- A psychedelic duet between Samuel Rohrer's deft jazz drumming and Villalobos's head-spinning electronics.
- Every Ricardo Villalobos release is a bit like that Mr. Afterparty meme—you never know just which side of the Chilean minimal master you're gonna get when you press play. One minute he's turning out 30-minute studio jams, the next he's finally releasing one of his most sought-after club tracks. Since on Microgestures he shares full billing with classically trained jazz drummer Samuel Rohrer, you'd be forgiven for expecting another sprawling improvisation, but instead it's as classic a Villalobos dance floor record you'll hear. Occupying the swampy space between the acoustic and the electronic, these are dense and detailed tracks with enough forward momentum to keep the room heaving well into one of his notorious marathon sets.
Villalobos and Rohrer have been moving in the same circles for the better part of a decade. Rohrer began his journey into dance music with the Ambiq trio (alongside longtime Villalobos collaborator Max Loderbauer and claritinest Claudio Puntin) and it wasn't long before Villalobos threw Rohrer a remix. Now they formally meet to put their percussive heads together. Where Rohrer's last release, Continual Decentering, imagined drums as the front-and-center driving force, then Microgestures takes things in a slightly weirder direction. "Helix," for example, is almost all drums, save for the occasional squealing synth lines and sampled radio chatter. But the real drama of the track comes from how the drum loop moves in and out of time at the six and ten-minute marks, like it's ripping the spacetime continuum, before settling back into the usual machine funk. It's hard to tell whether it's Rohrer playing live or Villalobos on a drum machine, but it's nice to imagine "Helix" as a true duet between the two.
The rest of the record works form this blueprint. "Incus" starts with two minutes of state-of-the-art minimal that should send Sunwaves' punters into meltdown, but goes through the looking glass as Rohrer replaces the tight drum machines with live, loose percussion. "Lobule" starts out like Villalobos' take on Uruguay-style techno with shrill, melodramatic synth work, until Rorher's jazzy drum licks pull things down into a mucky groove. The record as a whole doesn't mark a drastic departure for either of the two musicians, it does find a wonderful middle ground that should be appealing for anyone familiar with either of them: Villalobos provides the groove while Rohrer's drums artfully weave in-and-out, something for the chemically-enhanced dancers and the jazz heads alike.
Tracklist01. Incus
02. Helix
03. Lobule
04. Cochlea