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HELADO NEGRO

Helado Negro

Phasor

    ‘LFO’ (which stands for Lupe Finds Oliveros), sung in Spanish, brings together inspiration from Lupe Lopez and the minimalist composer and sonic meditation practitioner Pauline Oliveros for a song about ambient stress and endless scrolling. Oliveros is well-known, Lopez maybe less so. Lopez was a Mexican American woman who worked for Fender Guitar building amplifiers in the 50’s. All the amps were marked on the inside by a piece of masking tape with the amp builder’s name on it. “Lupe’s amps are sought after, her care and touch apparently harnessed a special sound from this design," Roberto Carlos Lange aka Helado Negro explains. "I fell in love with this story and this legacy and the mythology surrounding it. How craft touches us so deeply in the smallest ways. Deep care for the littlest things makes all the difference.”

    Some of the seeds for Phasor were planted in 2019 on Lange’s 39th birthday after a 5-hour visit to Salvatore Matirano’s SAL MAR machine at the University of Illinois. A complex synthesizer that creates music generatively with a vintage super computer brain and analog oscillators, it can create an infinite amount of possibilities in sound sequences. “I was enthralled by it,” Lange recalls.

    That SAL MAR experience became the bedrock for Phasor. It taught Lange more about himself and became central to his creative process. “It gave me special insight into what stimulates me,” Lange explains. “This pursuit of constant curiosity in process and outcome. The songs are the fruit, but I love what’s under the dirt. The unseen magical process. I don’t want everybody to see it because not everyone cares to see it. Some of us just want the fruit. I do. But I want to grow the fruit, too.”

    Phasor is Lange’s tightest collection—deep, atmospheric, meticulously executed. It’s aligned with 2019’s This Is How You Smile which found him incorporating more upfront drums and bass and focused grooves. His 2021 album, Far In, focused on being in quarantine—talking to your mother through Zoom instead of across a room. Phasor, in turn, is a homage to going outside again. It’s a returning-to-life record, remembering what the sun feels like and letting it warm your skin.

    STAFF COMMENTS

    Barry says: The First thing that struck me about Helado Negro's new LP for indie mainstays 4AD was how sumptuous the production is. It's a beautifully rich, syrupy selection of sidechained shuffling percussion and soulful vocals. On top of that, Lange's vocals add layers of laid-back groove and shimmering, echoing ambience.

    TRACK LISTING

    1. LFO (Lupe Finds Oliveros)
    2. I Just Want To Wake Up With You
    3. Best For You And Me
    4. Colores Del Mar
    5. Echo Tricks Me
    6. Out There
    7. Flores
    8. Wish You Could Be Here
    9. Es Una Fantasia

    When Roberto Carlos Lange, the musician known as Helado Negro, began writing ‘Far In’ immediately following the release of his acclaimed 2019 ‘This is How You Smile’, he could not have predicted that we would soon need to learn how to stay at home and be the stars of our domestic dancefloors with intimate and online communities.

    The titular pair in ‘Gemini and Leo’ stay indoors to discover each other anew with music recalling Lange’s youth growing up in South Florida listening to 80s club songs, and their return sampled in 90s hip-hop.

    Visions past and future meet in a euphoria of uptempo drums, Jen Wasner’s (Flock of Dimes) funky bassline, and Opal Hoyt’s (Zenizen) galactic swirl of warm and steely synths and bright backing vocals.

    What was a prophesying rehearsal for the musician will, we can hope, soon be our fresh start, a choice to bring that energy home, or go out to meet it.

    STAFF COMMENTS

    Patrick says: This is lush! I immediately tipped Ryan Horsebeach to it upon listening, as it finds a fine middle ground between Mac Demarco's lazy jangle and the Whitest Boy Alive. #AccidentalBalearic

    TRACK LISTING

    Wake Up Tomorrow
    Gemini And Leo
    Purple Tones
    There Must Be A Song
    Like You
    Aguas Frías
    Aureole
    Hometown Dream
    Agosto (Feat.Buscabulla)
    Outside The Outside
    Brown Fluorescence
    Wind Conversations
    Thank You For Ever
    La Naranja
    Telescope (Feat. Benamin)
    Mirror Talk

    Helado Negro

    This Is How You Smile

    Helado Negro returns with This Is How You Smile, an album that freely flickers between clarity and obscurity, past and present geographies, bright and unhurried seasons. Miami-born, New York-based artist Roberto Carlos Lange embraces a personal and universal exploration of aura – seen, felt, emitted – on his sixth album and second for RVNG Intl. Helado

    Negro’s 2016 album "Private Energy", re-released as "Private Energy (Expanded)" in 2017, is an urgent affirmation of self-love and solidarity driven by Lange’s personal response to sanctioned violence towards people of color. The widely embraced album furthered the artist’s visibility beyond a community of fans long established through a rigorous recording and touring career, with moments like “Young, Latin and Proud” and “It’s My Brown Skin” aligning with a larger social demand for basic rights amongst marginalized people and the universal imperative to love, be loved, and thrive.

