In a short film about the making of Phasor, Roberto Carlos Lange’s eighth album as Helado Negro, the multi-instrumentalist songwriter says that “slow clouds and soft heat became symbols of long hikes through 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 clean country air in your lungs that, almost without notice, gives you more energy than usual.
Lange’s specific temperament is a boon in a turbulent culture; his music reflects a gentle soul who encourages slowness and contemplation. But love has always been the message with Lange, an experimenter under the guise of a traditionalist, whose work in English and Español has snuck a folk songwriter’s sensibility into twinkling electronic cut-ups and field recordings. Phasor uses blank space a bit more liberally than 2021’s Far In, and here his expressions of affection feel as organic as the scenery he strives to capture. “And I’ll go outside, looking at the moon way too long,” he harmonizes with the pianist Opal Hoyt on “Best for You and Me,” his melancholic tone vague and aimed heavenward. 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—inside a cascade of rhythmic squelches.
The inciting moment for Phasor came in 2019 when Lange spent five hours with the Sal-Mar, a large-scale, one-of-a-kind synthesizer constructed in 1969 by the contemporary-classical composer Salvatore Martirano, who had the idea to use spare supercomputer parts to make an interactive “composing machine.” In Lange’s time interacting with the instrument at the University of Illinois, where it resides, he wrote sounds that bubble up in the crevices of Phasor, conveying ideas through simplicity and repetition whether lyrically or melodically. With the Sal-Mar’s sequencing employed in such a human and heartfelt album, it provokes some interesting thoughts about numbers, fractals, the nature of matter, the great interconnectivity of all beings, et cetera.
It seems significant that album opener, “LFO,” or Lupe Finds Oliveros, is a tribute to electronic composition icon Pauline Oliveros and Lupe Lopez, an original wiring technician for Fender amplifiers known in at least one corner of the internet as “the goddess of soldering.” The concept is literal—the reverb is centered alongside spacy sound snippets—but also posits music as a form of transcendental escape. “Un policía me pegó me dejó por muerto/Y le dije/¿Quién eres tú?” he sings stridently, and then: “¡Y ya sé quien soy!” Who is this cop beating him down, he asks, but at least Lange knows his own self. He then escapes into what sounds like a chopped-up mariachi sample, light cacophony with the echoes of a phasor, the guitar pedal that’s best known as the dub reggae sound. (“I don’t own one,” he admitted in a recent bio, “but I did try to emulate that sound where I can on the record.”)
But let’s not get lost in the oscillators. There may be a lot of theory, artistic experimentation, and new forms of inquiry on this album, but typical of Lange’s work, it’s carried by pure beauty, the sort of diaphanous songwriting that makes the noise of everyday life fall away. His confidence in his songwriting over eight albums and 15 years allows for these loftier ideas to float through the songs but never overpower them—or even present as a central theme if you’re not in the academic mood. “Out There” is a propulsive groove with a tinge of ’70s Brazilian jazz, fleshed out with vibraphones, Moog rhythm, and Pinson Chanselle’s featherweight touch on percussion.
Another standout, “Wish You Could Be Here,” hovers in a multihued electronic atmosphere as Lange hits his raspy lower register: “Streets flood with your love/Cars flowing down like mud/Sun barely under clouds/Heat so soft it sounds like.” His words are authoritative but impressionistic—this music wants nothing but to catch the vibe of a somnambulist summer afternoon. “BLISS IN ONE CONTINUOUS MOMENT,” he writes in Phasor’s liner notes. “LET IT BE YOU.” Heaven is within and lives in those you love, and on Phasor, Lange, never complacent, is determined to find it. “Donde quieres ir/Giraré mundos/Para estar allí,” he coos in the starry-eyed closing ballad “Es Una Fantasía.” Where do you want to go? He’ll move worlds to get there.
