Helado Negro has released the official video for ‘Agosto’ featuring the Puerto Rican duo Buscabulla. The song is from Helado Negro’s latest acclaimed album ‘Far In‘ on 4AD.
Guided by a Rhodes electric piano, Roberto Carlos Lange wrote ‘Agosto’ with his thoughts on the humid atmosphere of his South Florida hometown where flower petals and fruit fall and sweetly decay on concrete. He and Buscabulla are long time friends and collaborators.
Helado Negro recently completed an extensive tour across the UK and Europe. The tour followed the release of the standalone single ‘Ya No Estoy Aquí.’ The song’s title was inspired by the independent film of the same name.
“‘Ya No Estoy Aquí’ is a song about loneliness and alienation,” Roberto shares. “It’s about being lost within yourself and not knowing who you are. Making this song was catharsis; it was a way to get this all out and feel the texture of new perspectives.”
The recent album ‘Far In‘ is Helado Negro’s first album on 4AD and the seventh full-length album in his catalog. When Roberto began writing ‘Far In’ immediately following his breakthrough 2019 release ‘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.
“Escape is never out there, you have to go inward,” Roberto reflects on developing an epic Helado Negro double album during these extraordinary times, embracing the dark of the unknown with openness, pleasure, and growth. Throughout Roberto’s career, imagined beings, ghosts and haunted machines appear in sci-fi stories and his own conjurings. On ‘Far In,’ Roberto says he “celebrates the ghosts,” embracing pleasure and freedom to follow the metaphysical further.
A significant portion of the new album was written in Marfa, Texas where Roberto and his partner, the visual artist Kristi Sword had originally planned to visit for a collaborative residency in early 2020. The pandemic extended their stay to six months. Roberto and Kristi recently returned to Marfa for Kite Symphony, a multidisciplinary exhibition which opened in January. The project features a newly commissioned film, outdoor composition and installation. Sound is the throughline between these diverse elements of this long-term project.
