The Ecuadorian-American musician Helado Negro and his new environmental and dream album

The end is something that affects a lot Black Ice Cream. Some of his anxiety stems from conventional concerns, such as aging (the musician, whose birth name is Roberto Carlos Lange, turned 41 this year).

But others are the consequence of impending global catastrophes, such as the existential fear of climate change or the seemingly endless nature of the pandemic. “I know the world has always been in some kind of constant conflict and change,” he said. “But at present everything feels much more serious ”.

Since 2009, Lange has created ambient and almost dream music. On six studio albums and five EPs, he has put together lunar synths, loops tape and field recordings on soft experimental compositions that meditate on migrant identity, healing and tranquility.

In 2019 he received grants from United States Artists and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, which highlighted his immersive and multidisciplinary approach to the performing, sound and visual arts. Far In, his first album for the unwavering indie label 4AD, takes his subtle hymns to what could be his biggest audience yet.

In a video call conversation from Asheville, North Carolina – where Lange and his wife, artist Kristi Sword, moved in last summer after living in New York for more than a decade – Lange gave a tour of their new home, whose exterior is painted sky blue.

“I’ve been living in small apartments for fifteen years,” Lange said, flipping the camera over the studio equipment: vintage synthesizers, an antique piano; the foundations of soothing and heavenly sweet melodies from Helado Negro.

Lange’s first full-length album as Helado Negro, Awe Owe, mixed up some of the sounds he heard growing up in South Florida, turned them into warm bilingual themes, and wove a folk Enigmatic and anomalous in soft rhythms with sticky marimbas.

Since then, Lange, who is the son of Ecuadorian immigrants, has become more electronic: the discs Invisible Life (2013) and Double Youth (2014) paired the robotic sounds of synthesizers with tender melodies in loops of errant bursts, something that is not much different from the way Lange conversations, who often interrupts one idea with another. On Twitter, he described the songs of Far In as “mental wanderings drawn in sound.”

During all his life, Lange has enjoyed the daydreams she experiences through film and music. When he was in high school in the early 1990s, his older brother returned from a trip to Europe with a collection of techno, acid jazz, and jungle compilations that fueled his obsession with electronic music. When he got to high school, he would visit a record store in South Beach to buy the Aphex Twin and Tortoise records that his relatives in Georgia liked.

This early exposure to electronic music “It really turned me upside down,” Lange said. He took him to underground parties in basements that were organized by a pirate radio station in Miami, where he was hypnotized by various DJs and MCs. He began experimenting with varied rhythms and playing guitar, while recording on his brother’s computer, which had an old edition of Pro Tools.

Lange eventually ended up in Georgia, where studied art and computer animation at the Savannah College of Art and Design. There he took classes with a teacher who introduced him to sound installations. “It just squeezed my brain even more,” he explained. “I used to say to myself: ‘What is this? I want to do things like that. ‘

Lange’s profile was raised in 2015 and 2016 with the release of the songs. Young, Latin and Proud (Young, Latino and proud) and It’s My Brown Skin (It’s my brown skin), affable reassurance hymns for many Latino listeners who grappled with xenophobia and racism during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and his early days in office. During that tour, after long and demanding performances, fans would approach him and share their own experiences. “That meant a lot to me,” Lange said. “Much of it was beautiful, but it was also very difficult.”

On Far In, these topics are a little less literal. “I’m going to avoid sharing a lot of my own trauma,” he said. “There is an aspect of sharing experiences and, depending on how intense they are, some can make people complicit in your misery.”

Lange was partially inspired by Until the end of the world, the 1991 sci-fi epic, which almost became the project’s title. “I have a good relationship with movies that don’t guide you very much,” he said. “That’s why I like the movie of Wim Wenders. It starts somewhere and ends somewhere else ”.

Ed Horrox, the 4AD executive who hired Helado Negro, claims that Lange has a powerful ability to forge connections. “Whether it’s in person, on a Zoom call, or in a goddamn three-line text message, he has a knack for sharing warmth and positivity,” he said in a video call.

Horrox first came across Lange’s work while looking for music for his London radio show called Happy Death, and from there he continued his career through the years. The response to Lange’s arrival at 4AD from listeners proclaiming him their “favorite artist” was “quite overwhelming.Horrox said.

A song that stands out in Far In es Outside the Outside, which has one soft vibrate disco with laser synths and booming basses that is an ode to the small pleasures of life in the diaspora – his video is a montage of images captured on VCRs of house parties hosted by his family in the eighties, in which they stayed until the early hours of the morning dancing salsa or merengue. “I’d wake up around 7 in the morning and there were still people downstairs drinking,” Lange said with a laugh.

The Orange, a prayer for the apocalypse, is near the end of the disc. “And I know that only you and I / We can save the world,” Lange sings with a joyous glow. The Orange radiates a sense of radical hope, but many of the songs of Far In they also focus on facing the end with a sense of presence, even in the knowledge that catastrophe is near, What Cold Waters and Wind Conversations, both inspired by the ecological drama of the Texas environment (Lange and Sword were in Marfa during the first months of the pandemic working on Kite Symphony, a multimedia project documenting West Texas wind, sound and light).

L’Rain, a New York-based experimental performer who plays bass on three tracks on the album, says that sweetness surrounds Lange in both his collaborative and vocal roles. “It is an immediate and visceral intimacy,” he said in a telephone interview. “When you work with Roberto, at all levels – from the way he writes emails, the way he schedules rehearsals, talks to us about the music, and asks for our opinions – you always feel respected and protected.“, said.

Lange’s intentions in this project have also provided him with inner peace. “I’ve never felt more comfortable expressing myself through music,” he said. “Sound and music have always offered me that: they have always been a great place to go. It is the best way I have found to be part of that idea: to be present from within ”. (AND)