Chapter 1: The birth of a vocation
Ricardo Villalobos is considered as a veteran of the minimal micro-house scene. His career has proven over the years that he is able to evolve consistently through his releases and that he is a magician behind the decks.
This passion for his work is deeply embedded into his roots from his childhood and to his family’s background. Ricardo was aged 3 years old they have moved to Berlin flying from Chile where Pinochet was pressuring the population. Despite the change of culture, he has been influenced a lot by his Latin roots as his parents were always jamming South American music and took him to aftershow parties playing percussions on congas during the whole night.
Around 12 years old house music added a layer to his musical repertory. Young Ricardo was listening to older DJ’s mixtapes and soon started to do and sell his owns in order to buy records. However, the spark to his career as a DJ happened at 15 years old when his school asked him to mix for the “prom night”. Ricardo was on the tracks pursuing his passion for club music by climbing the club ladder and finishing at the top since with acts at London’s Fabric or Offenbach’s Robert Johnson.
Aside of his remarkable ascension as a DJ Ricardo was also refining a genre which has evolved with him since. It is quite a challenge to set one genre to depict his records. Ricardo is the result of the combination of a Latin approach of the percussion and the rhythms propelled by a constantly evolving German electronic scene powered by the rise of modular systems.
Chapter 2: Respect for music and the community
Ricardo has built an equilibrium around his work as a DJ and producer which is defined by - studio time, good parties and the community. According to him, it is the community which gives birth to a spirit around music which goes beyond time and define the positivity and the quality of a great party.
“The people in the scene that survive 10 or 20 years, and people who run certain labels for that period of time and certain DJs; these people are really not following the hype and they have a real connection with their surroundings. They are all members of a social net and this social net is the soul of every party, the soul of the musical movement and the soul of selling records to dedicated people who have a turntable and are prepared to pay this money, even though they can get everything for free.”
Crack - At home in Berlin with Ricardo Villalobos
Buying a vinyl appears to be an act of respect for the community it supports as it ensures that every person involved in the process gets paid. To Ricardo, the physicality of the format reflects a participation in the music world as a growing, breathing, mutually-beneficial organism.
An artist without such a community cannot last for long as whatever happen to your career there are other people who belong to the same values who are bound to help. It is what Ricardo’s experience and career thought us. His community around minimal and microhouse tracks is thriving through the ages animated by robust labels as [A:RPIA:R] run by Rahdoo, Raresh and Petre Inspirescu. It is this tiny circle of artists which helps him to review his work and together they contribute to showcase minimal outside of Roumania.
Like Barac he believes that music and parties is a healer to one’s soul. It is a moment of togetherness which enables you to escape and ease for a moment your daily problems. Taking altitude Ricardo consider a scene, a community as a way to heal society by connecting people through the same values favoring social peace.
“When music connects people, whatever the music, it has a really strong healing influence on society because it connects their interests. People who have the same interests do not go to war and kill each other. It’s hard to kill someone when you share similar values.”
Playhouse: An interview with Ricardo Villalobos
Chapter 3: Music as a universal language
Ricardo has his own conception of music as a language. To him, it is the most basic form of communication one can have.
“And I think music is a language, like someone talking to you, and I prefer a clear, understandable, calm voice as music. (...) When it’s a clear, understandable voice with all necessary components and frequencies which are necessary for the music. And nothing more than this.”
Playhouse: An interview with Ricardo Villalobos
This taste defines the simplicity of minimal and micro house tracks he tends to play during his sets. However, music is considered as a form of dialogue as the semantic used directly calls to your emotions. When you listen to music you will feel something positive or negative which will drive you and when you will listen to another track from the same genre it will recall these feelings.
Ricardo’s sets are based on this intuition that his subconscious is driving his selection calling to the emotions which flows and attached to a particular record. Following his sets is following his mindstream. The counterpart to it is that he has to feel into the mood to share a positive partying attitude through his tracks.
As a producer, he tends to work on a musical semantic appealing to our emotions. To him, music has not evolved much during the past years. The rhythmical codes has remains mainly the same but what happened between the rhythmical construction is our remembrance – the different melodies, this synthesizer, this voice coming. Then it is a treasure of emotions to rediscover a track which will appeal to our memories. If the melody belongs to culture, rhythm belongs to the universal.