ricardo villalobos

like, for instance, i saw reboot the other week. he was playing every single acapella and track luciano uses. he used the brothers vibe - the dance acapella on about 5 separate occasions. sorry, but i happen to think that's pretty lame. the rest of the crowd had no idea what he was doing (as they were not complete nerds like me), so it worked. for me, this is the equivalent of a signature acapella, so it's a separate issue...

there's a big difference between using someone else's idea that's strongly associated with their sets (an acapella, or here, a 40 second filtered loop) and playing a track that other people have played a lot...

the rest of the crowd had no idea what he was doing (as they were not complete nerds like me)

hehe. were you staring at him, angrily while surveying they crowd, trying to gather support for some sort of hang the dj type situation?

re: enfants. i kinda like this anthem/not anthem style of track villalobos has been releasing lately, it encourages djs to be a bit more creative with their mixing. much more interesting than if he'd released it as a straight up 5-10 minute minimal track.

maybe for the cognoscenti but i think 95% of the crowd is just going to think "that sounds awesome"?

i can understand being a little peeved at hearing someone replicate an actual mix sequence, but marking off an entire piece of vinyl as being too associated with a particular dj just doesn't make sense to me.

and personally i have 0 interest in whether something qualifies as a "tune" or not, or whatever.

staring at him, angrily

nah, i'm not THAT bad. i just let myself enjoy it as a kind of 'luciano tribute band' thing and had to surpress laughter every so often when he blatantly ripped off mix sequences.

i think you're missing my point about the villalobos. it's a great idea and it's HIS idea. but with the right inspiration, anyone could do it. so do it yourself. it shouldn't be a piece of vinyl, in my opinion.

thinking about it, it's an act of generosity to DJs he's released it. there's no doubt that as a tool it has the capacity to blow minds. i suppose personally, i'd have been more selfish. and as rio says upthread, i would feel embarrassed playing this in a club.

ha. i've had that "i've def heard this mix before" kinda de ja vu before.

i agree with you up until you're argument that it shouldn't be a piece of vinyl. i find tracks like this fun to play with. plus its such a wonderful loop. i dont really dj this sort of stuff, or in clubs, more private/friends only kind of parties.

yeh, hehe, opening a set, or hitting a climax in a set with this track would be pretty risky imo.

I really like enfants! Beat tool or not, I still think it has more colour and vigour than the average Villalobos track, and if I heard it in the middle of a set I think I'd probably be thoroughly invigorated by it.

"enfants" is OK, not as good as theo parrish's "friendly children"

'friendly children' is good, but way too stoned sounding to be a useful comparison. pretty wonky tho.

Line-up: RICARDO VILLALOBOS, DANDY JACK, RIC Y MARTIN, DJ POONTZ, VINCENT LEMIEUX, CHE VI CHE, BLISS
Date: March 1st, 2008
Venue: Metropolis (59 Sainte Catherine East)
Time: 10pm - 8am

Oh, Ricardo... If Obama promises to make Homeland Security be nicer to you, will you pleeease come play for us in the US of A?

I dunno, taking a 5+ hour bus to montreal, going to this party, coming back the next day without sleep, or going to a hotel or whatever, for what I don't think will cost much less than $80, not factoring in food/shopping etc. might not be the worst idea. After all, a freaking Ric Y Martin LIVE set, when am I ever going to see Ricardo, let alone not a DJ set?

On the other hand, it's just a party and they're just people, after all (albeit ones who play good music).

In addition, Montreal crowds tend to be great, and I can only imagine the vibe at this event is going to be over the moon. If I were in NY, I'd totally go. If you've never seen Vince Lemieux before, he's a real treat as well.

I am in NY, and were it not for the unfortunate fact that visa issues prevent me from leaving the country in the next few months, I would definitely make the trek up to Montreal... I love Dandy Jack almost as much as I love Ricardo.

BTW, Philip, well done on getting two Wire covers in the space of six (?) months. I (and I imagine lots of others) was somewhat startled to see another techno cover so soon after the UR one, but your Luomo interview was very enjoyable.

"If you've never seen Vince Lemieux before, he's a real treat as well.

-- pshrbrn"

he's not as good as mario lemieux:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=7oZJ5GonG5Y

f you've never seen Vince Lemieux before, he's a real treat as well.

Yeah, he put on the best what I'd venture to say was my favourite DJ set (I saw) of 2007. That 'Best unsung DJ' thread springs to mind.
I'm not in NY, if that was in reference to me, but Toronto, which if anything probably makes the process easier.

