Alcachofa (2023 Reissue)

There is a kind of party that has the rareness and mystique of a beautiful and endangered species, something connoisseurs spend years chasing and feel blessed to experience for themselves. Specifics will vary from person to person, but in many cases this scene may not much resemble what the average person might imagine when they hear the words “nightclub,” “rave” or “dancefloor.” Ricardo Villalobos described his version in a 2007 interview. It would be outside, preferably near a river. It would have exceptionally clear sound. And it would, in ways that are hard to explain, exist outside pressures of the world at large, free from the tyranny of linear time itself, a place where attendees—not so much paying customers eager to be entertained as warm-hearted people down for whatever—return to a state of childlike playfulness. Alcachofa, released on Playhouse in 2003 and reissued this year on Perlon, is both a soundtrack to, and transmission from, the semi-utopian bubble that has long been his domain.

If music is a language, as Villalobos believes, Alcachofa is his first work of poetry. “I prefer a clear, understandable, calm voice in music,” he once said. “I don’t like fortissimos.” The “understandable” part may be hard to square with a record that begins with “Easy Lee,” an afterhours anthem whose lyrics, moaned through a Nord Lead vocoder, no one has ever quite been able to decipher beyond the titular phrase. This sets the tone for an album defined by oblique moods and loose, organically evolving arrangements. Emotions come in subtle shades, from the nervous edge of “Bahaha Hahi” to the quiet determination of “Quizás” (Spanish for “maybe”).

Unlike so much neatly regimented dance music, these tracks unfurl according to the unconscious logic of improvisation, meandering serenely despite their brisk tempos, introducing elements that appear once and never return, and ending somewhere different from where they began. There are melodies, vocals, and hooks, but they’re upstaged by the sounds themselves—crystalline, impossibly tactile, deftly gelling mic-recorded acoustic sounds with electronic instruments (whose inventors Villalobos honors, along with his family and loved ones, in the album’s dedications). The percussion in particular is immaculate, with kick drums (when they appear) like beads of porcelain connecting his delicate structures. In a wise shuffle of the track order, Perlon’s reissue ends with “Waiworinao,” a DJ tool made almost entirely of samples of the Polish jazz bassist Krzysztof Ścierański, and a dazzling contrast to the lean electronics that come before it.

Few artists manage such subtleties in club music, but it’s not surprising that Villalobos does. Rhythmic music has been one of his primary modes of self-expression since childhood. His parents, Chileans displaced to Germany by Pinochet’s coup (part of the ignominious legacy of the recently departed Henry Kissinger), raised him in a house full of South American music and spontaneous parties, where a young Ricardo might be handed a conga in an all-night percussion session. He proved a valuable addition to Frankfurt’s booming club scene in the 1990s—DJing, throwing parties, and making hypnotic house and minimal records that embodied a unique blend of influences: South American music, synth pop (he was a Depeche Mode super fan), kosmische bands like Kraftwerk and Can, and, later, the kind of jazz and classical that might appear on ECM (a label whose catalog he remixed, alongside Max Loderbauer, in 2011). Much of his adult life has followed a weekly cycle: a few days in the studio, then DJ gigs all weekend, rarely playing for less than three hours, and sometimes for eight or more. (“I prefer not to sleep,” he once told an interviewer. “I don’t like it so much.”)

Heard today, Alcachofa is clearly the essential turning point in his decades-long body of work. Before it came a dozen or so distinctive but relatively traditional house and minimal records, among them classics like “The Contempt” and “808 the Bassqueen.” After it came music too wild to fit established notions of club music, or, for that matter, the runtime of a vinyl 12". There was Fizheuer Zieheuer, a 37-minute mind-bender that calls to mind both Latin house and Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4; then his “Apocalypso Now” mix of Shackleton’s “Blood On My Hands,” a haunted 19-minute odyssey whose lyrics will inevitably invite some listeners to ponder the spectacle of September 11th (“when I see the towers fall... fall... fall…”)—a bold move for the wee hours in room one at London’s fabric club.

For many DJs, dance music is an art form tailored to a specific time and place, which might explain its occasionally limited range. For Villalobos, it’s enmeshed with the essence of human life. This is, after all, a man who described himself as “the remix” of his father, says Basic Channel records remind us of being in the womb, and celebrated the birth of a child with a 17-minute DJ tool (2008’s “Enfants”). Alcachofa was, especially at the time of its release, a powerful demonstration that “DJ-friendly” need not imply a dumbing-down. Consider “Dexter,” whose ambiguous blend of warmth and sorrow goes well beyond the emotional range of most dancefloors. And yet “Dexter” is, along with “Easy Lee,” the album’s most famous track. When Zip played it at Houghton festival last summer, sometime around 10 a.m. beneath an overcast sky, its mournful hook got whoops and whistles from the crowd—along with at least one set of misty eyes.

Perlon’s reissue is more than merely ceremonial. The album has been out of print for years, and, like most music from this lifelong internet skeptic, has never been sold digitally. Perlon, the Berlin label founded by Zip and Markus Nikolai that is home to much of Villalobos’ most adventurous music, has reimagined it slightly, packaging its four vinyl discs in a particularly ecstatic orgy of text (their longtime visual signature) and shaking up the tracklist of the original (and divergent) LP/CD pressings a bit—they’ve added “Bach to Back” and “Waiworinao,” from the Alcachofa Tools EP, and ditched two others, “Fools Garden (Black Conga)” and “What You Say Is More Than I Can Say.” Curiously, the final chords from that last one waft over the beginning of “Dexter,” as they did on the Playhouse CD, implying Perlon used those masters instead of the original vinyl cuts—an odd quirk that may lead purists to remain partial to Playhouse’s original vinyl package, but one that won’t to matter to anyone just happy to have their hands on the thing.

This reissue serves a larger purpose, too. Villalobos has spoken about the importance of preserving the delicate community of artists, labels, and clubs that he inhabits, in part by making and releasing music on independent labels, especially on vinyl. In that sense, this reissue of Alcachofa is not just an artifact of his elusive world, but also part of his ongoing effort to keep it alive.

Ricardo Villalobos: Alcachofa (2023 Reissue)

$55 at Rough Trade