Here's a little fact to ponder: Google tells me the words "Ricardo Villalobos" appear in six out of the eight "Month in Techno" features Big Phil Sherburne penned for this site in the year 2005. I can't find anyone else who approaches that. Not Dominik "K-hole" Eulberg. Not Michael "International DJ Superstar" Mayer. Not Hans-Peter "Space Disconaut" Lindstrom. Apparently in 2005, the geist of techno swung to Mr. Villalobos, brittle zeit.
As the person most responsible for "ketamine house," sweet Ricardo has been chasing his personal white rabbit down any number of holes for the last few years now. (On record, of course.) Alcachofa redrew "jazzy house" with a broken piece of charcoal. Thè au Harem d'Archiméde approached drooling stasis through geologic repetitions. And in 2005 he seemed to have given up on the album format entirely, producing a series of singles that stretch right to the lip of the vinyl, unafraid of what goes on over the edge. Mssr. Sherburne has already commented that if you could get more than 15 minutes of decent sound on a vinyl single, Villalobos would just keep going and going and going.
Slipping out in the last weeks of December and at just a hair under 50 minutes, Achso is not an EP. The only thing that has kept it from receiving the same attention as Villalobos' two albums is form: a vinyl double-pack in an era where many music hipsters have given up even CDs. This is a shame because it might be his best work.
"Ichso" opens as a rustle of hi-hats, clipped male grunts, and a snaking, almost Native American melody. Less than a minute in, a more sure-footed and jacking rhythm drops. The melody becomes a chiming guitar pricking a handful of nylon notes, and back again. Then, after two minutes, he does the wholly unexpected and throws in a breakbeat-like kick, turning this swirl of tiny things nearly club-ready. A distorted chord clangs around five minutes in as the drums become more agitated and the guitar peals. Everything drops out at around seven minutes for a stretch of bass and drum that sounds like desiccated UK garage strafed by intermittent Death Star fire. By minute nine it's a sea of percussive onomatopoeia as the melody reappears. Then the whole thing slows to half time until fade out, a Timbaland rhythm pattern happily chewed on by Perlon grubs and mites.
And so it goes. "Duso" strings Orientalist guitar runs (that sound like they were recorded with an underwater microphone) through a now trademark Villalobos percolating groove, heavy on the hollow kick drum and gurgling off-beats. Halfway through he treats us to elephants stomping bubble wrap in an empty warehouse. Rusty screen doors shudder in the wind and dot matrix printers crank. "Erso" is a chiming sea of fizzy chirps and ISDN line noise like breakers against a shoreline. (Or, if I wanted to be reductive, a dancefloor Autechre.) At the four-minute mark, everything gets farty and it's the most cheerful thing the man has put his name to. "Sieso" is a percussive monster: Sizzles like grease popping from a frying pan, big ugly hammering klangs, contact mic'd dragonfly flutter, all held together by the thinnest Aphexian lunar melody that gorgeously modulates throughout. Patterns are constantly reshuffled, new ticks and tocks and tsssh's. More beats (or beat sounds) per bar than some dance producers manage in an entire career.
Achso is minimal because it doesn't announce itself with big riffs or overt melodies, and it's "minimal" because that's where it gets slotted in stores. But there's more going on in these four sides than the entire Get Physical catalog. I have no idea if these records would work in any club context; my instincts tell me no. But in a genre that often holds up anonymity as an aesthetic virtue, Villalobos records are as immediately recognizable as a Stereolab single, as considered as Morton Feldman, and as expansive as John Coltrane. Say whatever you will: He's the first true genius 21st century techno has produced.