Don't download anything of his. He'll do your nut...

“Music coming out of computers makes me sick! The music is only half there. I mean, why the fuck do people treasure MP3s? The rest of your life is progressing and getting technologically richer – but here comes the MP3 ruining it. Music is so important – it’s the basis of people’s lives, yet they are hearing it in such shit conditions. It is so, so strange. I can buy a camera every week that has an extra eight million pixels than the week before, whilst music is going to shit. How is this happening? How?! We all need to fight against it – it’s important. I see myself as a living protest against this process. Just don’t download this – legal or otherwise

here

Yeah, that's easy for him to say, since it's not like all DJ's, music enthusiasts, or people who just want to hear music and can't get it anywhere else are making a very healthy, steady income off music (and playing music), since having vinyl isn't a question of luxury but necessity, and absolutely perfect is an end in itself.

http://thephoenix.com/secure/uploadedImages/The_Phoenix/Home_Entertainment/The_Ultimate/mcbain_silly.jpg
How do you sleep at night? On top of a pile of records, with many beautiful ladies.

Sorry, but quotes like that bring out the bitter socialist in me.

you dont have to be rich to buy records. all you have to do is to is care enough about it to make it a priority. if you dont care that much, should you really be deejaying anyway?

Yeah, but I'm saying is that it isn't as easy for some people as it is for people making a good living off playing those records.

true, but having and playing records gives fun results, whether or not you are getting paid from it. lord knows how much i would have to start getting paid at gigs to break even (dance music owes me money), but that is not why i do it. i do it because it is fun! it is an end all by itself.

I agree with you there, that's why I actually use, and prefer using vinyl and don't just get CDJ's or something, but I imagine even Ricardo can at least see why people want to download mp3s, be it right or wrong.

sure but i think he's also trying to wake people up a bit -- to ask them, "why are you settling for less"? you know i hadn't realized, for instance, that iTunes shit is ripped at 128; i only figured that out after i'd purchased a couple of albums, and was like, what the fuck? for the last several years i've been ripping everything at 320, and while to take that step backwards wasn't the end of the world for me, it was noticeable. i think it's worth encouraging people to ask more of the marketplace.

not to take this too off-topic, but villalobos' camera analogy is spot-on: music is the one place in "entertainment" where the technology doesn't seem to be making any strides towards improved quality, only faster consumption. the shift to ipods and earbuds, the shift to low-bitrate mp3s, to listening on myspace pages; it's clear that people aren't really interested in audio fidelity. and maybe that means that people like villalobos are just tilting at windmills. but i'm glad someone's saying it. i don't mean that we should all go out and purchase subscriptions to Hi-Fi Geeksnob Quarterly; in fact just the opposite. technology, and the market, ought to be focusing on optimizing digital sound, rather than simply spinning it into a thinner and slipperier gruel.

the general public have never been interested in audio fidelity considering the massive popularity of transistor radios and tapes was how it was mostly listened to before DJs started getting on their high horses. i love villalobo but doesn't it just sound like your dad hitting his 40s and getting misty eyed about pong when youre showing him a bit of vice city?

why not just accept that not everyone wants to listen to vinyl?

no cause vice city is rich in sumptuous detail and pong is not. what kind of analogy is that?

to be fair philip, video is another area where low-def is massively more popular than HD, despite blu-ray and HD tellys, if you take youtube and ipod/psp videos into account. but i totally get what RV is saying and i agree with him in general. music isn't just informational the way photos and television often are. the texture of it (especially these days) is crucial.

and i agree about being shocked with itunes. the only album i ever bought off itunes was last year's underground kingz record and while it might sound OK pumped through computer speakers on headphones the entire bottom end just disintegrates into crunchy distortion. i honestly thought something was wrong with my headphones until i tried it with another pair and it sounded exactly the same way.

i was merely stating that villalobos is being cranky in a very dad like way to the status quo of DJing changing substantially for the first time in 3 decades

i haven't read the linked article but the quote doesn't make it sound like he's coming out against CD-Js or using WAVs in Ableton -- the two things that have really changed the status quo of DJing, imo -- it's about the ubiquity of shitty mp3s and DJs who don't seem to care about that. from what he says about cameras etc it seems he's very pro technology.

what he refers to is music coming out of a computer. enfacts in 10 quid on boomkat so im wondering how many vinyl copies of that i'll be hearing out.

if you release your music in digital format you have more control over the sound quality, vs. leaked mp3s of vinyl-only tracks being all over the shop in terms of fidelity

Tracer's right re: video analogy - if anything, video's been FAR worse impacted. But people expect and are already pretty well adapted to the difference in fidelity - think about how many dudes are out there buying huge ass HD televisions vs. high end audio. How people watch youtube expect pixelated performances.

