Helado Negro

★★★★ Far In 4AD. CD/DL/LP

From Brooklyn: a leftfield masterpiece of dreamy bedroom tropicália.

It’s in the liminal space between consciousness and sleep that you’ll find Roberto Carlos Lange, playfully smudging the boundaries between disco and lullaby. His seventh LP as Helado Negro is a sensual, hallucinatory delight, its weightless songs evoking the effortless art-pop of Arthur Russell, the hazy soul-funk of Shuggie Otis and the sui generis genius of Juana Molina. Using sequencers, synths and droll, multitracked vocals, Lange conjures hypnagogic disco (Gemini And Leo), dubby trances (Hometown Dream), soft-focus devotionals (Purple Tones) and lulling aural travelogues (Aguas Frías). Lange’s songs are deftly composed, but Far In also rejoices in sound as a purely sensory experience, the muted throb of Outside The Outside bleeding in like house music from a nearby club, the shimmering gongs of Thank You Forever engulfing the listener in its blissed-out reveries. Its post-midnight magic is infectious, undeniable.