The new remix project from Norwegian disco cosmonaut Prins Thomas is nothing if not gargantuan: At nearly two-and-a-half hours, it contains 12 remixes of songs from his 2016 album Príncipe del Norte, plus three new originals. The remixers—including ambient techno pioneers the Orb, Running Back label head Gerd Janson, and the fourth-world explorer Sun Araw—have no problem spinning Thomas’ burbling grooves into wild, psychedelic yarns. But somewhere just past the halfway point lies a pair of sprawling mixes threatens to dwarf the set’s already considerable magnitude. Together, Ricardo Villalobos’ “King Crab Remix” and “Knödel Prince Dub” clock in at nearly 27 minutes—par for the course for a producer who wouldn’t know concision if it chewed through one of his MIDI cables.
Villalobos turns out to be the perfect choice to remix Príncipe del Norte. The originals, many of which run 12 or 14 minutes, find Thomas in full-on jam mode, and Villalobos’ edits take those infinitely unspooling loops and rocket them even further into outer space. Over his characteristic drum syncopation, metallic tones clang like a taut coil let go. The way pitch-black empty space seems to hold everything together makes a compelling argument for the existence of dark matter.
Villalobos has long been famous for his stamina. The Chilean-German electronic musician is no stranger to marathon DJ sets, and his own productions take ample advantage of that extra legroom. (One unreleased track that’s been floating around the web for a while runs a gobstopping 45 minutes long.) It would be easy to look at Villalobos’ propensity for going long as simply being too lazy to edit himself, and there might be something to that. But his music simply wouldn’t work in the same way on a smaller scale. Deeply rhythmic, heavily repetitive, and tending to forgo melody in favor of squiggly, synthetic forms, it requires extreme length to exert its effects. The longer his tracks go, the stronger their gravitational pull.
What makes Villalobos unique as a remixer isn’t just his propensity for going long. It’s also his ability to bend virtually any source material to his own elliptical aesthetic, in which four-to-the-floor grooves collide with the most elastic sort of timekeeping, and nonsensical details threaten to overwhelm the main theme of a given track with an explosion of fractal filigree. Here are 10 of his finest remixes from over the years.
Shackleton – “Blood on My Hands (Ricardo Villalobos’ Apocalypso Now Remix)” (Skull Disco, 2007)
Sam Shackleton wrote his hair-raising dubstep epic “Blood on My Hands” as a doomy meditation on the collapse of the Twin Towers—and, by extension, upon the nature of evil and mortality. Attempting to channel what he described as “black energy” when I interviewed him in 2007, Ricardo Villalobos had another 9/11 on his mind as he fashioned his remix: the September 11, 1973 coup d’état that overthrew Salvador Allende, installed Augusto Pinochet as Chile’s dictator, and occasioned the exile of Villalobos’ own family. The results of Villalobos’ mix are, if anything, even more terrifying than the original, setting heart-rattling triplets against melancholy chords and a dread-filled bass throb, while pitching down Shackleton’s blood-curdling monologue—“There’s no point to look behind us/They left the corpse behind/Because flesh is weak and forms break down/They cannot last forever”—to a narcotic crawl.
DJ Minx – “A Walk in the Park (Villalobos 'Til Thursday Rmx)” (M_nus, 2004)
On the surface, this one’s all about the vocal hook: three notes down and three notes up—pretty much as simple as you can get and still call it a melody—then multi-tracked until it all looks like a blurry spray of points on a scatter graph. But once you attune your ears to the wealth of detail, there’s so much going on that it's hard to know where to begin: the rubberized toms, the high-end squiggles, the scat singing buried deep in the background, the way the delay on the snare seems to snap open and shut like a handheld fan. No two bars are alike, but watery Rhodes chords provide a melancholy undercurrent that helps to soften the nervous edges of a constantly mutating bassline and drums. He earns every second of the track’s 15-minute running time: Getting inside it is like standing in the middle of a rainforest where every last centimeter of space is bursting with life and movement.
Depeche Mode – “The Sinner in Me (Ricardo Villalobos Conclave Remix)” (Mute, 2006)
It’s hard to explain—hell, it’s hard to remember—how mind-blowing the idea of Villalobos remixing Depeche Mode felt, just 10 years ago. Pop and dance music simply didn’t mix in the way that they do now. No matter how much Depeche Mode have done to help popularize electronic music, minimal techno still felt like a world apart—one almost entirely free of vocals, which made Villalobos’ remix somewhat divisive. In a twist on his usual methods, he leaves Dave Gahan’s voice virtually untreated, and the contrast between the singer’s rich baritone and the slippery bass-and-drums arrangement makes it a particularly spellbinding example of Villalobos’ counterintuitive spirit. It’s also almost certainly the first (and last?) time that you'll hear a son clave woodblock pattern in a Depeche Mode song.
