Hector Llamazares: The Long View
Nearly two decades into life behind the decks, Hector Llamazares has become increasingly interested in what survives the noise around music. Not the accelerated churn of releases, announcements and weekends measured in airport gates, but the slower things: knowing when a track is actually finished, understanding what belongs in a set, protecting a Sunday with family, arriving somewhere without feeling that the journey has already taken something out of you.
That sense of measure runs through Chasing The Skyline, the five-track EP that also introduces Romantina, his new label. It arrives without the anxiety of having to announce a reinvention. Instead, it feels like the consequence of time spent refining an existing language and deciding which parts still matter.
“I wasn't in a hurry to release it; I simply wanted to give it the time it needed.”
That sentence says something fundamental about Llamazares' position now. Electronic music increasingly operates at a speed that can make patience feel almost oppositional. Tracks circulate before they have settled. Artists are expected to maintain a continuous public rhythm. A new label can easily become another demand for content. Romantina begins from a different premise.
“I never produce with trends in mind or with the intention of releasing music as quickly as possible.”
The distinction is important. Chasing The Skyline is not built around one mood repeated five times. Its coherence comes through purpose. Every track is intended for the dancefloor, but Llamazares treats the dancefloor as a space with changing temperatures rather than a single condition.
Feeling carries the more open, emotional side of the record. Llamazares describes wanting to make something timeless without abandoning a contemporary frame, a track capable of moving between different points in a set. Tarantula applies greater pressure, occupying the less comfortable territory between house and techno.
“I've never felt the need to repeat the same formula.”
That resistance to repetition gives Romantina its first meaningful outline. The label's identity is not being established through a rigid sonic manifesto. It is emerging through Llamazares' preference for contrast, provided the material still shares an internal logic.
“I prefer each track to have its own personality and purpose.”
There is something telling about launching a label this far into a career. For a younger artist, independence can sometimes be an aspiration projected forward. For Llamazares, it comes with accumulated experience: years of watching music move through clubs, understanding what remains useful after a season has passed and recognising the difference between immediacy and durability.
Romantina therefore feels less like a declaration of independence than a way of organising the world he has already been constructing.
The same thinking shapes his DJing. Preparation matters, but control has its limits. Before travelling, Llamazares gives himself time. He tries to sleep properly during the week, avoids rushing where possible and goes through the music he expects to play. Then he reaches the booth and allows the plan to change.
“I often end up changing my mind once I'm in front of the crowd.”
That flexibility only becomes convincing after enough time playing rooms to recognise when instinct should override preparation. Llamazares' sets are not presented as fixed demonstrations of identity. Their character comes from negotiation: between what he has brought with him and what the room will actually accept, between patience and pressure, familiarity and disruption.
This year's Aquasella offered that relationship on an unusually large scale. Llamazares describes it as the biggest crowd he has played to, but what stayed with him was not simply its size. It was recognition.
“I felt that a large part of the audience already knew what they were going to find in my set.”
For an artist with almost two decades of touring behind him, that kind of familiarity carries more weight than novelty. It means an audience has learned the contours of a musical personality without that personality having to become predictable. Llamazares believes his sound has reached a particularly clear point.
“I genuinely feel I'm in the best place I've been creatively in a long time.”
Clarity, here, does not mean narrowing the field. Chasing The Skyline suggests almost the opposite. What has become clearer is the framework within which different impulses can coexist.
That confidence also changes the significance of returning home. His upcoming elrow debut will take place in Oviedo, where he has not performed for four years. After years of movement, the hometown date carries its own tension. International touring can expand an artist's geography while making familiar places increasingly rare within the professional calendar. Returning is never quite the same as staying.
Away from that calendar, Llamazares' life becomes deliberately smaller.
Ask him what he needs when clubs, airports and studios disappear from view and the answer arrives without mythology: Pilar, his family, his close friends. His ideal free Sunday is equally unconstructed. This year, his birthday offered the template. The family gathered for lunch and stayed for hours, talking and laughing without watching the clock.
“I don't need anything extraordinary.”
The simplicity is significant because his working life is structured around precisely the opposite: constant movement, changing information, decisions made quickly and emotional shifts that do not necessarily respect the boundary between work and home.
“This job is an emotional rollercoaster.”
Llamazares does not romanticise that instability. Nor does he claim to have mastered switching it off. The work follows him. News arrives, plans change, expectations rise and fall. His response has gradually become less about imposing perfect routines and more about identifying what can actually be controlled.
That principle appears everywhere in the way he talks. He is not obsessive outside music and seems almost suspicious of giving unnecessary mental space to things he cannot alter. Before a show, he reduces avoidable stress. At home, he protects ordinary time. In the studio, he refuses to force a release into existence because a schedule says it should be there.
“Over the years I've learned to focus on the things I can control and not waste energy on everything else.”
It would be easy to interpret this as calmness, but there is discipline beneath it. A long career in electronic music asks artists to live inside contradiction. Spontaneity requires preparation. Independence creates responsibility. Touring offers extraordinary experiences while repeatedly removing the ordinary ones. A dancefloor depends on immediacy, while the music that lasts often comes from resisting immediate decisions.
Llamazares seems increasingly comfortable leaving those contradictions unresolved.
Romantina arrives at exactly that point. Its first release does not attempt to summarise everything he has done before, nor does it announce a clean break from it. The classic elements he has carried through his music remain present, now placed alongside sounds he has been exploring more recently. The label gives those instincts somewhere to develop without forcing them into a single definition.
“I prefer to let each track find its place and release it when it truly feels like part of a complete body of work.”
For now, the horizon around Llamazares is unusually active. Chasing The Skyline is out, Aquasella has given him one of the largest encounters with an audience in his career, and Oviedo is waiting through elrow. Yet the interesting part of this period is not the accumulation of milestones. It is how little he appears interested in treating them as a destination.
After enough years moving from booth to airport to studio and back again, momentum can become its own trap. Llamazares is choosing something more deliberate: enough preparation to know where he is going, enough experience to change direction when the room demands it, and enough patience to leave unfinished things unfinished.
“After so many years, that connection with people is probably the most rewarding part of what I do.”
The rest can take its time.