With audio, I think there's this bizarre expectation that all bitrates are made the same and most people who complain about this stuff usually are blissfully unaware of that fact.

digital cameras are increasing in resoltion, but only after the initial massive drop off in quality between a film camera and the early digital cameras. i assume the same kind of thing will happen with digital music as disc space becomes cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. soon, .wav will be standard, while people whine about not being able to get 192kHz 24 bit files which "sound closer to vinyl". and so on and so forth. and that whole time, there will still be people playing records.

Resolution is an easy metric without much significance as far as real image quality goes. (Besides, few consumers actually use TIFF and RAW files, sticking to JPGs -- which are the visual equivalent of MP3s.) I remember in the heydays of portable CD players when Sony kept putting out longer and longer antishock memory times. Consumers want a simple number which can reassure them as to the quality of what they're buying. I don't think that the audio world has such an equivalent. Besides, the vast majority of people right now listen to music through their shitty iPod earbuds - I'd challenge anyone to hear the difference between 128 and 320 through those while they're walking around a noisy city.

hehe, i always feel like i have to chime in on these kinda discussions.

pipecock, digital audio resolution and bit depth aren't at all useful when comparing to digital audio to vinyl. for example a piece of vinyl recorded (well) into a computer then replayed will sound pretty much the same as the record. a clean digital recording chain will capture whatever you throw into it.

someone mentioned something about bitrates on mp3s upthread. these are kinda silly to discuss as well, the actual codec used makes more of an impact that the bitrate. if you have an audio editing program you can install lots of codecs and output stuff at the same bitrate and compare.

with regards to a club situation, i get more uppity about the stupid placement/setup of speakers and rooms than format. danny wang wrote some pretty hyperbolic but interesting stuff on this subject.

similarly, misuse of equipment is far more annoying than format. cd-js overdriving really shitty mixers. badly set-up and maintained tables. the horrible sound of ableton's warp feature (see henrik schwarz's dj kicks, bass/gutiar low end on spanish joint)

i think it'd be fun to argue that people playing 128k mp3s in a club is the equivalent of using a 2megapixel camera to capture an image to go on the side of the building.

we can see the pixels / we can hear the artefacts

Precisely.

Ricardo's presumably pissed off at the thought of people using his music, which he's presumably slaved over at great length to make sound perfect, either through crappy PC satellite speakers while googling for porn or Facebook-stalking or else to block out the subway via an iPod. He considers himself an artist, not a distraction. Fair play to him. More people should be pig-headed and demanding about quality consumption of their product / art.

x-post - aye, I know piss-all about clubs, but I don't image many are set-up properly to take advantage of a beautifully-mixed recording.

those martion speakers that i posted on that computer speakers thread are what villalobos listens on at home. £20,000 +

http://www.martion.de/english/index.html

thank you crackle! i couldn't believe it when i saw schwartz (who i love) play live somewhere, and the rhodes lines he was using were so clearly mistreated in ableton, they were full of those sort of "right-angled" artifacts that make my skin crawl-- completely the antithesis of the vibe he was going for.

and those martions are the most incredible things i've ever heard. i wish i even knew how to describe it. (IIRC he has both the big "horn" speakers and also a pair of martion bullfrogs, which alone blow away anything else i've ever heard...)

i've been lucky enough to hear some of those martions too - how i wish i hadn't, my mackies haven't sounded the same since.

i wish i could find that daniel wang essay on club sound systems, google isn't helping, was a fun read even if he does have a tendency to go on a bit.

this one?

http://www.discopia.com/portal/workspace/issue9/disacou

I'd never read that. Cheers for the link.

love the bit about why it suddenly sounds worse when everyone leaves the dance floor.

so it's not my poor record choice, it's the acoustics!

digital cameras are increasing in resoltion, but only after the initial massive drop off in quality between a film camera and the early digital cameras. i assume the same kind of thing will happen with digital music as disc space becomes cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. soon, .wav will be standard, while people whine about not being able to get 192kHz 24 bit files which "sound closer to vinyl". and so on and so forth. and that whole time, there will still be people playing records.

