Alcachofa was the debut album from Chilean techno producer/DJ Ricardo Villalobos, and made of eight sprawling, decadent, oblique, self-indulgent minimal techno tracks. By the time of its release in 2003, eight years on from his debut single, Villalobos had finessed his sound into outré, hedonistic, disconcerting, polyrhythmic and elongated techno tracks that revealed themselves over time through repetition and gradual development. 

On Alcachofa’s lengthy tracks some musical ideas idly wander across the soundfield never to return, others lock in relentlessly, unhurriedly mutating, trying out minute variations. It’s techno that has been carefully taken apart, parts have been purposefully reduced, trimmed down or removed entirely; it’s groove by way of deletion, energy arising from absence, and much of the album has a yearning, wistful emotional tone that matches that constant sense of absence. Exceptional production values make for a simmeringly intense album, its hypnotic repetition, rhythmic experimentation and otherworldly, hollowed-out, lonely aesthetic a route to a dancefloor dreamstate.

Villalobos’s first album still sounds distinctly eerie, as though its possessed, each of the tracks here being driven by a force larger and more inexplicable than itself. Leading up to Alcachofa, Villalobos had released a string of excellent 12” singles, spiralling and psychedelic, that hinted at something transformative, and here was its realisation. “Easy Lee” and “Dexter” are the obvious highlights, but for all their woozy, strung-out glory, these days it’s tracks like “La Raja” and “I Try To Live (Can I Live)” that are most curiously compelling – there’s something about them that feels like fossicking for gold, or crawling through mud dense with detail, everything slippery and slowly shifting, somehow ungraspable. The spatiality of Villalobos’s production helped make everything surreal. It’s an album rich with gloopy, pendulous, amorphous texture, minimal techno as a mutant force.

Released on German imprint Playhouse in 2003, the debut album from Ricardo Villalobos positioned the Chilean-born producer at the cutting-edge of minimal techno at the start of the millennium. However, for all its crystal-clear precision and technical wizardry, far from feeling cold and clinical, Alcachofa gurgles and mutates with an organic spontaneity: motifs and sections many producers would kill for appear once and then disappear as the natural selection of the records’ evolutionary flow works its own meandering magic. Villalobos’ varied musical background (his family fled Pinochet’s Chile and settled in Germany where he became an electro pop obsessive then stalwart of the Frankfurt DJ scene in the 90s) brought a human element and almost jazz-like spirit of freedom to a genre often characterised by its lack thereof.

A confessed internet-phobe, Villalobos has resisted any digital releases of the album, but in December 2023 it finally received a vinyl reissue with a tweaked track-listing, replacing two tracks from the original release (“Fools Garden (Black Conga)” and “What You Say Is More Than I Can Say”) with two tracks from Villalobos’ Alcachofa Tools EP.