Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer

Re: ECM ECM****

Maybe this is Ricardo Villalobos’s pension plan. After all, a time will come when the Chilean minimal techno DJ and producer will be ready to give clubland a miss. Villalobos won’t be alone – others have already moved towards jazzier waters. Laurent Garnier, for example, is working with Bugge Wesseltoft, and his LBS tour is as much jazz as house.

In this case, the real interest comes from Villalobos (above left) hitting the ECM catalogue with collaborator Max Loderbauer (right), a musician who has worked with the Moritz von Oswald Trio, Sun Electric and others. No surprise that Villalobos has taken a shine to Manfred Eicher’s label, given the ECM aesthetic and the range of jazz and classical sounds it has long championed. The DJ had experimented with Arvo Pärt and Alexander Knaifel pieces in his club sets, so ECM were happy to let him into the archives.

Villalobos and Loderbauer have taken a bunch of lesser- known ECM recordings by Pärt, Knaifel, John Abercrombie, Bennie Maupin, Paul Giger and others, and created new sound structures using the originals as a starting point. While the tracks are newly reheated, relooped and rejigged, Re: ECMis more about paying tribute than simply ripping the back- catalogue to pieces for sheer hell of it.

It would also be wrong to simply tag the album as a vanity remix project. After all, these interpretations are experiments in the grand tradition of ECM (a label, remember, that has previously featured wildly out-there work from the likes of Nils Petter Molvaer). Tracks such as Resvetebecome a moody, eerie wash of sounds, while there's magical tropical atmospheres wrung from Louis Sclavis's Reannounce.

Some ECM fans will undoubtedly conclude that Eicher has lost his marbles by giving these lads the keys to the kingdom. But even a storied label needs this kind of experimentation and fresh thinking every now and again. See ecmrecords.com

Download tracks: Resvete, Reannounce, Reemergence