it wasn't clear at first that au'harem was one of the things that i wanted to take that effort with; but having done so, i've automatically done the same with other villalobos releases (eg chromosoul, which doesn't seem to get mentioned much round here). i'm sure there are tonnes of other minimal-related things that i'd appreciate if i made the same effort with them.

all of this has just reminded me of this:

geeta in london nov 27-dec 2: FAP? (Little Duke, Roger St, Clerkenwell, 29/11)

i strongly suspect that i'll never know what that 7am record was, or if i've heard it since. this still bothers me sometimes.

we can pay credit to ricardo's endurance though. the guy is almost undoubtedly the worlds best when it comes to playing at a messed up afterhours looking like a sweat-soaked casualty of gurn.

Debris "Static Disposal"!! omg. I wonder if that guy will start the site back up, no new ones since February ....

sorry, back to Ricardo ....

I think this is correct but I think this has more to do with the way in which "we" tend to talk about dance music and experimentalism and etc than the quality of the music - not that this delegitimates the claim.

That was the point of my mammoth post on dissensus comparing the two - I actually find both equally exciting but, rightly or wrongly, villalobos is exciting in ways that make many people (critics esp) grope for the word "genius" rather than, I dunno, "hot shit" or something.

This is what I said:

"This is what I meant when I was talking on that other thread about the difficulty of proving vanguardism. It's not so much that vanguardism doesn't exist, but that - at least today - its claim is always plausibly (but rarely finally) refutable. There is in all contemporary music a certain component of revivalism or repetition, and this becomes a sticking point for people (or not) depending on their willingness to accept the presence or echo of that which is being repeated - e.g. dub and reggae in dubstep.

Dance music provides some good examples of this. When I think of two of my favourite current producers - Ricardo Villalobos and Booka Shade - it's immediately clear that Villalobos is the one being lauded as vanguardist (to the point that I felt moved to complain on ILM that in critical terms he's becoming the Outkast of German dance music). But the argument could be made that Villalobos's Achso ep, as awesome as it is, is just reviving 80s Jon Hassell and early nineties "intelligent" techno (Black Dog and early Autechre are probably the key reference points).

Booka Shade, meanwhile, are arguably reviving disco, early UK (acid) house, early trance, early rave and detroit techno - so their reference points are maybe A Guy Called Gerald/808 State, Eye Q Records, early Warp/Ital Rockers etc, with a dash of Detroit and early Orbital in there too.

Both are providing a pretty clear "twist" on their influences in terms of recognisable production nuances and immediately recognisable sonic signatures. Neither tend to straightforwardly revive one sound in particular, but carefully combine their influences (Villalobos's "Ichso" is a Jon Hassell/Talk Talk collaboration with Black Dog on production; Booka Shade's "Manderine Girl" is, I dunno, Carl Craig gone trance through a white noise filter).

So how do we distinguish between the two?

The audacity of the translation of influences? Villalobos is drawing on stuff from further outside house's legacy, but it's not really outside techno's legacy. His chosen sources may appear to come from more disparate genres, but they actually blend together quite easily and smoothly - whereas with Booka Shade the influences rub up against one another quite forcefully and delightfully ("Mandarine Girl" and esp. the new track "In White Rooms" do quite amazing and unexpected things with tearjerker trance riffs).

The freshness of the source material? Is Jon Hassell less played out than early A Guy Called Gerald? Hard to say...

The transition of the source material from a genius context to a scenius one? Maybe, but in doing so Villalobos is increasingly being distinguished as "genius" rather than "scenius" anyway.

The radicalism of the new production stamp? Villalobos is more openly, ostentatiously idiosyncratic and epic, but I think Booka Shade are just as impressive and interesting finally.

These aren't unanswerable questions, but they're complex ones, and every juncture I just see personal taste bleeding through.

Mark's definition of vanguardism - the creation of new populations, the redefinition of the very concept of music - avoids this trap, but it does so by skirting the entire field, equally rejecting both options as being mere product. Which is fine, but it leaves us with a vacuum as to what critical language we can use to talk about these rejected options. And there is music we all like which falls into this category - Junior Boys for example, or Ariel Pink, or..."

ps did my package get to australia?

dissensus requires patience i think, you have to adjust to a different speed whereby there may be one interesting new thread per month as opposed to one every couple of days at least here.

(Vahid perhaps your polemaesthetic is strident pro-smeariness!)

godammit i wish this had been released as a 12" instead of chromosul

http://www.roskilde-festival.dk/object.php?obj=4e342774&code=1

Isn't it the long (9 mins or more) unfolding of larger musical pieces from "micro" structures?