Resident Advisor Exchange, an interview with Ricardo Villalobos (2012)

His back and the records on the floor

Todd starts by asking about his back. Ricardo thinks it's damage from working a long time in a wrong position. It's a common problem for taller people and also for people who did sports and then stopped, and he stopped at twenty-four. He played volleyball, athletics and soccer, all kinds of sports, and volleyball for the last five or six years.

Todd says a lot of Berlin DJs seem to play volleyball together, but Ricardo says that was his time before Berlin. He relaxed because he thought all that sport would carry him for life, and it's not true. From a certain point you have to do sports again, so the muscles make up for the wrong positions you have as a DJ.

Wherever he plays there's no place left for the records, or if there is, his friends are sitting there, so the records end up on the ground and he has to go all the way down, for hours and for many years. And the turntables are a bit too low most of the time. In the clubs of the last three, four, five years there's no place for records anymore because nobody plays records anymore, which he finds very sad.

He couldn't stand for more than five minutes, so he had to cancel everything, because playing would only have worked with a lot of painkillers. He took a break, recovered and trained his back. No operation was needed, which is what he feared at first, and now everything is good.

Vinyl, privacy and the internet

Then the new 12-inch for Perlon, which he calls the pre-album 12-inch. So another album is coming. He's not only making spaced-out electronic jazz lately, he's been producing dance floor music all the time too, and the album is a selection of that. They produce and produce and swap a lot between friends who also produce, and "ninety-nine percent of the things are not coming out."

It's a small group of producing and DJing friends, maybe ten, swapping long studio sessions, and a selection of those tracks now comes out on Perlon.

But vinyl stays very important to them, an original copy of the music. It means the artist gets money for it, and so do the distributor, the record store and the designer for the label. That's what they want to protect, because "this is financing our whole scene and our whole culture."

Todd says this protect idea seems big for him. Ricardo says a lot of moral things and rules about how people live together are getting mixed up, and some traditional things are worth protecting, like conversations, writing a letter, reading a book, things that seem old-fashioned. Right now the thing to protect is an intimate life that isn't public, protected from the internet spy machinery.

In his words, "The computer knows much more about me than my wife," about his needs and his inner thoughts. So a lot of people talk about not taking part in this spy machinery. He calls the internet a very critical thing and says all the social networks are like disinformation, and he wonders where this information goes.

He has said in interviews that George Orwell's Big Brother idea is a cold joke compared to what's happening now. "At the moment, Big Brother is coming into your house, fucking your wife and guests." It goes into your most intimate situations.

He sees the internet as a big gift, a free playground where everyone can exchange, but he thinks it will disappear. You'll have Facebook, Google, Apple TV, four or six or seven giant providers, you'll pay for all information, and the internet as we know it will be gone. In his view it was used for twenty-five years to spy on the needs and most hidden wishes of every person.

Todd points out that the internet also helped him. Ricardo says every form of communication helps, but the most important promotion for what they do is the party itself, the record you make, helping other people and spreading information directly. "The only promotion is the party where you're playing for the next party." The distribution network matters too, so a record can reach someone in Jakarta, but he thinks the party decides about the next party.

Parties and the doctrine of dependency

Todd remembers him saying a party is one of the few places where people get together in a peaceful and fruitful way. Ricardo agrees. There are concerts and soccer games, but not many situations anymore where people get together voluntarily for a common reason, and what's nice about parties is the get-together and that there's no aggression and no conflict.

That's why he wants to be there and be part of this collective get-together, and he says it's the only reason he DJs. He wants to belong to something and be dependent on a whole group. In his view the promotion of independence is used to create values, needs and products to sell, and he follows what he calls the doctrine of dependency.

You have to be dependent on people and aware of it, be necessary and belong to a special place where you're necessary. He thinks dependency, like in family systems or a child depending on its mother, leads to happiness, and belonging to something leads to happiness, not independence. "The promised freedom of independency means to be lonesome at the end."

Todd asks where this philosophy comes from and if it's from his parents. Ricardo says it's not a philosophy. We all get a socially responsible education, otherwise we wouldn't have friends or family, and it's based on belonging, dependency and social behavior. Making a career is another story, but with friends and family you're social and you don't try to do business.

