Helado Negro aka Roberto Carlos Langeis set to release a new EP ‘Island Universe Story: One’ via Asthmatic Kitty on the 26th March 2012 and has offered up a free download as a taster of the EP.
‘Island Universe Story’ is an infinite series of music produced by Helado Negro. These EPs will serve as a sub-narrative behind the showcased broadcast of the full-length release schedule. Yet, this sub-narrative is the subconscious whisperings, deep labyrinth of dot-connecting and cartography for the diligent listeners into the inner-workings. The IUS series will inform one another, actively communicating to collectively create new meanings in Helado Negro’s music.
‘Island Universe Story: One’, the first in this series, is the result of experimentation with a Scully 280 1/4″ tape machine, and by creating tape loops and tape edits from the Teenage Engineering OP-1. These catalytic tools were provided deep dredging and strip-mining for the brain trust at Helado Negro Central Headquarters.
“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancy—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”
The above is a desperate and forlorn quote from Aldous Huxley. With the Island Universe Story series, Helado Negro has set out to chart new constellations and family lineage for the lonely souls and stars of the deep universe of existence.
Download the shimmering delight that is an excerpt of opening track ‘Mamember (Long Largo)’ here:
The son of Ecuadorean immigrants, Roberto Carlos Lange was born in South Florida in 1980. His childhood was suffused with tropical heat, humidity, hurricanes, all refracted with the rich sounds and colours of the various Latin American cultures of southern Florida. Pounding bass beats from passing cars, boom boxes bouncing down the block, and late-night parties called “peñas” provided a foundation for Lange’s interest in sound and lifelong quest to discover the unlimited variety of objects used to produce music. Over the last few years Lange has collaborated with prominent visual and sound artist David Ellis to compose a new series of kinetic sound sculptures. These include typewriters that self-type the lyrics to Grand Master Flash’s ‘The Message’ (in rhythm to the song, none-the-less), musical owls drawn out of liquor bottles, owl costumes made out of straws, flying musical birds, motion paintings, and trashcans (full of trash) that are actually living drum machines. Lange has also worked with Paul Duncan and Bear in Heaven as well as famed music producer Guillermo Scott Herren to produce Prefuse 73 and Savath and Savalas as an active member and contributor.
Helado Negro came together when Lange moved to New York in 2006 (he now calls Crown Heights, Brooklyn home). The early group concept grew through projects and experiments Roberto would conduct while recording himself and others in his home studio. Loops, computer synthesis, record samples, and live instruments provided the foundation for the first full-length, ‘Awe Owe’, a vibrant, shimmering, full-band Latin psyche-funk-folk epic. On follow-up ‘Canta Lechuza’ we witnessed the birth of Helado Negro as an intimate solo project to replace the big collaborative group jam of previous work.
Watch this Laundro Matinee performance from last year:
