Ricardo Villalobos Biographie

BORN

"Santiago de Chile, 1970"

FAMILY

"At the age of three I moved to Germany. There was a military coup [General
Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratic government of Salvador Allende in
1973] and we had to go, it was a forced situation. My mother is German so
that was an easy decision. I found Germany to be very nice. For sure it was
complicated, and I had problems with the culture and the language at first,
but after a while I found out how to behave in Germany, how to fix those
problems, and then it was really cool. My whole family is extremely
musical. My Uncle, my Grandma, my step-Mother... it is called a family
parra; a traditional, musical family. Also around me was a collection of
scientists, mathematicians; my Father and Grandpa. It was a complete
division between mathematics and music. Now, I hear some people saying that
music is like 'the mathematics of feelings'. I believe there is something
like a brotherhood between music and mathematics."

MUSICAL ROOTS

"When I was ten or eleven I started to play conga and bongos. Music was
something I loved but I never thought that I could be a musician. I started
in the late eighties making electronic music, and DJing too. When I was
twelve I became the biggest Depeche Mode fan. I was everywhere that they
were in Europe, travelling with them. My interest in electronic music came
from Depeche Mode, for sure. For me they were like the Beatles of the
eighties, with electronic instruments. It was one of the bands responsible
for making electronic music popular. In '81 and '82 they had lots of four-
to-the-floor stuff, ten or eleven minute mixes of tracks, and they were the
first to do it. Daniel Miller was doing techno in the early eighties too,
and he, of course, signed Depeche Mode to his Mute label. You can mix those
records with techno tracks. In the beginning people complained about
Depeche Mode. They said, 'They don't play the music how it sounds on
record.' But after a while people understood it, and Depeche Mode need to
be credited with helping this music find popularity. For me personally, I'd
also credit Baby Ford, Thomas Melchior, Daniel Bell, Andrew Weatherall for
sure, and Richie - the whole Plastikman and Fuse stuff at the beginning,
especially; the Plastikman records were just crazy in the early nineties -
as being my biggest influences, alongside some house artists, in particular
Derrick Carter. Brazilian music is the biggest influence I have. Brazilians
were listening to techno two or three hundred years before anyone else. If
you compare the samba groove to the techno groove it has a really, really
similar idea behind it. I think South American music is important because
of the rhythm, but also the melody. It relates to the living, the reality
that people have in South America. You have many things to be sad about,
but the general outlook is one of happiness. It's a very special mixture
and mentality. The people are making these melodies that exist exactly
between sadness and happiness, and also the rhythm thing creates happiness.
People use music to forget their problems. I was listening to this music
with my parents at home the whole time, and the influence is very, very
pronounced. Brazilian music; Salsa; Cuban music; the music of the Andes -
Chile, Peru, Bolivia - all these things; Tango for sure; Argentinean Astor
Piazzolla; all of it. These melodies are full of passion, happy and sad at
the same time, it leaves something very strong in your mind."

FIRST PROJECTS

"In the beginning it's like a hobby. DJing paid something between one
hundred and five hundred Euros. You couldn't live out of it. I was studying
at University and doing parties and stuff, but more or less doing this as
something I just enjoyed. Then we started a little label in '93 called
Placid Flavour... it didn't go very well, so, we started again. I met the
Playhouse people in '93 and made my first record for them in '94. In '95
and '96 I started to be more serious, also with DJing. Since '98 this has
definitely been a career. I've only done this to earn money. I need to
live, and I need to work hard. It's quite late: some people get known at 22
and 23 for being DJs. This didn't happen to our generation; our generation
took a lot longer and it wasn't that easy to get musical information and
good records. Now you have high standards of production and a lot of people
to learn from. You get your information in big packages, you get told a lot
at once. Friends tell you now, whereas [people from] our generation were on
their own. Maybe a few people had listened to Dance Mania or Trax records
and things like that but now everybody says 'Detroit is one of my biggest
influences, even if you're 23 years old. You can get the information to
work it all out. It took me ten years from getting my first money, to
realise that I'd be able to live from doing this, that it's the centre of
my life, the reason I stay living. If things grow slowly, and you stay
where you have always been much longer, you don't fall as fast. Everyone is
talking like this now, all the good artists, it's like a rule. It's the
much better way."

LABELS AND PRODUCTION

"I have a few main labels: Perlon, Playhouse, and a couple owned by friends
like Luciano. Perlon and Playhouse are enough: I have so much to do, I have
to DJ and produce like hell. It is impossible for me to start a label for
example. It's also not necessary. The world of labels will shrink a little
bit. The reality is that labels are disappearing, distribution is
disappearing, vinyl is getting harder and harder to live with. It's
important to give all my energy to Perlon and Playhouse and not somewhere
else, I won't go and make an album for another label."

DJING

"I have always DJed the same way. I don't jump around, and make a big show,
and scream or whatever. Things like that are not my style. You have to be
very concentrated, but also you have to be in the mood of the people, that
is very important. Being relaxed is good, and it means you can play a
little more abstract stuff in-between the stuff that people are more likely
to be expecting. Everyone has a style and mine has always been like this."

FABRIC

"For me it's incredible to be able to play at Fabric so often. It's the
best sounding club in the world. The atmosphere is really nice, the concept
is really nice, that there are three floors, each a completely different
world. You enter each room and it is like it is swallowing you, it's
something that doesn't happen in big rooms very often. If I am asked to
play in a club where two thousand people attend in one night I normally say
'No, no way, too much'. The first time I came to Fabric I was completely
surprised at how separate and how isolated each of the worlds are. You can
decide on where to go depending on how you feel, and the line ups are good
and different. It's a music lover's concept, and the people that do fabric
are music lovers. And it has a lot of support from the underground: that
isn't very common for a big club at all."

THE FUTURE

"It's important to make the club thing happen in Berlin, to develop our
scene, and there are so many incredible musicians here in Berlin that it
will start to happen. We will all begin to work together, in different and
strange mixtures. People that don't know one another will begin to work
together. We are all going to the same parties, listening to the same
music, dancing to the same music; all these people will work together and
it will be really fertile and interesting. Richie is here; Thomas Melchior;
Baby Ford is here every three weeks; Luciano is coming. It's a worldwide
net of close friends that are heading for the same thing. Berlin is where
everyone meets. It's a big city, not a small one, it's the only big city
that we Germans have. It's really, really nice and it's cheap to get a
flat. I want to be here more and not travel so much, I really want to be
here."