    This Is How You Smile’s opener “Please Won’t Please,” a call back to Private Energy, finds vitality in turning the privacy dial further inward. Setting the scene with a sparse drumbeat that moves the music forward in a more maligned than militant march, Lange’s voice tenderly permits himself weariness: “We light ourselves on fire, just to see if anyone believes.” Something must be reserved, “will anyone rescue what’s left of me.” Diving into glimmering spirals, the remainder of the album takes leave of the broader “we” and mines intimate pairings - siblings, parent / child relationships, partnership, and old friends. The story of This Is How You Smile includes a jaunty, head-nodding walk with his brother on hot pavement to the community pool of his childhood neighborhood in Florida. Such days end with a welcome fatigue and chlorine blurred reveries in “Seen My Aura.” The confidence and security of youth, moves away from family, across years and regions, to a bleak winter of “Imagining What to Do,” and loving partners deciding to make each other smile, while waiting for the sun to return.

    This Is How You Smile derives from Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” a story she wrote in the form of a mother’s sole, complicated, but loving voice, speaking a “How to” litany of advice ranging from domestic chores to what a daughter, an immigrant and young woman of color, must do to protect herself in a world that was not designed by or for her. This is how joy, or its visage, at turns comforts, constricts, or becomes armor.

    Contemplating a parental voice, or its absence, becomes a question of where one may choose to return or depart. The lyrics of “Running,” seem to retrace the cyclical path of pop’s familiar obsessions, addressing the unrequited, fickle, or feared lover, “I feel you in my mind, all the time… you got me running, running…” Instead, the repetition of fleeing breaks with a languid laugh of recognition, that the lives of those who came before are within one’s own, even when we diverge, “I see you in my hands… just like you.” The song may also be read beyond seeing the humanity of self and parent, to the ever more visible global failures of patriarchal structures, and those moments when one sees their traces in self and those dear. Lange describes the album as the soundtrack of a person approaching you, slowly, for 40 minutes. In “Fantasma Vaga,” one of the first songs he wrote that set his approach for the album, a ghost wanders in from the low end, building a fuller form with each shaking step. Whirring, stops and starts of an eco espectral, may be musician trying to imitate, synthesize, the sound of a haunting, or a ghost itself trying to render the human voice. Lange often visualizes meeting strange beings, the odd encounters that occur in the creative process, a sound form of manipulation, in which who, or what is changing whom, becomes unclear. This Is How You Smile invites listeners on a walk through the changing colors of early mornings and evenings, writing, recording, or hearing a friend, a figure emerges, and there you are.


    STAFF COMMENTS

    Barry says: A superbly balanced mix of rhythmic downbeat, hip-hop percussion and good old fashioned songwriting, 'This Is How You Smile' epitomises how effective a melting pot of styles can be, fittingly for it's subject matter, being all the better for it's diversity and willingness to embrace a wide range of genres to great effect. A perfectly conceived and excellently written opus.

    TRACK LISTING

    01. Please Won’t Please
    02. Imagining What To Do
    03. Echo For Camperdown Curio
    04. Fantasma Vaga
    05. Pais Nublado
    06. Running
    07. Seen My Aura
    08. Sabana De Luz
    09. November 7
    10. Todo Lo Que Me Falta
    11. Two Lucky
    12. My Name Is For My Friends

    Helado Negro

    Private Energy (Expanded)

    Exploring the expressivity within intense states of being, Latinx identity, and pluralistic sensibilities, Helado Negro’s Private Energy (Expanded) is an engrossing statement achieved through lyrically personal and political avant pop music.

    Private Energy (Expanded) carves a deep groove through the electronic music landscape, challenging to best Brooklyn-based artist Roberto Carlos Lange’s previous accomplishments under the Helado Negro moniker. Half a decade and half a dozen albums later since Helado Negro’s 2009 debut album Awe Owe, Lange has cultivated an untraditional approach to songcraft that places his voice on an adventurous musical impulse without shying from familiar pop appreciation.

