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 dance floors with intimates and online communities. The titular pair in \u201cGemini and Leo\u201d stay indoors to discover each other anew with music recalling Lange\u2019s 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\u2019s (Flock of Dimes) funky bass line, and Opal Hoyt\u2019s (Zenizen) galactic swirl of warm and steely synths and bright backing vocals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What was a prophesying rehearsal for the musician, we can hope will be our fresh start, a choice to bring that energy home, or go out to meet it.
The constellations aligned with optimism to create this song and several others when Lange invited a steady flow of friends to his Brooklyn studio before embarking on tour in the winter of 2019. The crooning \u201cWake Up Tomorrow,\u201d offers the reassurance of a new day, while Kacy Hill\u2019s hum soothes, as much as it haunts. The sound was inspired by the eerie persuasion of Bonnie Beecher\u2019s voice in \u201cCome Wander with Me,\u201d as a mysterious folk singer caught in a deadly time loop in a final episode of the Twilight Zone. Throughout all of Lange\u2019s recordings imagined beings, ghosts, haunted machines, atmospheres, and doubles appear from science fictions and his own conjurings. These affecting elements rarely appear at the center of Helado Negro summations, in spite of touring for years with uncanny dancing tinsel creatures on stage. His sonic storytelling is so capacious, that weird tales and scifi make themselves at home amongst the autobiographical narratives that invigorate community and solidarity for which he is often more known. \u201cIt\u2019s My Brown Skin\u201d on Helado Negro\u2019s 2016 Private Energy and \u201cPlease Won\u2019t Please\u201d on This is How You Smile assert an affirmation of Latinx identity and community through recurring images of brown glowing complexion, a perception that is rooted as much in a spiritual consciousness of guiding light, resilience and protection, as a physical experience. On Far In, Lange says he \u201ccelebrates the ghosts,\u201d embracing pleasure and freedom to follow the metaphysical further; the glow appears without words, as \u201cBrown Fluorescence ” in a minimal arrangement of layered, ethereal, vocal loops. We grow younger to stay strong, he sings on \u201cPurple Tones\u201d with the playful bells of steel pan drums and reveling in the creative time-space of twilight and dusk, waking dreams, and transit \u2014 the self dispersing nowhere and anywhere, but the touch of hair maintains an earthly connection to who you are and what you care about.\u00a0\u201cLa Naranja” opens with long, slowly bowed violin tones, joined by a creeping tea kettle frequency. This identifiable flying sound of our cinematic imaginations anticipates the blow of a meteor crash, or THX deep note. Rather than a brutal jolt, at the point of contact Lange\u2019s voice gleefully bounces in to tell us that we will survive the end of the world. \u201cSome of these songs are about facing anxieties” Lange says, \u201ctalking about the end, allows us to begin knowing how to deal with the end.\u201d It\u2019s possible to hear the world on fire and the abundant fruit of collective courage turning round at once. Supported by the grounding baseline of Taja Cheek\u2019s (L\u2019Rain), Lange\u2019s faith in survival persists in the sheer buoyancy of the drum beat, soaring and plucky synth and string arrangements, and his voice climbing new registers. This recent vocal inclination ascends in moments throughout the album, most notably his falsetto embracing openness and growth in \u201cMirror Talk.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In March 2020 after returning from tour, Lange and his partner artist Kristi Sword, the \u201cloyal freaks\u201d of \u201cOutside the Outside\u201d set off for Marfa, Texas just before the pandemic hit. They intended to stay for a two-week residency working on their collaborative project, \u201cKite Symphony” and decided to stay put through the summer. Here he wrote \u201cThank You For Ever,\u201d saturated in reverb and gratitude for their experience of the desert expanse. In the verse and
chorus, Lange\u2019s voice repeats and stretches high notes across a horizontal vastness, while Angela Morris and Nathaniel Morgan\u2019s saxophone melodies delicately tumble in for the instrumental bridge. With melodic sparkling layers of a detuned Moog Grandmother joined by vibraphone overtones, \u201cAguas Fr\u00edas,\u201d summons a somatic consciousness immersed in nature, specifically bathing in the mineral-rich waters of an ancient coldspring, so transforming that names and faces fall away. Guided by a Rhodes electric piano in the studio, he wrote \u201cAgosto ” with his thoughts on the humid atmosphere of his hometown where flower petals and fruit fall and sweetly decay on concrete. For this song he collaborated with Buscabulla, the tropical synth duo who are no strangers to the melancholy pull of home in a Carribean climate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Driving back to Brooklyn in the fall inspired by his work in the desert, Lange auspiciously purchased a Rhodes from a friend who 20 years earlier gave him his first synthesizer, an Arp Odyssey 2800. The electric piano was a catalyst that guided much of the remaining songwriting for the album. After time apart from a changed city, his base for fifteen years, \u201cHometown Dream\u201d and \u201cOutside the Outside,\u201d unapologetically look forward to new places and possibilities. On the soulful \u201cTelescope,\u201d Benjamin Julia\u2019s (Benamin) heartache tears into the room against Lange\u2019s low and gentle invitation to his mother, the combination wasting no time to articulate love\u2019s urgency thrown into sharp focus by the state of the world.
\u201cEscape is never out there, you have to go inward,\u201d Lange reflects on developing an epic Helado Negro double album during these extraordinary times. Heavy, pulsing, rhythms drive \u201cAureole ” through a dystopian landscape, but as Lange sings of endless psychological restrictions, the shimmering radiance of expanded realms bursts through. This chiaroscuro effect suggests a path that isn\u2019t tuning out beneath monumental forces and anxieties, but embracing the dark of the unknown with openness, pleasure, and growth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n