-- pipecock, Friday, 22 February 2008 16:01 (7 hours ago) Link

This is on the money. What's holding back most mp3j's from better quality files if anything is the fact that they can't support flac's or wav's on their harddrives. I imagine when storage space is more ample and accesible, flac's and wav's are going to become more prominent (but it'll have to be more affordable first).
This just affirms Philip's 2nd point, in that it is strange that Mp3 isn't being replaced by a better, more efficient option while something like digital cameras are, but remember, digital cameras/video remain inferior to film - I imagine many photographers and filmmakers would dispute Ricardo's point. But to return to my original point, not everyone can afford 20,000 pound speakers, a $14 12" every so often, and I don't think these people should be cast out because of this. If you don't have those financial resources and still invest such sincere money and effort into music, then that says a good lot about you, that you really give more of a shit about music than the guy on the subway with ipod earbuds with 128 mp3's. Ruling out people that do play 320 mp3's is kind of going a step far, Ricardo (and this is based on several other things) is just a sound-elitist if you ask me, and I'll admit I don't care that much about music as many, people, but I'll still enjoy it at my own pace.

Re: Schwartz. I've noticed that in his DJ sets, someone needs to let him in on the fact that if you change the track play mode from Beats to Complex in Ableton, his tracks would sound just fine.

that iTunes shit is ripped at 128;

ok, geekpedant alert, but iTunes are MPEG-4s, which do much better at any given bit rape than MPEG 1 Layer 3 (i.e. mp3s). a 192kbps mp3 is better than an MPeg-4 128kbps, but not by much.

soon, .wav will be standard, while people whine about not being able to get 192kHz 24 bit files which "sound closer to vinyl". and so on and so forth.

I don't agree. People will become pickier about slightly higher-bitrate mp3s, but since 192kbps+ mp3s sound to a human ear in almost any circumstance the same as the respective WAV files, and the latter can be up to 7 times bigger than the former, people will prefer to just horde more music rather than compress.

Another downside to WAV files is that they don't automatically come with ID3 tags. You can tag them in iTunes, but they don't come pre-tagged via ripping software. (I never ripped CDs via iTunes though, so maybe I'm missing something.) The mass tagging is a major issue.

This is straying from the topic a bit, but perhaps Ricardo's point was taken out of context. It's not the mp3 itself as much as "mp3 culture" that Ricardo's criticizing, I'm guessing. The whole experience of listening to something on speakers in your own space as opposed to via tinny headphone surrounded by urban noise all the time or in the background somewhere... making a small ritual out of something that used to be the only choice. It's an argument made many times before for vinyl, but it's not a bad argument. Speaking of which...

and that whole time, there will still be people playing records.

Agreed.

haha, bit rate

on itunes you can also buy songs encoded at 256kbps if you shell out an extra thirty cents per song and if the songs are available at the higher bitrate. </geekpedant-2> it's still not as good as other sites out there.

i think the downside to internet music culture is that staring at a screen and multitasking while listening to mp3s on headphones is not optimal. at the same time, tools like traktor and ableton are fun as hell to play around with and do actually provide a focused environment for music. also, restating what pshburn said, buying music online regardless of whether you're buying physical or digital products engenders a kind of radical shift in music consumption that isn't entirely positive. obsessive downloading is just the extreme version of that. some people have always been major collectors of music though so now it is just easier.

i am reminded of seeing daft punk play "technologic" last year and being astounded at their kraftwerkian way of saying "fuck it" in 40 foot high blinking letters. it was like the most concise way of articulating a kind of position that is both pro and anti technology; pro in that they are using cutting edge gear which actually makes their music possible in this gigawatt-size amazing show and con in that it is so easy to get conned into this idea of convenience and simple binaries at the expense of your humanity. fuck it fuck it fuck it fuck it.

From the same site, Autechre chime in on the same subject in reference to the idea of there being a ritual to listening to music;

Do you worry about how people will listen to the album when they’ve downloaded it? “What can you fucking do about that? I mean, I’ve listened to our music through shit laptop speakers before and it sounds alright. Ideally we’d have people experiencing it first through a high quality source and subsequent listens would draw on a lot of memory anyway. So the first counts, then people tend not to listen as closely. It depends a lot on what drugs you’ve taken as well I suppose… I have personal standards, but I would never try to force them on other people”

I like that idea of always making an effort for a first listen - but it just ain't practical. My first exposure to stuff is often by accident or chance encounter; but this in itself adds to the experience... If you know what I mean.