In a short film about its creation Phasor, Roberto Carlos Lange's eighth album as Helado Negro, the multi-instrumentalist songwriter says that “the slow clouds and soft heat became symbols of long hikes in the mountains and the noise for these songs.” His environmental inspiration ripples through nine beautiful tracks with a faint and visceral touch—like the effect of fresh country air on your lungs that, almost without warning, gives you more energy than usual.
Lange's particular temperament is a boon in a turbulent culture. His music reflects a gentle soul that encourages slowness and contemplation. But love has always been the message with Lang, an experimentalist in the guise of a traditionalist whose work in English and Spanish has hidden a folk songwriter's sensibility in shimmering electronic tracks and field recordings. Phasor uses the empty space a little more liberally than in 2021 Far In, and here his expressions of affection are as organic as the landscape he is trying to capture. “And I'll go outside, looking long at the moon,” he harmonizes with pianist Opal Hoyt on “Best for You and Me,” his wistful tone vague and skyward. On “I Just Want to Wake Up With You,” Lange captures one of the simplest moments of intimacy—a nice morning rise with your nearest and dearest—into a cascade of rhythmic squelches.
The touching moment for Phasor came in 2019 when Lange spent five hours with the Sal-Mar, a one-of-a-kind large-scale synthesizer built in 1969 by modern-classical composer Salvatore Martirano, who had the idea of using supercomputer parts to build a interactive “synthesis engine”. During Lang's time interacting with the instrument at the University of Illinois, where he resides, he wrote sounds that swell into its slits Phasor, conveying ideas through simplicity and repetition either lyrically or melodically. With Sal-Mar's sequence used in such a human and heartfelt album, it provokes some interesting thoughts about numbers, fractals, the nature of matter, the great interconnectedness of all beings, etc.
It seems significant that the album opener, “LFO”, or Lupe Finds Oliveros, is a tribute to electronic synthesis icon Pauline Oliveros and Lupe Lopez, an original wiring technician for Fender amps known in at least one corner of the internet as “the goddess of welding.” The concept is literal—reverberation is centered alongside fragments of spacious sound—but it also posits the music as a form of transcendental escapism. “Un policía me pegó me dejó por muerto/Y le dije/¿Quién eres tú?” he sings loudly and then: “Y ya sé quien soy!” Who is this cop beating him up, he asks, but at least Lang knows himself. It then breaks out into what sounds like a chopped-up mariachi sample, light cacophony with the echoes of a phasor, the guitar pedal best known as a dub reggae sound. (“I don't have one,” he admitted in a recent autobiography, “but I tried to emulate that sound wherever I could on record.)