    The hymn of Private Energy (Expanded) initially sounded in 2014 while Lange absorbed accounts of the unjust death of Michael Brown and felt a sharpened sense of vulnerability and anger as a minority. Lange’s creative drive veered toward toward catharsis - he sought to make music that would protect as a form of protest. The music of Private Energy (Expanded) was shaped to demarcate the artist’s pride of being, preserving and persevering, and celebrating, as Lange puts it, “my brownness, my latinidad.”

    For the marginalized, the personal is always political. This truth is not exploited by Lange but used as a platform to examine fluidity in love and amongst various genders. Singing “porque soy una mujer, porque sigo siendo tu hombre”, (“because I’m a woman, because I’m still your man”), on “Tartamudo,” Lange subverts the expectations of the “latino man,” embracing instead a genderless expression of affection and sexuality. And yet the title “Tartamudo” means to stutter; Lange acknowledges the challenge of articulating one’s progressive ideals and the personal demands of stewarding the Helado Negro project.

    “Transmission Listen” is another exemplary selection from Private Energy (Expanded), a song so effortlessly tuneful and seductive it sounds beamed in from the radio waves of an outer world. Or alternately, an inner world. Speckled and reverberant, it’s a love song as much as a purely joyful sonic experience. “Young, Latin, and Proud” and “It’s My Brown Skin” are prideful lyrically but complicated texturally, fusing restrained synthesizer voicings with sparse percussion and an interpolation of rhythmic tones. Here, as elsewhere, though, Lange’s distinct voice is the spine of the music’s ambulatory energy.

    Though Helado Negro is essentially a solo project, the contributors to Private Energy were numerous, demonstrating Lange’s compassion for community and collaboration. In line, the lyrics to “It’s My Brown Skin” work as a central tenet of Private Energy (Expanded) and an intimate invitation to the varied cast involved and surrounding. Identity is celebrated as a possible personal shelter of sorts, yet complicated and humbly inclusive within abstract territories - i.e. the real and surreal worlds, inhabited by fellow humans and those that don’t identify as human alike.

    “My brown me is the shade that’s just for me / I’m never not missing anything but me, “the song’s lyrics state, offering insight into the infinite possible variations for individuality and self-invention that animates the music and ethos of Private Energy (Expanded).

    Helado Negro’s Private Energy will be re-introduced to the public via RVNG Intl. in expanded form on May 5, 2017, appearing on vinyl for the first time alongside new CD and digital editions. Supplemented with three brand new “versions,” this iteration of Private Energy (Expanded) will continue the strong narrative of Helado Negro’s spectral and transmissive 2016 opus

    RIYL: Tim Maia, Caetano Veloso, Stereolab, Empress Of, Xenia Rubinos Private Energy (Expanded) is remastered, redesigned, and expanded with three brand new versions.

    TRACK LISTING

    1. Calienta
    2. Tartamundo
    3. Obra Dos
    4. Lengua Larga
    5. Runaround
    6. Young, Latin And Proud
    7. Obra Tres
    8. Transmission Listen
    9. Personas Facil
    10. Mi Mano
    11. Obra Cuatro
    12. It’s My Brown Skin
    13. We Don’t Have Time For That
    14. Obra Cinco
    15. Runaround (Alternate Mix)
    16. Young, Latin And Proud (December Mix)
    17. Transmission Listen (Alternate Make)

    Helado Negro is Roberto Carlos Lange, sometime collaborator of Scott Herren in Savath & Savalas and occasional conspirator with Jaytram of Yeasayer.

    Whilst his last full length, ‘Awe Owe’, was a Funkadelican mega-opus, this is a more personal beast, a solo affair built lovingly from live instruments, percussion, and field recordings, all processed through electronics, computers, and synthesizers. It is an album with very defined songs, its song-structure has been laboured over; choruses count bigtime, confident breakdowns and digi-pop bridges are all part and parcel of the greater good.

    His voice recalls ‘China Girl’-era David Bowie; a relaxed and tropical Peter Gabriel (or even Peter Murphy).

    TRACK LISTING

    1. Globitos
    2. Regresa
    3. 2º Dia
    4. Lechuguilla
    5. Cenar En La Manana
    6. El Oeste
    7. Obra Uno
    8. Oreja De Arena
    9. Con Suerte
    10. Calculas
    11. Alcanzar


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