Villalobos has been routinely pumping out ten-minute tracks and remixes right from the beginning of his career, so it was only a matter of time before he started putting out four track "albums" . But why stop there? After all, the logical conclusion to these inflating track lengths is to produce a one track "album" ... hence, he gives us the 37-minute "Fizheuer Zieheuer".
This track doesn't have much to say that we didn't already hear more than ten years ago from Basic Channel's "Octagon/Octaedre" and especially BC's "Phylyps Trak II (side B)". He plays around a little more with delay, echo, and irregular, syncopated percussion (the latter of these being very similar to the tricks he used on "Ichso") but I mainly find myself longing for another thirty minutes of those BC records rather than multiple listens to the whole of "Fizheuer Zieheuer".
It's overly long for the sake of being overly long, not because it needs to be. It makes for remarkable listening for the first fifteen minutes (all of side A) but the saturation point comes a few minutes into side B, after which it becomes something of a curiousity, i.e. "how long does he really want to continue like this?" That said, this little experiment is rewarding enough that I won't mind if Villalobos releases nothing other than 40-minute tracks for the rest of his career. Sooner or later he'll hit upon an uberclassic, where every single second of it is essential.
No comments:
Post a Comment