He says the saying "never mix business and friends" is very true, because you shouldn't look for an advantage over the other person, or you'd have to buy your friends. It's the family idea. Later you swap your family for friends and your mother for a new girlfriend, but it stays the idea of belonging together and being interdependent, and you see it every day.

When his little child cries, the mother runs right away to find a solution, with no discussion and no transaction. People who belong to each other just do things for each other, and he calls this "the most important thing rescuing our world."

Darmstadt, kitchen parties and Frankfurt

He grew up in Darmstadt. Making friends is hard in general, he says, because you have to invest a lot of time and find common interests. His common interest with his father was playing, being as innocent and as irresponsible as possible. His father was a mathematician and "irresponsible" in a way, he jokes, but after he had to leave Chile he couldn't work as a mathematician.

He worked as an engineer or whatever came, because he was in a new country and the family had to survive.

The area was very nice. There was a lot of information about electronic music and a good school system, and it was a bit in the countryside, so he saw a lot of nature but also technology and culture. Of course it's a different mentality than the Spanish or Latin one in South America, and there were moments where you notice someone from Northern Europe reacts differently than someone south of the Alps.

One example is how you handle truth. In Latin culture there are different ways of explaining reality with different truths, and there's always a little back door to get out of a situation. In Northern Europe people always try to say the truth, their own personal subjective truth, and he says that right can be very useful for scientists but not very useful for human relationships.

His first parties were his parents' kitchen parties. Always music and always dancing, when Chilean people in Germany came together to celebrate and listen to South American dance music. Todd asks about Violeta Parra, and Ricardo says they listened to all kinds of South American folk music, but what he remembers most is the parties, the dance and the rhythm.

That impressed him the most. Todd asks if his house is also full of dancing. "Of course. I try to."

Roman Flügel once told Todd that Ricardo used to have after-parties in his basement. Ricardo confirms it. At twenty, out of school and still living with his parents, he was DJing a lot. They invited friends, people from Detroit or wherever, made parties and then had their own little after-hour in the basement of his parents' house.

Roman remembered coming up out of the basement with Ricardo's dad just sitting there saying "Oh, hello." Ricardo says exactly, he was sitting in the kitchen. Down in the basement Carl Craig played, 22 years old, one of the most amazing sets Ricardo has ever heard. It was a very nice period, from ninety-two till ninety-six.

He was hanging out with the Playhouse guys. They were very active in Frankfurt, selling records and running record stores, the Delirium record store and before that Boy Records. They supplied all the known Frankfurt DJs, mostly Ata and Heiko M/S/O, and it was the central meeting point for people into house music. A center of information, he says.

There was a culture, a lot of record stores and very important clubs like the Dorian Gray and later The Omen, and a lot of money for nightlife entertainment. Those are the basics for a cultural nucleus.

From an SH-101 to his first records

Asked who gave him advice when he started producing, he says "There is no source of advice." Your whole musical experience decides what you do, the music you listen to and friends with the same interest helping each other. He wanted a synthesizer and it was too expensive, so his parents, his grandmother and everyone collected money.

A DX11 or DX7 was a dream. They collected about 700 Marks for a Christmas present and bought a Roland SH-101, and he was super disappointed. "What should I do with this shit?" He says children are sometimes very unjust to their parents, and he sees it now with his two and four-year-old kids. After half a year he looked at the 101 and said "Okay, let's start to do something." A friend bought his first drum machine, a 707.

They started with pop music, oriented on Depeche Mode. Daniel Miller, the producer of Depeche Mode, was behind that whole sound, and you always heard some repetitive four-to-the-floor beat, for example on the "Get the Balance Right!" maxi-single from eighty-one or eighty-two. Ricardo calls it a revolution and one of the first techno things. That was a big influence, together with Italo disco.

From twelve to seventeen he went to thirty-two Depeche Mode concerts and followed them all over Europe by train. They were huge fans, until at sixteen or seventeen he had to start taking care of his own life. For him Depeche Mode was a good compromise between the pop world and the new technology of electronic music.

"For me, they are the Beatles of our new era." They explained to a lot of people that electronic music is also music and the synthesizer is also an instrument, and they wrote so many good pop songs.

The way to house was natural. South American rhythm music was there first, then disco came, and his parents took him to the discotheque on vacation. For him it was always the same thing. Out of the whole electronic wave scene at the start of the eighties something happened and it became house music, this mixture, and so house was the common base of what he was into.

