Helado Negro’s curated perfect morning playlist
You can’t describe an artist as sounding like a Saturday morning coffee without coming off a tad pretentious, but it just so happens that Helado Negro conjures the sentiments of bird song and summer breezes with more veracity than any fellow artists. He’s inspired by a world of music but echoes a voice closer to nature’s idiosyncrasies.
As the son of Ecuadorian immigrants, the Florida-born musician was raised amid an array of sounds. Growing up in the 1980s, the sugary synths of the American pop charts were pitched alongside rather more earthy pasillo folk. Somehow, in the years that have followed, Roberto Carlos Lange has managed to marry both in his solo music project Helado Negro—finding a way to make high-end production align with naturalistic sounds.
He first started releasing records of this ilk with Awe Owe on Asthmatic Kitty back in 2009. Now, he’s further refined his sweet style and is signed to 4AD, putting out one of the finest efforts of 2024 so far with the gorgeously sanguine and seamlessly experimental Phasor back in February.
As Far Out wrote in a review of the record: “Phasor hears Lange return to the big wide world. Instrumentally optimistic, this heady bundle presents a kaleidoscopic image of decadent dance halls and bustling beach parties.” Jordan Potter concluded, “But not so fast; Lange will burrow under your skin with oblique flourishes and transportive lyrics demanding undivided attention.”
Indeed, that is roughly where Lange’s inspiration pitched for the record. He wanted to channel the release of lockdown easing, but his tool to do so was Salvatore Matirano’s SAL MAR machine. This is a highly intricate synthesiser that generates layered sounds through analogue oscillators. That’s no party, but for Lange, turning something so knotty into smooth rhythms is his call as an artist. The results are ours to simply bask in.
So, like a Saturday morning coffee, we perhaps take the immense efforts, darkly complex flavours, and swell of emotions for granted while listening to his tranquil tunes. Thankfully, Lange does the same with the music he loves. The morning playlist he curated via the BBC is full of tracks with hidden density beneath the surface, which you can idly lounge in as you yawn in pretty dawn.
From the mellowed-out ambience of Nick Hakim to the rolling folk of Bedoiune, blink in the morning with Helado Negro’s perfectly curated beats, wrapped up in a playlist below.
