About

Alcachofa is the first studio album released by Chilean-German producer Ricardo Villalobos on the German house label Playhouse on September 19, 2003. The album cemented Villalobos's place in the vanguards of microhouse and minimal techno. This reissue celebrates the 20th anniversary of the breakthrough LP originally released in Sep 18, 2003 by Playhouse as a 3x12“ record set. The reissue also adds a fourth 12“ EP, the Alcachofa Tools from 2003.

This is, for now, perhaps Villalobos’ best work – a bold, dense reimagining of what dance music and pop melodies could be. It’s a totally uncompromising record that sent Villalobos on an improbable journey towards being a global cult star. Very little about this record makes any regular kind of sense.

Alcachofa (artichoke, in Spanish) is deeply alien. It sounds like it came from nowhere, with no ancestors. And, in one sense, it did. Listen back to the stuff that Villalobos was making pre-Alcachofa, such as ‘Que Belle Epoque’ or (perhaps his biggest early track) ‘808 The Bass Queen’, and it’s pretty standard-issue slinky minimal house. And then he drops Alcachofa: this insane masterpiece that tears electronic music apart and obsessively stitches it back together in a whole new way. Indeed, even calling Alcachofa “minimal” is off the mark. It’s a hot, lush record, sprawling outwards and tangling itself together with tropical fecundity. A world away from the dry clicks and scrapes of stereotypical minimal, Alcachofa feels organic – full of bubbles, coughs, wet slipping and slapping sounds. Listening back to it, now removed from the context of minimal techno, it’s remarkable how much of it is like a skewed, futuristic take on dub. Just listen to ‘I Try To Live (Can I Live)’, for example, the smears of vocals and hissing percussion blowing around an acid bassline that’s been decayed into creaking, snapping leather. This is music that shifts, breathes, throbs – mixing-desk psychedelia that carries the feeling of classic dub but, unlike Basic Channel-style dub-techno, few of the sonic signifiers themselves.

Alcachofa is the prime exhibit of the last truly modernist phase of techno. It came out of a time when there was a self-conscious break with the past. Listen back to music from the minimal techno scene of that time, it sounds nothing like techno that came even five years before it. The central contradiction of Alcachofa is that it’s so reminiscent of that period in the early-to-mid ’00s, while also being timeless and unique. It’s completely of its time, but also completely of itself. So many great records have that same internal dichotomy – think Selected Ambient Works, or Loveless. They’re crystallizations of a moment, but they far outlive their original surroundings. We wouldn’t be at all surprised if people are still listening to Alcachofa in decades to come, and still finding something surprising and beautiful in it, peeling back layer upon layer, just like the artichoke of the title. — (via FACT)
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Sides A, B, D, F and G play at 45RPM
Sides C, E and H play at 33 RPM

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Label: Perlon
Format: 4 x Vinyl, 12", 33 ⅓ RPM, 45 RPM, Album, Reissue
Country: Germany
Reissued: 2023 / Original Release: 2003
Genre: Electronic
Style: Minimal Techno, Tech House, House

File under: House / Techno / Electro
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