[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/69197184″ iframe=”true” /]
From the room he grew up in, in South Florida, to his apartment in Savannah, where that restless tropical silent partner, humidity, continued to creep in, and now in his current home in Brooklyn – Roberto Lange of Helado Negro has never not made music. Tones whittled out of these places, memories, time and all its impressions, Invisible Life is Helado Negro’s third full-length album. Like captured light, it is a reflection of Helado Negro’s refined love affair with synthesis, sampling, and his own strengthening voice.
Singing in English for the first time, as well as Spanish, Helado Negro is a bilingual tour guide into the transcendent zone of wavelength where music is mutually transacted bouncing between artist and listener. Assisting in this transaction are contributions from collaborators including Bear in Heaven’s Jon Philpot, Mouse on Mars’ Jan St. Werner, Devendra Barnhart, Matt Crum and Eduardo Alonso. Each help multiply the whispered dream of Helado Negro into a full-spectrum technicolor existence.
In the way of artists like Caetano Veloso, The Sea and Cake, and even Sade, Helado Negro floats beyond his own identity into that democratic forest of shape and color. He breaks the ice on Invisible Life with “Ilumina Vos” where he’s talking to you in Spanish, perhaps with more volume, in the language he’s been teaching us the past three years through his seductive full-length albums Canta Lechuza (2011) and Awe Owe (2009), the sub-narrative exploration EP Island Universe Story One, and Ombre (2012), his collaboration with Julianna Barwick. His ideas continue, in English this time, with “Dance Ghost.” “There’s no one home, just the ghosts who dance alone”. It’s a slow motion boogie in swirls of nostalgia. This immersive curriculum, paired with our own capacity for photo-receptive feeling, will make Invisible Life visible . . . at least as much as Roberto Lange wants us to see of himself. Just translate the name of that first song for the first clue: it illuminates you.
Helado Negro’s Invisible Life is out March 5th on Asthmatic Kitty.