Helado Negro has announced his new album Phasor scheduled to be released on 9 February 2024. The eighth full-length album in Helado’s catalogue follows his critically acclaimed 2021 album Far In. The announce comes with the release of the album’s first single, ‘LFO’, which is accompanied by a hallucinatory self-directed official video.
‘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.
After Far In, Lange relocated to Asheville, North Carolina and the landscape around him was essential to Phasor—the crystalline mountains dotted with mica, wild blueberry bushes, and inky dirt surface constantly. He made the collection at his studio, across the hall from the studio of his wife, his frequent collaborator Kristi Sword, who created the album art drawings for Phasor.
Phasor will be available digitally and on CD, standard black vinyl and translucent vinyl (4AD Webstore + UK Indie exclusive) on 9 February 2024, for pre-order information head HERE.
Helado Negro – Phasor
9 February 2024
Catalogue Number: 4AD 0610
Tracklist
- LFO
- I Just Want to Wake Up With You
- Best For You and Me
- Colores Del Mar
- Echo Tricks Me
- Out There
- Flores
- Wish You Could Be Here
- Es Una Fantasia
ABOUT HELADO NEGRO
Born in South Florida in 1980 to Ecuadorian immigrant parents, Roberto Carlos Lange stitches together memories, impressions, and atmospheres to make detailed dreamscapes as Helado Negro. He produces, engineers, and mixes his own songs, literally creating and populating his own sonic world. Lange has a degree in Computer Art and Animation from Savannah College of Art and Design and works extensively with video, sculpture, sound, and performance. He brings that toolbox to whatever he makes, and there’s a seeming effortlessness to the complexity. His songs are awash with vibrant melodies, sharp lyrical vignettes, and subtle, even whispered hooks. Since his 2009 debut, Awe Owe, across multiple projects and collaborations, through his breakthrough records, 2016’s Private Energy and 2019’s This Is How You Smile, and to 2021’s Far In, Lange’s work continues to move past easy genre assignments. Showcasing that interest in open-ended multi-disciplinarity, in 2022, he and his wife, the artist Kristi Sword, created the multi-disciplinary exhibition, Kite Symphony, with Ballroom Marfa—it was a collection of impressionistic installations, drawings and sound pieces that encourages listeners to “open their ears to the sky, the sound of cacti, and the feeling of the wind on their skin.” Lange has been awarded a United States Artist fellowship and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant. He lives in Asheville, NC.
HELADO NEGRO ONLINE:
heladonegro.com
Instagram + Twitter: @heladonegro
Facebook: @heladonegro
