Biography
There’s no mistaking it for what it is… this is House music. From the emotive depths of the bass to the sparkling clicks of the syncopated hi-hats, there’s no confusing Henrik Villard’s music for anything other than House music. He’s been toiling away in the deeper registers of the genre since 2017 after making his debut on Nite Records and has stayed the course, pursuing a sound that pays homage to the roots of House music through contemporary voices. It’s a sound steeped in the traditions of House music and would do well coming from one of the genre’s older statesmen, let alone a fledgling talent like Villard’s. It’s a prolific talent at that with over a handful of EPs and a fair few singles coming from the producer in the first years of a still young career.
He’s been fortunate to get his music out there with a “bunch of labels that like the music” requesting releases from all over Europe and a select few like Mhost Likely, Moskalus and Two Five Six Records recently enjoying the privilege of releasing Henrik Villard’s records. “I feel that I’ve been lucky,“ suggests Henrik in what I can assume is only modesty, because this is more than luck. There’s something natural in the way Henrik’s music sounds with an instinctual grasp on House music from the first record to the latest. There has had to have been a lot of work to get to this point in his career, which is especially remarkable for someone still in the grips of the early stages of a career.
Henrik Villard grew up in Kolbotn, a satellite town to the south of Oslo. His father was a music enthusiast and a fan of yacht rock specifically, soundtracking the son’s formative years on the saccharine sounds of the likes of Steely Dan. It took Henrik on a path towards rock music, and eventually towards heavy metal through his teens, when he first picked up a guitar and started plucking away at those fundamental musical foundations. “Playing by ear, and learning from the other kids,” turned into various afterschool project bands before he would eventually leave the guitar in its case, as the sounds of a new genre of music coerced him down another path.
Around 2015 the music of “Amine Edge & Dance and their label CUFF” drew Hernik away from those base EDM sounds to the roots of the genre and that “classic style of House” that he himself creates today. “To me they had a raw (in terms of energy) sound, ” explains Henrik, “and (although) it leans toward tech house to a certain degree – to me, their sound definitely took a lot of inspiration from classic house sounds (drum machines like 909 and 707, bass sounds from dx7 and such).” He “realised after a while that the sound was a bit too clean and techy” for him, and started moving towards something more “chilled out” sounds in the lo-fi arena where artists like Kaytranada lurked. Enamoured by these deeper sounds of the genre, Henrik applied himself to the internet for music theory and piano lessons, building on the little he knew of music from the guitar in a quest “to understand music from a technical point of view.” He “wanted to be able to play chords and notes” on the keyboard, jamming out “ideas with recordings“ and turning those into songs.
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