Alcachofa

Ricardo Villalobos treats minimal-techno groove as long-form composition on Alcachofa. 'Easy Lee' takes ten minutes to say what a house track says in five, and 'Dexter' closes the record still refusing to resolve. Elastic, percolating tracks unfold across fifteen-minute arcs and hold their dancefloor pull, built from an exact command of negative space and micro-timing. The music still works as a DJ tool and as an album-length study in patience.

Tracks that wander off for ten minutes and come back with something. Villalobos stretched what techno could get away with in length and looseness, and the decade of minimal that followed borrowed the length and missed the joke entirely.