The Colombian electronic producer makes techno-pop that doesn’t just fill club nights with sound.
A darkly rising and falling surface of sound, there is rustling and crawling in the leaves, but before the track starts to itch, the stuttering beat rattles into the structure after three minutes. What an opener: “Abrir monte,” which is Spanish for piercing through dense foliage, is a chord progression that came to Ela Minus in the desert of northern Mexico as a route to her second album DÍA.
It’s not an album for one night, especially not for a club night, but a very personal work, cleverly balanced between club, pop and experiment, equipped with lush sound design: The Colombian only uses hardware synthesizers; she has to have a whole fleet of them own.
In addition, as part of the creative process, she simply shredded all the texts: too superficial, she decided – and re-wrote everything in search of existential depths. Now in “Qqqq” she lets the world end with a lot of phaser on her voice to the 4/4 bass drum. In “I Want To Be Better” she talks about her fear of failure, which sounds as if she were the post-punk icons Suicide in a techno club. Techno euphoria that makes you throw your hands in the air exists on an equal footing with karst landscapes from dark sequencers. Ela Minus has thought this album through thoroughly, which fortunately doesn’t show.
You can find out which albums will be released in January 2025 via our monthly release list.