ricardo villalobos

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.

OK just met mr martion, the insanely good speakers maker (sat to the right in a pic upthread) at my farewell party. happy go lucky type and positively haunted by his craft, in town for a while outfitting Luciano's studio. for me the sound is absolutely out of this world, as if it reaches unused/unusual planes of perception. the sound money can buy.

ricardo plays the baghdad green zone!

http://www.residentadvisor.net/news.aspx?id=9201

um, it's April 1st.

well yeah

Oh right you get that you just were hoping we didn't :)

First Lieutenant April Cohn

"Villalobos follows in the footsteps of other celebrities such as Toby Keith and Papa Roach, who have entertained US troops in Iraq."

LOL

where did this thread go? vasco cd is out now with "full session" 30 min version of minimoonstar, what do people think? or how about akklaa, his most recent 'straight' track off the split with rother/vath?

I liked Vasco more than I expected to, and the Shackleton remix of Minimoonstar is pretty cool - interesting drum sounds.

I have the vasco record and the cd. Still not completely bowled over by it, though the full session did help a bit. Also some of the other tracks are a bit too idm, even for Villalobos. Shackleton remix is pretty cool.

Just listened to the 28th minute of Minimoonstar (Full Session) and I have this compulsion to start the whole thing over again.

Fucking brill.

Hey, whatever happened to the villapolos thread. Search (using search funtion and looking through the last few weeks of posts) isn't coming up with anything.

villapollbos

after listening to 'Vasco' a few times, i must say that i really enjoy this record. not only is it gorgeous ('Electronic Water' is particularly wonderful), but pushes the envelope even further than i could have ever expected-- i mean, there are moments on here where i could imagine Tricky doing something gonzo over the top.

great stuff!

the way the hats and snare hang in this weird balance between synthesised and organically resonant on the opening minutes of 'minimoonstar (full session)' is so fucking delicious.

yeah, vasco is incredible. minimoonstar in particular is fantastic, somehow i didn't realize how great it was until i heard the full version. something about how the whole thing just sprawls out, it made me much more receptive to the beauty of it. it forced me to listen to it in a different way, less as a house track and more as just a strange almost ambient percussive epic. the whole album takes me to another place, very cool.

it's funny because if this was the end of 2006, i can imagine myself hating on this record. perhaps i have mellowed with age.

really? what were you listening to at the end of 2006 that was less gorgeous and wasn't quite pushing an envelope?

well...hmm, at that point, i was mostly listening to lots of luciano and aril brikha. (also much too much kate bush-- i was in the midst of a nervous breakdown, mind you (for real)).

there was a big blow-up on this thread about the Fizzy Zizzy around that time, and i was anti-FZ for quite a while-- i thought it was too self-conscious and departing from what i loved about ricardo in the first place (ie- stuff like Lugom-Ix).

i probably would have found Vasco rather boring, or not living up to my expectations. but i've become a lot more open since then in terms of what i enjoy listening to on a regular basis. like in the mornings, i've been placing 'Vasco' alongside Bvdub singles, shuffling between them. such would have been unthinkable to me in late 2006.

shackleton rmx is fucking superb.

I still need the Vasco CD - I had a very happy afternoon listening to it a couple of weeks back, loved it - and it's a welcome Villalobos CD for non-vinyl heathens like myself.

PS @jim, I still have your FZ CD, I'll bring it into work and leave it out back - ask about it next time you're in if I'm not about.

hey it's obama time now come over no excuses

http://phs.abstractdynamics.org/willaloboteeyo3.jpg

finally, a look inside Villalobos' studio! (unfortunately there's no subtitles....)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1YhFa01MRs

watch all 4 parts here.....the rest of the footage is Villalobos at Panoramabar (some sort of 24 hours in Berlin show?)

this looks like footage from that upcoming documentary on him

I hope that's not from the documentary... Truly terrible camerawork/editing. Looks more like some local art and culture show?

yeah i recognise the show, gets shown in France and Germany.

oh apparently it's this: http://www.france24.com/en/20090903-television-show-longest-berlin-24h-day-germany-berlin-wall-modern-life-records and the show that I recognise is Franco-German public broadcaster Arte which make the show I have seen before.

x-post

it's from the berlin 24 hour documentary which was broadcast on arte last saturday from 6am to 6am sunday morning. 80 camera teams had been filming exactly one year ago, they had followed klaus wowereit, the mayor of berlin, the editor in chief of the bild zeitung, a guy who was in jail because of murder, two deejays, besides villalobos paul van dyck and many more normal people. a great interesting project. a little bit like a modern ulysses for berlin instead of dublin.

anyways lets continue to gaze is awe at his studio

yay, Part 1 has subtitles now

http://www.factmagazine.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3758&Itemid=26

This is very exciting, especially if it's as good as the Carl Craig 'Recomposed' project

This does sound potentially amazing, yes.

Was excited to see a positive notice for Romuald Karmakar’s doc “Villalobos” in the newest issue of Film Comment (Nov/Dec) the other day. Writer calls it one of the Venice Film Festival’s “most beautiful works.” He goes on to write that, “This visually raw portrait of world-famous Chilean-born German DJ Ricardo Villalobos is made with modest means but nonetheless allows the viewer to savor the uniqueness of every moment. We see Villalobos listening to new records, separating the wheat from the chaff, talking about his art, revealing how he creates his sounds, playing to often stadium-size crowds, discussing politics, sex, and how contemporary culture is a flight from all the pain and crushed hope that genuine human contact entails. Here, making music (or films) is to search for contact with other people—to communicate, to share experiences and ideas, to gain enlightenment, i.e., the basis of civilization. Villalobos gives digital form to how simple this could be if we honestly tried.”

Here’s to hoping it gets a theatrical release at some point.

this is fantastic.

http://www.xlr8r.com/news/2011/03/podcast-ricardo-villalobos

heard that earlier..really good.

Love it
Glad he's gotten back to his roots

elegant, austere, primordial

not the first time RV has been used for a April fool's either. http://www.residentadvisor.net/news.aspx?id=9201

Just got the 2CD set Re: ECM, on which he remixes stuff from the ECM catalog. It's out now in Europe, out in September in the US. Really, really beautiful.