Rawax / Germany / RE 2025 / 12"
In the early stretch of his career — spanning the late ’90s into the early 2000s — Ricardo Villalobos often operated under a few lesser-known pseudonyms. First came Minta Spacew (a lone EP in 1993), followed more prominently by Richard Wolfsdorf, an alias that captured his transition toward the hypnotic minimalism that would later define him.
Originally released in 2000, Tia marked the second and perhaps most essential Richard Wolfsdorf outing — a record that’s become highly prized among collectors, now revived courtesy of Rawax.
The A-side, ‘Echt Rot’, channels peak Playhouse-era Villalobos: a jittery weave of cut-up vocal tics, stray percussive quirks, and cosmic bleeps orbiting a tough minimal-house groove and looping, mind-bending TB-303 line. On the flip, the title track ‘Tia’ folds simmering orchestral fragments into a taut, off-kilter rhythm, while ‘Feurwasser’ sketches out the skeletal, hypnotic blueprint that would fuel Villalobos’s later minimal-techno explorations.