Ricardo Villalobos - The Au Harem D'Archimede (2004) Microhouse

[Celerity]

Label: Perlon – PERL 43
Format:
3 x Vinyle, 12", 33 ⅓ RPM, Album
Pays: Germany
Sortie: 11 May 2004
Genre: Electronic
Style: Minimal Techno




















https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8507-the-au-harem-darchimede/

I suspect that a lot of this tech-house stuff is easy to make. Perhaps process shouldn't be a determining factor in the opinion of a final product, but nevertheless I respond pretty consistently to Kompakt and Force Tracks and especially Perlon releases in part because the tracks just sound more thought-out and laboured over. If anything, they're extremely detailed. Sometimes detail work makes us dance harder, and on rare occasions it can even give a track some unexpectedly human quality: Michelangelo Matos talks about the thread of pessimism that courses through Luomo's Vocalcity, for instance. Whatever gives icy tracks like "Tessio" or Jan Jelinek's "Tendency" such emotional depth, Fruity Loops definitely doesn't have a preset for it-- at least just yet.

Blame the detail work, the drugs, or the greasy long hair in his eyes: Ricardo Villalobos' Thè au Harem d'Archiméde is the sound of paranoia, a ticking bomb that never quite goes off. Nine well-carved tracks fidget violently within a remarkably controlled spectrum of sound. While tech-house in 2004 widened its scope for bigger sounds, trading computers for synths and hard grooves for genre and song structure, Villalobos approaches Thè au Harem with a monkish, almost classical degree of top-down restraint. It seems as if the Chilean-Berliner sticks to only seven or eight percussive sounds throughout the whole album, running them through every possible permutation, milking them till they're miraculously warm and woozy. Villalobos gave us great hooks on 2003's Alcachofa; here he stalks us in a sweaty haze of Amazon rhythm, challenging us to find the hooks ourselves.

Dizzying and sometimes nerve-wracking, Villalobos is hardly a shyster though, hooking up Thè au Harem's hardest working listeners with fantastic payoffs throughout the mix. While the first three tracks flaunt grooves as tightly-wound as Maurizio twelves, Villalobos still finds an unsettling amount of wiggle room for wind-chime strings in "Hireklon", swashbuckling slurps in "Serpentin", and noirish synth accents in "For All Seasons". As the album progresses, tracks become livelier and more unpredictable, each building on the rhythmic developments of the one before. Lush pun-on-title-track "Thèorème d'Archiméde" is the tipping point, thereafter Villalobos insisting on increasingly chaotic routines: "Temenarc 2" spins like a shattered Tiefschwarz record, and follow-up "Temenarc 1" all but bats its way out of an aluminum trash can. By the time the aptly-named "True To Myself" finishes out Thè au Harem, Villalobos has become quite the derelict, offering 14 minutes of weary chants and ghostly yelps. Think Dani Siciliano in Downtown 81 drag, chasing us through the jungle.