A small disco ball hovers over Roberto Carlos Lange as he slouches in his windowless studio one afternoon last December. In a yellow beanie and tie-dye socks—the rented space is a no-shoe zone—Lange is affably lowkey, the type of interviewee who seems as genuinely interested in my life as I am in his. Even with coronavirus cases spiking at the time, he cracks jokes and makes small talk about what he’s been listening to—cult heroes like Venezuelan jazz singer María Márquez and ’70s UK songwriter Labi Siffre—easing any mid-pandemic social tension.
Located on a residential, snow-capped street in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, the shed-like studio is strewn with amps and pedals, and an old Steinway piano in the corner that takes up about a quarter of the entire room. This is the same place where Lange made 2019’s This Is How You Smile, his sixth album as Helado Negro, and an unlikely breakthrough for a scruffy guy in his late 30s who had previously been toiling in New York City’s underground arts scene for more than a decade. The album portrayed themes of family and Latinx visibility in shimmering colors, and served as a welcomed balm amid the horrors of the Trump era. “Lifelong history shows that brown won’t go/Brown just glows,” he murmured at the beginning of the record, as warm synth tones lifted each word up high.
As he gained renown for his meditative songs, though, his life grew more hectic. Lange zigzagged the globe playing shows, from Switzerland to Mexico to Turkey, spending months away from his longtime partner, visual artist Kristi Sword. Coming after years of nonstop music-making and touring, the demanding schedule finally caught up with him. “I got really sick,” he says, referring to both his physical and mental health. “It was just completely insane.”
In March 2020, before yet another round of planned gigs, Lange and Sword ventured to Marfa, Texas, the small-town arts destination, to work on a new multimedia project together. The couple were supposed to be there for three weeks. They ended up staying six months.
As Lange recounts the story of his COVID-induced displacement, his cast-off gaze suggests a bemused mix of clarity and disbelief. Stuck in a strange place during an even stranger time, tension curved into Lange and Sword’s everyday lives. They were visitors trying to be respectful of the local community during a crisis, but it was hard to ignore how Marfa only had two small village clinics with few respirators, and how hospital capacities in nearby towns were shrinking by the day. At one point, a friend’s brother put them up in a hotel nearby. “The AC was mad tiny and barely worked,” Lange recalls. “We were cooking Instant Pot meals on top of a mini fridge—it got really strange.”
But they tried to make the most of their alien new surroundings. In June 2020, Lange released Kite Symphony, Four Variations, an instrumental piece inspired by Sword’s drawings that transmutes the Marfa landscape into floating soundscapes. It’s a gorgeous work, wide-open one minute and tense the next; creating it also helped to keep the couple’s minds off being stuck in the middle of nowhere during a global pandemic.
That same month, Lange signed to veteran indie label 4AD, a move that offered more resources for his This Is How You Smile follow-up. But the upturn in his career coinciding with his unexpected time in isolation—and his 40th birthday—forced him to face hard truths: Would he eventually just go back to the grind of nonstop records and shows again, or move in a different direction and set solid boundaries for himself?
When he got back to Brooklyn in September, he slowed down and analyzed what he wanted his life to look like. He considered leaving New York entirely, partially prompted by his time in Marfa and his exhaustive touring schedule, but also because he knew the change of pace would require him to more seriously settle down with Sword.
Sitting in the studio in the middle of winter, he says, “I’m just trying to really challenge how everything can be more than what it is right now for me. And whether it needs to be.” Before I leave, he plays me a few works in progress, including “Gemini and Leo,” the eventual lead single from his forthcoming record, Far In. He turns the disco ball on for dramatic effect, showering the room in speckled light. The song is a love letter to Sword (Lange is the Leo), a straightforward dance track that rides on a bouncy synth line, rolling drums, and his gentle voice: “We can move in slow motion, just watch me/We can take our time in cosmic balance.” He sways around the room, letting the song’s bliss take over.
Lange’s music has always eluded easy categorization. He has made free-flowing work as a beat-maker and producer under various monikers, plus several collaborative projects and enigmatic installations as a sound artist. His early music as Helado Negro was marked by impressionistic flourishes before it shifted with 2014’s Double Youth, where he recounted family memories through dreamy electro-pop. From there, his work bloomed into elegant, bilingual ruminations on connection, homey nostalgia, and identity as the child of Ecuadorian immigrants, drawing freely from electronic, Latin, and ambient music.
His beatific 2015 song “Young, Latin and Proud” has since become an anthem for Latinx audiences around the globe. Devendra Banhart, a close friend of Lange’s, tells me he frequently covers the song on tour and, no matter where he is, the crowd always recognizes it and sings along. “His music really does reflect his personality,” Banhart says. “It’s genuinely how he is: a gentle, very calm, really grounded person.”
