Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer - Re: ECM (2011)

My favourite thing about the sheer volume of ECM's back catalogue is that you can spend years listening to hundreds of albums, and still have hundreds to discover.  When given free rein of the label's output in 2009 to sample and remodel, Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer's first hurdle must've been to decide where to start with their choices.  The thirteen albums that they settled on could easily have been a completely different set.  As per my opening line, I'm only personally familiar with two of them, the only two here of 70s vintage: John Abercrombie's Timeless and Bennie Maupin's Jewel In The Lotus.

Far from being some sort of 'remix album', Villalobos & Loderbauer worked with a live mixing board setup and a modular synth to improvise around the spatial structures of the original recordings.  Taking full advantage of ECM's famously audiophile frequency range and sense of space, they sampled not just instrumental/vocal elements but "also used pauses, gaps and the microphonic impressions of the rooms as source material", to compose the 17 new tracks that make up Re: ECM.

The resulting two-hour listening experience is a deep, subterranean dive into pure sound that continues to pay fresh rewards with every listen.  I've been living with this album on and off for about five years, and dug it out this month to enjoy during a major Villalobos kick that I've been going through.  There's enough here that's recognsiable to please fans of Ricardo & Max, in the minimal, jazz-inflected drum tracks when they appear - a far more reductive, ultraminimalist version of this approach would lead to Safe In Harbor.

There's also more than enough that's classically ECM, even when heavily manipulated, such as a faraway snatch of piano, bass (although nine minutes of Miroslav Vitous' bass buzzing midway through disc 1 may be the album's weakest point) or, in its most sublime moments, a haunting vocal from one of Arvo Pärt or Alexander Knaifel's ECM New Series releases.  Listen and enjoy, many many times, and let this singular project, a fully respectful homage to the ECM sound, wash over you.

Disc 1 link
Disc 2 link
pw: sgtg

Vilod - Safe In Harbour (2015)

The meat in the middle of this week's ECM sandwich comes from two electronic musicians who have in fact featured on that label together, in the remix double-album Re:ECM.  That one was under their own names, Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer, and I'm still making my mind up about it - it'll probably appear here at some point.

For their first full-length album of original material, Villalobos and Loderbauer compressed their names into Vilod, and compressed jazz, dub techno and free funk (yup, I've checked around to make sure I got my subgenres right!) into a subatomic particle chamber to let them freely intermingle for an hour.  With the beats made up of at least as much live drums as machine programming, and some moody electric piano on tracks like Beefdes and the outstanding title track, this is a record that genuinely swings with its jazz DNA.

Both artists wear their love of classic jazz on their sleeves in the grin-inducing opener Modern Hit Midget.  The track samples the between-song announcements from a Modern Jazz Quartet performance for NDR Hannover in October 1957 (released in 2013), and a few bars of Milt Jackson's vibes, both speed-shifted into absurdity.  That one and the title track are my definite favourites, with the epic Zero running them close, but every time I listen to the other tracks as well there's a fresh microscopic detail to pick out and revel in.  Deep listening electronica par excellence.

link

previously posted at SGTG: Fizheuer Zieheuer