With New Album ‘Far In’ Helado Negro Confronts Worldly Anxieties


the end is heavy black. Part of his discomfort stems from traditional concerns like aging (the musician, born Roberto Carlos Lange, turned 41 this year). But some are the result of looming global catastrophes: the existential fear of climate change, the seemingly unending nature of the pandemic. “I know the world is always in some kind of constant conflict and flux,” he said. “But now it feels even heavier.”

Since 2009 Lange has been producing ambling, dreamy music. His more than six studio albums and five EPs have combined lunar synths, tape loops, and field recordings into gentle experimental compositions that meditate on immigrant identity, healing, and serenity. In 2019, he received grants from the United States Foundation for Artists and Contemporary Artists, emphasizing his immersive, multidisciplinary approach to performance, sound and visual arts. His debut album “Far In” for the intrepid indie label 4AD will deliver his fine hymns to the largest audience ever on Friday.

While chatting during a video call from Asheville, NC, where Lange and his wife, artist Kristi Sword, had moved to Brooklyn after more than a decade last summer, he offered to show her a tour of her new home, painted in sky blue outside. “I’ve been living in small apartments for 15 years,” Lange explained, as studio equipment: vintage synthesizers, an antique piano—the foundations of the soothing, heavenly lullabies of Helado Negro.

Lange’s first full-length album as Helado Negro, “I’m sorry” He mixed some of the sounds of his South Florida upbringing into hot bilingual jams, weaving weird freak folk into soft rhythms and melting marimbas. The son of Ecuadorian immigrants, Lange has since become more electronic: Albums “Invisible Life” (2013) and “Double Youth” (2014) their robotic synths and delicate melodies steeped in loopy, wandering flutters like Lange’s speech-often dividing one idea into another. On Twitter, he described the songs in “Far In” as “sound-drawn mind twists”.

Lange has spent his entire life daydreaming with film and music. When he was in middle school in the early ’90s, his older brother returned to Europe from a high school trip with a collection of techno, acid jazz, and jungle compilations and bypassed his obsession with electronic music. Back in high school, he would visit a South Beach record store to buy CDs of Aphex Twin and Tortoise for relatives in Georgia.

This early exposure to electronic music “really changed my brain,” Lange said. This led him to underground basement parties hosted by a pirate radio station in Miami, where he was hypnotized by ragga DJs and MCs.

Lange eventually studied computer art and animation at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, where he took classes with a professor who introduced him to sound installation. “It pinched my brain even more,” he explained. “I just said, ‘What is this? I want to do things like this.’”

Lange’s profile rose with the release of tracks in 2015 and 2016. “Young, Latino and Proud” and “This Is My Brown Skin” A soft acknowledgment anthem for the many Latino listeners who struggled with xenophobia and racism during Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign and his first days in office. On the tour, after long and difficult performances, fans approached him and shared their own experiences. “It meant a lot to me,” Lange said. “A lot of it was really nice, but it was really hard.”

In “Far In,” these themes are a little less real. “I will hold back from sharing a lot of my own traumas,” she said. “There’s an aspect to sharing experiences, and depending on how intense they are, some of them can make people share in your misery.”

Lange is partially inspired by the 1991 sci-fi epic. “Until the end of the world” almost became the name of the project. “I have a good relationship with movies that don’t hold your hand too much,” he said. “This is why I love the Wim Wenders movie. It starts somewhere and ends somewhere else.”

Ed Horrox, 4AD executive, who signed Helado Negro to the label, said Lange has a strong ability to make connections: in a video chat, he “has a knack for sharing warmth and positivity.” Horrox first found Lange’s work while searching for music to play on the London-based radio show “Happy Death,” and followed him over the years. Horrox said that Lange’s arrival at 4AD was “pretty overwhelming”, with the response from listeners declaring him “my favorite artist.”

The highlight of “Far In”, “Outside the Outside” is a soft-focus disco groove with laser synths and punchy bass, a tribute to the little pleasures of diasporic life: the video is a montage of video footage of his family’s house parties. In the 1980s they would continue to dance to salsa or merengue. “I used to wake up and it would be 7 a.m. and people would still be downstairs drinking,” Lange said with a laugh.

“La Naranja” A prayer for the apocalypse comes towards the end of the album. “Y sé que sólo tú y yo/Podemos salvar el mundo,” Lange says with a sunny glow. “And I know that only you and I can save the world.” “La Naranja” radiates radical hope, but many of the songs in “Far In,” like “Aguas Frías” and “Wind Conversations,” are about coming to an end with a sense of presence, even with the knowledge that the apocalypse is imminent. both inspired by the ecological drama of the Texas landscape. (Lange and Sword were in Marfa during the early months of the pandemic working on “The Kite Symphony,” a multimedia project that documents the wind, sound, and light of West Texas.)

L’RainSoftness surrounds Lange as both a collaborator and vocalist, said a Brooklyn-based experimenter who played bass on three of the album’s songs. “It’s a really urgent and really heartfelt intimacy,” he said in a phone interview. “When working with Roberto at all levels – from the way he emails, the way he schedules rehearsals, the way he talks to us about music and the way he asks us for our opinions – you simply feel respected and cared for,” he said.

Lange’s intentions for the project also provided peace of mind. “I feel most comfortable expressing through music,” he said. “Sound and music have always been like that for me: It’s always been a great place to get into. It’s the best way I’ve found myself to be a part of this idea – the idea of ​​being in it.”



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