Helado Negro brings unconventional take on Latin music to Brighton Music Hall
Early in his career, Roberto Carlos Lange — the frontman and mastermind of the band Helado Negro — wrote a song that became an underground classic, “Young, Latin and Proud.” Though his audience took the song to heart, it was one he wrote largely for himself.
“I wrote that in 2014 and I thought of it as a message to myself when I was younger — to feel a little more confidence and security, and not to notice all the differences between what was important to me and what was going on in my life,” said Lange, who performs with Helado Negro at Brighton Music Hall Monday night. “So it was a meditation and a journey, kind of a time travel song.”
Lange’s music is a diverse mix of elements, including the Latin rhythms he grew up with (his family were Ecuadorian immigrants), and the ambient pop he developed as a producer and remixer.
While launching the band, he lived in Brooklyn and collaborated with a number of experimental performance artists, and this too plays into
his work. It may not fit any conventional definitions of Latin music, but he says that’s the point.
“Many people can have a
myopic perspective on what they hear. But music from Latin America is anything and everything, it’s wide and vast and deep. And I relate very much to the vastness of it all. I grew up in South Florida, which is really the capital of Latin America. So I heard a lot of Latin pop music, a lot of crooners and a lot of folkloric music that you’d identify as Americana. Then there was indigenous music, Andean music and things like cumbias that were more danceable. So I don’t necessarily strategize how I form my sound, but all these things have become part of who I am.”
He also keeps a foot in the performance art world: He recently wrote a new musical score for an exhibit of vintage Andy Warhol films, and designed a “kite symphony” that was presented in Marfa, Texas, for Earth Day. His live shows typically include “tinsel mammals,” silver-costumed dancers whose movements add a surreal element to the show.
“I grew up understanding music more as a visual language. And that developed through making music and going to school for visual art;
I still speak that language and work in those ways. I describe the music I make as textures and colors — not in a synesthetic way (the artistic term for evoking one sense through another), but as part of the vocabulary that I have to work with.”
But his latest album, “Far In,” also sounds fine on its own. Largely written during shutdown, it wound up as an upbeat record, at least on the surface.
“I really wanted to make it with friends in the studio, but the pandemic hit and there was a lot of remoteness, so you work with what you have. It is more upbeat, but there’s a lot of introspection there too. I feel that the aesthetics of this album are a very immediate sweetness, but there are more layers as you get into it.
“It’s like a cake: You have the frosting on the outside, and we know what that tastes like. But if you really dig cakes, you’ll want to go deeper into the layers.”