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The Chile-born producer is no stranger to lengthy, minimalist techno and remains a master of inspired remixes to this day
Not many producers can get away with putting out tracks that stretch to 45 minutes long. But Ricardo Villalobos isn’t just any old producer. One of dance music’s most storied figures, the ChileanGerman producer and DJ’s slender, hypnotic grooves have earned him a reputation as a master of minimal techno and a near-universally renowned artist within electronic music’s underground.
Born in Chile, Villalobos’ parents fled the country in 1973 after Augusto Pinochet ousted liberal president Salvador Allende in a military coup, bringing the three-year-old to his mother’s native Germany, a place she had been forced to leave after WWII. As a child in Germany, Villalobos’s curiosity was sparked by the South American rhythms in the records he would hear at home; he began his own collection at the age of eight, landing his first gig (at the school disco, no less) when he was only 15. Two years later, inspired by Depeche Mode’s emotive synthpop, Villalobos began tinkering with production using a bedroom set-up centred around the Roland SH-101.
These experiments would spark a lifelong fascination with sound and a passion for the classic analogue gear and hardware used to make it. In the years since, he’s become a hugely prolific producer, putting out ten albums and too many singles to name, alongside a host of radically imaginative remixes that transform their source material into unrecognisable new forms. Though his diverse output has seen him sample everything from postmodernist classical to Serbian folk music to avantgarde jazz, there are a handful of traits that reliably define a Villalobos track.
The first is his minimal approach, which strips the music back to only the bare essentials; most tracks will only feature a few percussive sounds, a manipulated sample or two, a bassline and – of course – a relentless kick drum. “Music is a language”, Villalobos said in a 2012 RBMA interview, “and I prefer a clear, understandable, and calm voice – with all necessary components and frequencies which are necessary for the music. Nothing more than this.” Another defining quality is the producer’s hallucinatory timbres; weird and wonky sounds, often cooked up by his towering modular rig, that have inspired many a Gearspace forum thread concerning their methodological origin.
More than anything, Villalobos’ music is recognizable by its rhythms, almost impossibly groovy constructions that sound organic, human and anything but sequenced. This plays into another Villalobos hallmark: extended track durations. Considering that many of his tracks run far beyond the length of other artists’ albums, the unacquainted might accuse the producer of sel