Todd says it's hard for a lot of Americans because house is pop music in Germany. Ricardo says it's not pop music in Germany. What happened is that the song-oriented house track turned into this new dance floor style, a very cheesy form of electronic pop based on house, and he doesn't count that as house anymore.

But techno, house and the Euro-trance thing all follow certain dance and rhythm rules, and seen as a whole it's pop too. What he tries to contribute reaches so many thousands of people that he'd call it something like pop music. pop music is popular music and belongs to as many people as possible.

His first record was not on Playhouse in 1994, as Todd thought. It came out on Overdrive, a label from Mainz near Frankfurt, in ninety-two. Then they had two small labels, Elastic and Placid Flavour, and at the end of ninety-four his first Playhouse record came out, which was already his fifth or seventh record.

Music as a gentle language

Todd asks when he felt he had his own voice. Ricardo says he never tries to feel that, because he doesn't want to define what he does. When he sits in the studio and presses record he has no concept, and it just has to sound nice to him. He says music is like a language and should come in a nice, non-aggressive, explaining voice.

If someone screams at you or talks too much, you stop understanding. He tries to produce a hearable, nice and clear language. The most important thing is to have no concept. The frequency of the bass drum and the bassline have to sound nice to him, and then he records, and it doesn't matter if it's house, techno or electronic jazz.

When we talk we usually talk in a gentle way, which is the best way to communicate, and he thinks music should be like that too.

There's a lot of aggressive music, Todd says. Ricardo agrees and loves moments of pure energy exchange, rock situations and a hard techno track that "really crashes me away," just not all the time. He likes dark holes and bass but also bright colorful situations. To him the worst thing you can do is call music good or bad.

"Good or bad music doesn't exist." There's music where you understand the language and music where the communication fails, and that doesn't make it bad. "Music is just a language you understand or not."

Convincing every dance floor

Todd says his DJ sets took in more influences over time and audiences follow him further. Ricardo says in every DJ situation you have to convince the people, no matter if they're prepared or have no clue, with the language you speak in that moment. You need the energy to convince, even when you feel bad, and if it fails maybe they won't book you again.

"Success for a DJ is being able to explain something so people understand." People have completely different cultural backgrounds, but with the rhythm formula you can get anyone in the world to dance.

His example is a record he's playing at the moment by a Palestinian guy. It's folk music with clapping hands at more or less the same BPM as house, chanting around a fire. Even if parts of the world condemn Arab culture as whatever enemy, when you play this music "everyone becomes Arab," and everyone is fascinated.

First the Arab people come and say "Hey, this is Arab music!" and then people who might think the guy on the sleeve looks like a terrorist are convinced the music is wonderful. He calls it the universal language of music, an anti-Babylon. It doesn't matter which culture you come from, and if this guy convinces you with his chanting, even the biggest Arab-hater will dance.

Music shows we all have something in common. He says we all belong to the Indo-European culture, three and a half billion people speaking English, Spanish, Persian and Hindi, and all these languages belong together. So it's very strange to him when people invent reasons to bomb the Persians, because we belong together, and music shows we can love each other and dance together without any problem.

Todd says every international DJ gets an interesting view because they see all these people dancing to the same songs. Ricardo says exactly, but he doesn't want to be a politician or blow up the bubble they live in. Their movement is a still-accepted bubble with no political meaning, and trying to make political meaning out of it could be dangerous.

They should protect the bubble and be happy they can make parties. Todd says you have to work hard to create it. Yes, Ricardo says, and defend it. They are not DJ terrorists, and as long as no DJ terrorist gets killed by some agency they're safe, and they should be happy for those eight or ten hours where they can meet and hear music.

The ECM project

Around the ECM release he mentioned putting Arvo Pärt and Alexander Knaifel into his DJ sets. He explains that there are moments in a party where you feel very dizzy and the party loses control of the normal state of life. It's very monotone and rhythmic, and then you think "It would be nice to put a choir or a violin on it."

A melody from somewhere else gives it some color. He wasn't into classical or jazz back then, but every time he listened he was moved, so he put what moved him into the set, especially pieces without rhythm, on top of monotone rhythmic music.

He got into jazz and classical because of ECM. As a child he bought his first ECM record, an interpretation of Keith Jarrett's music, and his parents took him to concerts. But when you're innocent you don't make a difference between jazz and classical, it's just music. Todd says he was looking for empty on the ECM project.

