The Smart New Year’s Eve Pick Is a Ricardo Villalobos Live Mix

Don’t feeling like dealing with amateur night? Recorded in Paris, this three hour Villalobos mix treats the dance floor like an instrument and time like something you can bend.

It’s New Year’s Eve, and later today the world will split into two kinds of people: the ones lining up for overpriced drinks and precisely measured countdowns, and the ones quietly looking for a better way to spend the night. If amateur hour holds no appeal, here is one thing to do instead: Put on Ricardo Villalobos and let someone who actually understands time and tension take the wheel.

Villalobos is a Chilean German minimal house producer and DJ who came out of the Frankfurt and Berlin scenes in the late 1990s, closely tied to the Perlon circle alongside Akufen, Pantytec and Markus Nikolai.

Born in Santiago in 1970 and raised in Germany, he developed a style that treats minimal techno less as a genre than as a way of thinking about time, repetition and the strange emotional charge that lives inside small rhythmic shifts. It’s an approach that allows for dropping perfectly matched horn solos, the combination of which suggests free jazz caged and pacing. If you’re not a fan of relentless thump, Villalobos likely won’t be your thing.

That instinct is on full display in this three-hour set uploaded early this year, in his extended 2022 Ruta 5 set at Sacré, a club in the heart of Paris, about 10 blocks from the Louvre. Villalobos took the booth in one of his trademark striped shirts — which prompted one perfect comment on YouTube: “Shit get wicked when Ricardo brings out the stripes.” The shit did get wicked. Over its long arc, the set threaded together Rhi & Telemachus, Matias Aguayo, Heiko Laux and Johannes Heil, Wladimir M., his own productions, Mark Broom, Riva Starr and Star B, Elisa Bee, Radio Slave, Night On Earth, Moby, Frost, Hell and Jonzon, Tim Shiel, Floorplan, Sir E.U — seriously: go to 1:29:20 in the set below — Dance 2 Trance, the Orb, Ian Pooley, Mighty Dub Katz, Nostromo Dept., INVT, A Homeboy A Hippie & A Funki Dredd, ODE, Paul Johnson, Adventures of Stevie V, DJ Duke, Rod Baksteen, David Duriez Presents Plastic Music, Fingers Inc., Auto Repeat, Los Updates, Romanthony, capped by a lovely ambient coda from Fennesz. It’s a sequence that reads less like a playlist than a map of his musical mind.

His own discography moves with the same restless intelligence. Dependent and Happy (2012) remains his most widely known album, but the deeper story lives in the hundreds of epic remixes, 12-inches and side projects that orbit it, from the Fizheuer Zieheuer release on Playhouse to the slippery dub constructions of Sei Es Drum and the Arpiar catalog with Luciano, all of it blurring the line between track and tool. His work with Max Loderbauer (Sun Electric), especially the RE:ECM remix album that ECM commissioned, highlights Villalobos’s light touch and ability to lower the volume while retaining the energy. Below, a gem from a collaboration with Samuel Rohrer.

On the decks, Villalobos has a reputation for unpredictability, which says more about club expectations than his real-time mixing skills. He doesn’t build sets to hit marks or deliver guaranteed peaks — though he can. He listens, loops, stretches and reshapes sound as he goes, sometimes producing rooms of uncanny collective focus and sometimes frustrating listeners who arrive with fixed expectations. That tension is part of the exchange he offers.

This has been a very, very hard year for Los Angeles, and for the world. For those brutalized by the fires, the ICE thugs, the economy, the relentlessly dumb politics or any combination thereof, we’re wishing you a healthy and happy 2026.