Ricardo Villalobos – What's Wrong My Friends?

A colorful representation of the loose screw that makes your head spin.

Skip through the tracks = "this is shit"
Play all the way through = "actually this is quite good"

Africolaps voice and main loop is sampled from https://www.discogs.com/composition/e127c061-f2a8-41b5-a54b-728f43ccc02d-Banga-Banga By Aka Pygmies.

This release proves for the ones who were doubting that Mr Villalobos didn't turned pretentious and in self parody after the quite controversed "Fizheuer Zieheuer" (I personally don't really understand this controversy, after all extreme minimalism and extended durations have always been present in his work).
Here we have four pieces in the same 2x12" format than 2005's "Achso" but with a very different countain, where he comes up with some of his most sensual & psychedelic tunes to date : the jazz-moody "Gugga Sempa", where he's exploring some jazz funk remainings, as if he has spent some times listening to the 70's Miles Davies live sets, and the post-plastikmanesque "Drummolator", the kind of tracks that are suposed to get Richie hawtin a bit worried about his next release !
The two other tracks are less rewarding, but are good partners, "Afrikolaps" providing a good dance floor moment with theses samples of Pygmy chant (coming from a cd that paired them with works by Ligeti & Reich), while the title track offer us a strange mutation beetwen the ghost of legendary bopist Thelonious Monk and some Disco-Drag Queen-à la Prince vocals.

Not a lot of reaction to this release, and I can't see why. Truly, the beginning of side A is kind of a letdown compared to previous works, but only for the unpatient: after some minutes of seemingly unmoving syncopation it starts rolling and evolves relentlessly towards the end, even if it may seem it goes nowhere... but it does, believe me. The other sides are more straight forward rythmically, yet they flow around eccentric efx closer to jazz solos than anything else, specially the hypnotic "Gugga Sempa". I agree that Villalobos' latest productions tend to be a bit too lengthy and the tracks on this double 12" may suffer from it, but that's part of their charm, and even when he's not 100% focused he can still dig gold from that trademark naive structures. Though it doesn't rank along with his finest it's still genre-defining rather than genre-bounded.