Exactly, Ricardo says. What he used in his sets had no rhythm, one instrument or a choir. People from ECM heard that at parties and suggested an evening where they play ECM records with his music, and then suddenly it was "Why don't we record a record?"

He wasn't nervous. Working with a concept is hard for him, but he did it with Max Loderbauer, a good friend. They listen to more music in the studio than they produce, they sit there, smoke cigarettes and listen. So it was clear, take this part of an ECM track, loop it and put something on it.

They did it in a very innocent way, without thinking "Oh shit, perhaps it's not serious enough for the jazz people."

When they met Manfred Eicher they played him the first four tracks. He saw right away it was a good way of mixing ECM music with a new electronic approach and said "Okay, do whatever you want." They made twenty more tracks, and Eicher sent suggestions and went looking for empty parts of tracks. Ricardo says it was very fertile.

They had about twenty-four tracks, edited them and had to kick out five or six because it was too much music for two CDs.

They also play it live, always Max and Ricardo with the modular systems plus one jazz musician. They played with Christian Wallumrød, the first concert at Berghain was with Claudio Puntin, and the Italy tour was with Gianluca Petrella, an amazing trombone player. They play in old places, Puccini, Paganini, incredible Italian concert halls, 500 years old and full of gold, and he likes getting in touch with that traditional culture.

But then Italian friends come who know the parties and never listened to the ECM records. After twenty minutes the first guy screams "Bass drum!" and "I want my money back!" because they think it's a Ricardo show and he'll play dance music. There's a rhythmic part, but only for five minutes, and everything is improvised.

Live, Max and Ricardo split the roles. Ricardo takes care of the rhythmic sound structure and Max takes the melody and the harmonic part. But it can go wrong. If there isn't enough light or you're nervous, you might not find the right hole for the cable. It's completely improvised and you can't stop the concert, so you have to deal with whatever happens.

Innocence, modular and the future

Asked if he's getting better, he says you get less nervous. "Pressure always causes unskilled actions. Innocence is free of pressure." Watching his kids he sees what it means to be innocent, free of responsibility and competition. "To stay out of competition is the most important sentence in my life." To say "Sorry, I'm not competing with you. I don't want to be the best or richest." Just let us do things.

So many electronic musicians play with modular now, and Ricardo calls it an emancipation. It's more fun to find the cable and connect this hole with that hole. You can have the same modules digitally in Reaktor or Kyma or Max MSP, but with modular you feel you can find a more personal sound. On a computer a preset often pushes you somewhere, with modular you always start from zero, and it's not elite, because you can buy one module per month.

He uses it in his dance music too, because it's less boring for him. "It's like playing with Lego or Fischertechnik as a child. It's like a game."

Todd says keeping things like a child seems very important to him. Ricardo says not losing the relationship to innocence is very important. When we go to a party everyone suddenly becomes a child, smiling and hugging with no competition. "Going to a party is like going to kindergarten." His children are his biggest idols now, how they stay innocent, how they don't use their intellect and just decide based on subconscious information. Consciousness is sometimes his biggest enemy, thinking about the future and the past, and his children just decide.

So how does he handle responsibility? He gives all responsibility to his wife, he laughs. She takes a lot of responsibility, and he's glad he found someone different from him who organizes and plans. She gives him a shelter where he can be free and out of competition. It's important to find someone who protects you and says "Okay, let me do the organizing, you go to the studio for eight hours and be a child."

Last time they talked, Ricardo said he wanted to do soundtrack work and more jazz things, and he's been doing that. So what's next? He doesn't know, and defining the future is complicated. The ECM thing is nearly the same as what he does otherwise, recording whatever comes out of the studio without a specific purpose.

For him the most important thing is to just go on doing what he does and not try to reinvent himself. He loves the party, he loves producing dance tracks and he'll keep doing that, and if something jazzy comes out, okay. "But it is the worst to define the future." Being a DJ and producing is what he'll do for the next 10, 15, 20 years, "if my health admits it."

Links

The original interview is on Resident Advisor Exchange, and there's Ricardo Villalobos on Resident Advisor. His label is Perlon Records, the collaboration is Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer, Re: ECM, and the key venues are Robert Johnson in Frankfurt and Fabric in London.