Beck – “Cell Phone's Dead (Villalobos Entlebuch Remix)” (Interscope, 2007)
No matter how strange the pairing of Gahan vocals with Villalobos beats seemed in 2006, nothing could have prepared you for the shock of hearing Beck’s lackadaisical voice float over one of the Berliner’s moon-stepping grooves the following year. At times, it almost feels like Villalobos is pulling our legs; there’s a recurring chant (“by one!”) that threatens to snap you out of your reverie every time you hear it, to say nothing of an extended snippet of Beck at is wordyrappinghoodiest. But in the background, that mournful, rising-and-falling vocal line always pulls you back in.
Thomas Dolby with Salz – “One of Our Submarines (Ricardo Villalobos Remix)” (Salz, 2002)
Here’s another outlier, if only because Villalobos rarely goes quite so melodic. Cutting up phrases from Thomas Dolby’s 1982 WWII lament, he zooms in on Dolby’s sad, bright synths and draws them out over rolling drum programming. It feels more like an edit than a remix, even though the percolating groove, enlivened by the original’s booming synth-toms, is pure Villalobos.
Insanlar – “Kime Ne (Ricardo Villalobos Mixes 1 + 2)” (Honest Jon’s, 2015)
The Turkish group Insanlar’s 2013 song “Kime Ne” is a heady Anatolian fusion of the lute-like bağlama with slow-motion cosmic disco, far-out synthesizer experiments, and lyrics borrowed from the 17th-century poet Kul Nesîmî and the 16th-century poet Pir Sultan Abdal. Oh, and it runs nearly 24 minutes long. Just the thing, in other words, to spark Villalobos’ imagination—across two separate mixes, at that. Over a trim beat, he scatters the vocals like drops of soap in oily water; he lets the bağlama play out unadulterated before sending it ricocheting through his sampler’s hall of mirrors.
Rhythm & Sound ft. Ras Donovan & Ras Perez – “Let We Go (Villalobos Remix)” (Burial Mix, 2006)
Unlike many of Berlin’s techno musicians, Villalobos has rarely emphasized dub in his productions, which makes him an interesting choice to tackle Rhythm & Sound/Basic Channel’s Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald in their pure dub reggae guise, assisted here by the Jamaican vocalists Ras Donovan and Ras Perez. In place of reggae’s typical glancing backbeat, he offers faint bleats of twin saxophones; unlike most dub, he seems barely to use any delay at all. Instead, he paints on sounds so faintly they seem to be merely small, splotchy suggestions of themselves, and all those dots go bobbing off like amoebas under the microscope, or a Fauvist landscape in zero-G.
Mari Kvien Brunvoll – “Everywhere You Go (Villalobos Celestial Voice Resurrection Mix” (Sei Es Drum, 2013)
Norway’s Mari Kvien Brunvoll is billed as a jazz singer, but that tag only goes halfway toward describing the full sweep of her music: a cappella loops and beatboxed rhythms catch like burrs against skeletal drum patterns, simultaneously bringing to mind Björk, Matthew Herbert, and Bobby McFerrin. The original version of “Everywhere You Go,” from her self-titled 2012 album, is spooky and plaintive; it opens with what sounds like a cold wind whipping through the cracks in a winter cabin, but that’s not half as chilling as the lyrics, as she pleads with a strange man to just leave her alone, please. Slow and hesitant, the song is not exactly the sort that screams out for a dance remix. But Villalobos’ 15-minute rework preserves the otherworldly qualities of Brunvoll’s voice, even as he ups the tempo by half and sends her gliding over one of his characteristic boom-clap grooves, like a skater doing loops on perilously thin ice.
Heiko Laux – “Moved (Ricardo Villalobos Remix)” (Kanzleramt, 2000)
Villalobos frequently gets pegged for being too abstract and self-indulgent. A counterpoint: Listen to what he does with the pensive Rhodes chords of Heiko Laux’s “Moved,” a song plenty moving on its own. He pretty much just leaves them as-is. Instead, he reframes them, removing the tough, 909-driven beat of the original and swapping in a more pliable groove, like a sponge for soaking up a melody overflowing with regret. The effect—combined with the way he holds back on the kick drum for several minutes—is revelatory. Once he’s established the emotional tenor of the tune, he can go about the difficult business of catharsis, sinking into a deep drumbeat and setting in motion a million tiny polyrhythms that move back and forth like brush bristles. It’s like an exfoliant for the soul.
Sven Väth – “Cala Llonga (Ricardo Villalobos Remix)” (Virgin, 2003)
As far as I’m aware, this isn’t one of Villalobos’ better known remixes; in fact, with just 13,000 YouTube plays at the moment, it seems like one of the more obscure ones. Which is strange, because it’s one of his finest. It may not have the hooks of a tune like Mari Kvien Brunvoll’s, or Shackleton’s, for that matter, but it has something else, something harder to put your finger on. You don’t so much listen to it, or even dance to it, as dissolve into it. It is a field of endless tumble—at least, until something happens to disturb the flow. Some two minutes in, a single note rings out, soft and round, a little like a bass string plucked high on the neck. It sounds like the beginning of something, like the sprouting of a melody, but it’s not. It’s just that note, lonely and a little lost, and as quickly as it appeared, it is gone beneath the waves.