Bleep

Microhouse visionary Ricardo Villalobos dropped his debut album in 2003, and minimal techno's 21st century boom has been expanding ever since. Throwing miniscule musical structures into a prolonged early hours rave format, Alcachofa both shrinks and magnifies dance genres in an evermorphing meld. With the album's first reissue in over a decade landing on Perlon, its shifting tracklist is reunited with the Alcachofa Tools companion EP.

Villalobos’ detailed attention to sound design creates shimmering, simmering soundscapes with room to breathe, and to dance, as the tracks’ minimal palettes are lowkey yet simultaneously ignite the dancefloor. He finds his successors in the likes of Actress, precursed by the album's flurry of blips and sprawling beat patterns that evoke liminal spaces in their extended and soporific club runtimes. Each spaciously sequenced snap of organic percussion floats through micro moods, each wobbling bass spill is contrasted by swift pops and bursts of air.

There is, of course, the iconic ‘Easy Lee’ and its robotically filtered earworm vocals, beneath which lies elastic synths and liquid beat manipulations. Simple sine tones contrast the complex clicks and snaps from the drum machines, growing more intricately frenzied and wobbling joyfully as we wade through the track's crisp, bubbling fizz and froth. The scintillating ‘Theogenese’ freezes this as split second synths and claps dribble through the ice, melting in the wonky molten glitches of ‘Bahaha Hahi’, with underground subbass jittering like a server room caught in an earthquake.

The glitchy micro sounds of the turn of the millennium were threaded into a dazzling and refreshing debut with Ricardo Villalobos’ Alcochofa.