Helado Negro
ALBUM: “Awe Owe”
LABEL: Asthmatic Kitty
There’s always a lot of word-play when Helado Negro is involved. The first thing people think is, “What is helado negro?” Upon finding out that it means “black ice cream,” they think, “What’s black ice cream?” Turns out it’s raspberry ice cream, but then, what does his album title “Awe Owe” mean?
A&E tried to answer these and many more questions about Helado Negro, AKA Roberto Carlos Lange. The son of Ecuadorian immigrants , he began producing his own music in his Florida home and Brooklyn apartment, his diverse background serving as his launch pad into various projects and collaborations.
His album as Helado Negro is complex, melodic folk with quirky production touches and layered harmonies that make it sound like early Sufjan Stevens or the experimental days of Grizzly Bear.
Lange called A&E to talk about hip-hop, partying and the Germanic origin of the last name Lange.
What does your album title mean?
[To be] in awe of something and just caught in that state and it kind of told the story [about] a lot of the record, what I did, things I was just impressed with, experiences that I was impressed with. And “owe” is just the concept of humbleness and remembering I owe other people my life.
I could say maybe some of it is like a subconscious inspiration from my friend David that I work with. He used a lot of letters when he worked in a visual work, like murals on the street. In a way, a lot of graffiti writers truncate words to make them shorter words. You got to put your idea across. In a way I take from that too, getting an idea across in the simplest means, using the things I have around me. That was the biggest thing about this album: doing what I can with what I got — my ambitions, and to inspire as many people as I can.
You have many projects, including the hip-hop oriented Epstein. Do you rap?
I never emceed on any of that stuff. A lot of them are just friends or people associated the label, Arepaz . No I don’t rap. It’s more hip-hop based, only because a lot of that was birthed with me getting my MPC for the first time and buying records, being like, “Oh sh-t, this is boogy down production.”
Is your record primarily organic instruments or a mixture of samples?
It’s not 100 percent samples. I think sampling is a part of our culture. Sampling is an art form. People disregard it, “You’re not playing instruments.” What if I didn’t have arms or legs, and I made this music? People would be like, “He’s a genius.”
People get so bent out of shape about things being non-musical, but samples can still be informative musically. I know I’m kind of repeating something someone’s already said a million times in a million interviews in the 20-30 years of hip-hop. It’s a part of me and it crossed over to my music.
What was your musical education like? I read that your hard partying parents were influences.
My parents always had music in the house and parties on the weekends. A lot of times during the early part of the party, 9-3, there were a lot of people just dancing conga, merengue — typical Latin American music. I think for a lot of times, late night it would roll into folk sing-alongs, where everybody’s had a few drinks, and they would go late in the morning, singing and playing guitar or whatever instruments you’d bring. My mom would go to sleep around 2 or 3. They would have karaoke machines and record themselves I think that gave me an interest for things like that. I started recording myself, kind of mimicking.
I played guitar in middle school because my uncle gave me a Spanish guitar. Later I went to an art school.
I was always growing up peripheral to that whole culture of Ecuadorian influences. I was also inspired by electronic music and hip-hop. Those two things have always been the biggest. In high school I wanted to make beats. I had a friend who was an emcee so I made beats. In college I bought an MPC sampler sequencer, and I’d sample, make a beat send it to my friends.
You studied art in college. Do you like working with visual artists, or is your music influenced by visual art?
It’s not so much that it influences it, but it’s just that together we make a better whole. Sometimes things just come out of you that move people and they’re the most important things to focus on. Me working with someone else does something naturally that affects people visually. Together we make this “super thing.” I think it just keeps building from there. People need to keep coming together with other people to see what we can make together, to make something bigger.