It would have been easy for Lange to continue to create more songs like “Young, Latin and Proud” and the ones found on This Is How You Smile, but while making Far In he intentionally moved away from themes of identity to focus more on evoking emotions through poetic, enigmatic verses. The result is more amorphous both musically and lyrically, yet no less inwardly captivating. The stark “Mirror Talk” was the first song he wrote for the new album, and it sets the tone for the shifts he wanted to challenge himself with. “‘You’ve changed,’ that’s what they’ll say,” he sings in a scratchy upper register at the song’s start, perhaps anticipating a backlash. “Even though they don’t know where ya been.”
I meet up with Lange again outside of his Bed-Stuy apartment this June on a gray, overcast day, an exhale between sweltering heat waves. People are spilling out into the streets as the weather warms up and vaccines are taken. Far In is finished, completed in a spree over the previous few months, mostly at home.
The record’s title assumes various self-analyses: an examination of being far into your career, for one, or going far into yourself to unpack emotional baggage. An inversion of “far out,” the phrase came to him by happenstance. In 2019, Lange performed as part of a large-scale, communal musical event in Berlin, and spied the New Age icon Laraaji waiting for a flight at the airport on the way home. “He was just chilling, you know?” Lange says, grinning at the memory. He hates going up to people in public, but figured this could be his only chance. “He was so warm and considerate,” Lange adds of Laraaji. “I was telling him what I had been up to in Berlin, and he was like, ‘Far in.’ That stuck with me.”
He jotted it down and went deeper into the concept while working on the album, exploring how it related to different facets of his life. “When you’re trying to escape something, it’s always far in. Whatever problems I have, all that shit gets packed away in invisible luggage,” he explains, applying the idea to his own workaholic lifestyle and everyday anxieties alike. “I’ve been thinking about how to express those themes in multiple ways—not in a melancholy or sad way, but dancing it out a little bit.”
The reconsiderations he was making in December play out all the way through Far In, which is dappled with joyous, rhythmic love songs suited for the dancefloor alongside more somber, nature-minded tracks with lush strings, wind instruments, and piano. Listening to the record, it strikes me how much Lange creates music in the same way many of his listeners receive it—as an acute source of relief from the overwhelming pressures of life.
Reshaping songs happened constantly as Lange pulled in a stacked cast of collaborators to contribute on instrumentation and vocals, including Brooklyn artist L’Rain and singer-songwriter Kacy Hill. He worked with classically trained pianist and experimentalist Kelly Moran on the delicately downcast “Wind Conversations,” where imagistic lyrics of naked worlds turning inside out are backgrounded with arpeggiated guitar and Moran’s rippling piano, programmed using a Disklavier. “Strange hell, sitting here,” he sings on the song, “Breathing/Knowing it’s too late.” He says the album’s loose environmental themes are a result of his profound, up-close experiences with the stillness of nature while in Marfa, where he thought more seriously about the planet’s decline due to climate change.
Other songs take on more homespun subject matter. “Telescope” is a deeply felt ballad dedicated to Lange’s mother in Florida. He was planning to visit her late last year, but travel became uncertain, and he began to think about seeing her life solely through the lens of video calls. A field recording of chirping birds opens the song before it builds up into an ambling funk stroll, with a wistful guitar line and guest vocals from New York artist Benamin. “I’m thinking about why haven’t we talked this month,” Lange sings. “I’m thinking about growing older and missing you so much.” He still hasn’t been able to see his mom, though he plans to soon. In the meantime, the song is his own unique way of reconnecting, with a tinge of relatable guilt at the edges.
We stroll a few blocks to Guevara’s, a pastel pink vegan café filled with plants that lean toward its vast windows. Sitting outside with chilaquiles verde and a chai tea (he has also cut back on caffeine, which he admits is another hard lifestyle change), Lange tells me he and Sword are moving to a house in Asheville, North Carolina. What was just an idea last year will be a reality within a few weeks, and they’ve been going on long walks to savor their last days as New York City residents. He’s excited for what’s to come. “I’ve actually been thinking about getting an e-bike,” he muses, pulling at a gooey, cashew cheese-covered tortilla chip.
Lange describes the move as the start of more significant adjustments for his future. “I was avoiding a lot of conversations with myself about how to take care of my life, especially my partnership,” he says as the sun starts to creep out. Talking about his relationship with Sword, he adds, “We’ve been together for 20 years, but we connected on a level that felt so disconnected for a long time.”
As we walk back to the subway, Lange mentions that he mastered and produced Far In piecemeal for a few hours a day at the Flatbush studio before heading back home. The more mindful schedule allowed him to be present in his family life in a way that he’d lost while making previous albums. “Even if you’re making music and doing what you want to do, we all work ourselves to death and lose priorities,” he says. “There’s this illusion that we’re supposed to work up until a certain age and then enjoy life.” But finishing Far In made him realize he could go at his own pace, making use of the tools he had on hand.
Inclusivity has always been paramount to Helado Negro, but Far In feels even more deliberate in its open-heartedness. The album allows for listeners to imprint their own experiences and daydreams onto it while remaining in tune with Lange’s uninhibited kindness. “It doesn’t have to be isolating, to go far in,” he says. “It’s more like an invitation.”
