Helado Negro Dives In

Right off the bat, Helado Negro tries something new. PHASOR, Roberto Carlos Lange’s latest album under the moniker, opens with “LFO (Lupe Finds Oliveros).” For an artist who so often carves out the nuances within grooves, syncopation and steady rhythmic pulses, “LFO” finds the Asheville resident in full-on psych-rock mode. Although it doesn’t resemble anything like, say, Tame Impala’s Lonerism or much of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s catalog, its deft pace, atmospheric textures and straight-ahead drum pattern are novel for Lange. It’s one of the most raucous tunes he has composed to date.

From my experience talking with musicians, I’ve learned that most artists are genre-agnostic. They’re averse to labeling themselves with a sonic tag. Yet, I can’t help asking Lange about the psych-rock components of PHASOR’s lead single and opening track. Was it an intentional choice, or did he just stumble upon it organically? “It was definitely intentional—intentional in the sense of unknowns,” Lange says over Zoom. “With ‘LFO,’ I was in the process of distorting some guitar, and I was experimenting with different ideas and techniques. Through that, you’re finding what melodic meanderings make sense and to best idealize the sound that’s in your head.” As Lange puts it, the guitars came out “chugging.”

Crucially, the song also pays tribute to two musical legends in its parenthetical title: Pauline Oliveros, the experimental composer who coined the term (and 1989 album of the same name) “deep listening,” and Lupe Lopez, the Fender amp assembly worker who would write her signature in masking tape inside the chassis. The song’s homages are poetic; they reflect Lange’s fascinations with synthesizers and guitars alike. They underline the multivalences of his artistry, the way he fuses droning ambience, swaying auxiliary percussion and mesmeric guitar tones.

Of course, Lange is also a proud synthesizer nerd, so naming a song “LFO” has a technical bent to it, as well. LFO is an acronym for “low-frequency oscillator,” a synthetic sound generator known for its dramatic pulse. They’re typically below 20 hz, just out of hearing range, so when it finally does become audible, it has a sweeping effect. “LFOs themselves are very poetic,” Lange says. “They’re moving things without being seen or even heard.” Analog synthesis aside, he thinks of important figures like Lopez and Oliveros in tandem because of the thoughtful attention to detail they both possessed. “Through nuanced attention and creative thought, you can make something a little bit more interesting and better,” he continues. “And that was the connection I saw between them: this deeper listening, and then other people deeply listening to this amp, like, ‘Damn, this amp actually is better-sounding!’”

For most of PHASOR, Lange has shied away from autobiographical writing. Like “LFO,” Lange explores others’ psyches and imagines his own worlds. “They’re like tone poems,” he explains. In an age where “confessional and revealing songwriting” reigns supreme, one where songwriters feel forced to unearth their deepest traumas for the whole world to hear, Lange prefers equivocation. It’s certainly a welcome change. Given the parasocial implications of myopically combing through an artist’s lyrics to divulge their personal lives, fandom can be taken to unhealthy, occasionally dangerous extremes. When you adopt a surreal, ambiguous style, it almost acts as a safeguard against that. Lange doesn’t mention any of this, though. He simply says he has “shifted away from writing too personally in a lot of senses, just because it’s nice not to.”

“It feels like the things that are rewarded the most are what’s the most revealing or the most vulnerable,” Lange continues. “And it’s unfair because there’s a wider palette of things to embrace as forms of expression. That’s what I wanted to do with this record, was keep it not so heavily based on traumas or personal identities.” Rather, he drew inspiration from fiction. He cites PHASOR’s closing track, “Es Una Fantasia,” as an example. The song’s narrator envisions themselves in another person’s life, and it’s “almost like a hallucination,” Lange says. Before he moved to Asheville, North Carolina, he lived in Brooklyn, and he’d daydream on the subway about what the person sitting across from him was up to. Where were they going? What were they doing? Whom were they going to see? “Es Una Fantasia” is an Inception-esque take on imagination as a conceptual framework. It’s a song that imagines someone imagining someone. “That’s what fiction is, I guess,” Lange adds with a laugh.

Even though Brooklyn gave him the inspiration to write a song like “Es Una Fantasia,” he ultimately realized he wanted to move away. In such a big city, with so many things to do and see constantly vying for his attention, he felt exhausted from FOMO, trying to consume so much that it consumed him in turn. Asheville gave him the space he needed to slow down. When I ask him why Asheville in particular, he immediately echoes my question with a smile: “Yeah, why Asheville? I ask myself that every day,” he laughs. On top of its excellent music scene featuring buzzy indie artists like Wednesday and Indigo De Souza, Lange wanted some more proximity to family. Also, not many places in the U.S. excited him, and he loathes the cold. His options were dwindling, but he’s happy to have picked Asheville. “I could list 1,000 reasons why,” he adds.

The move was only part of the impetus behind PHASOR, though. For the most part, when I ask an artist to name some inspirations for the album, they either list other musicians, films or books. Lange, however, points to food. He says he’d love to read a book that goes into what foods certain artists ate while making classic records. “You are what you eat,” he says. Immediately, I think of an interview with Turnstile’s Brendan Yates around the time they released Glow On, and he said his daily breakfast was coffee and watermelon. That sounds like a recipe for quick adrenaline as much as Glow On itself. With PHASOR, Lange was eating a lot of fish. Not to make the trite comparison of an artist’s culinary choice as representative of their new album, but it’s hard not to in this instance. PHASOR exudes an aquatic aura, its instruments lapping over one another like waves, the verses and choruses fading into each other like a soothing, infinite ocean. There’s even a song called “Colores Del Mar” (which translates to “Sea Colors”), its gentle acoustic strums and Lange’s dual vocals beckoning you into its thrall like the titular sea.

The aqueous analogy extends even further. Like an endless body of water stretching out into the horizon, Lange has never felt freer than he did while making PHASOR. Whenever it comes time to make a new album, he resets himself into a beginner’s mindset; the process of discovery and exploration feels much more exciting that way. “I try to unlearn whatever I’ve done in the past, in terms of letting previous work guide me too much.” On PHASOR, he forges a new path, realizing a creative freedom that’s as vast as the Atlantic Ocean. Pauline Oliveros might suggest that deep listening, as deep as the ocean floor, would do this record proper justice. So feel free to join Helado Negro there. Dive in.

Watch the music video for Helado Negro’s new single, “Best For You and Me,” below. PHASOR is out February 9 via 4AD.

Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic in Kansas City. He writes the Best New Indie column at UPROXX. His work has also appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books and other publications.