Ela Minus ends her second album DÍA with a track called “COMBAT”. Conventional wisdom tells us the Colombian-born/US-based electronic artist is courting some fiery bluster this time around. Not in this specific case. “COMBAT” is a gorgeous, meditative piece of music, peppered with glassy textures, carefully layered vocals – a human element sundered by frigid synth swirls, like grains of sand inside of a vortex. Not some adrenaline-pumping techno-romp – it sounds more like a heavy storm slowly dissolving into an azure sky.
At the start of the song, Minus – real name Gabriela Jimeno Caldas – references a common proverb: “Los pájaros nacidos en jaula / no le tenemos miedo a nada”. The bird who grows up in a cage, and as a result, becomes conditioned to deem flying as a sickness. In the video, we see Minus inside another cage of sorts – an anechoic chamber – as the camera slowly moves closer into the beating heart inside of her, evoking this deep yearning from within.
This evocative imagery checks out with how Ela Minus’s solo career has progressed up till now. Fighting her footing in the Bogotá music scene, she made music mired in compromise, stuck in the designated role of playing drums in various hardcore and indie rock bands. The physicality of performance was ingrained in her from a young age – she started playing when she was nine. It took a good trail-by-fire stretch to forge a vocabulary that translated that innate talent into an autonomous vocabulary. Minus didn’t cut any corners here: instead of relying on digital plug-ins, she diligently crafted her own synths and music hardware – her very own sonic building blocks to create intuitively.
The other big artistic step Minus took for her solo project was perhaps a mite less intuitive: expressing herself as a vocalist and lyricist. Written language not only bolstered her compositions, but became a utilitarian source code to imbue her tracks with their unique improvisational spirit. Minus would litter her grid with bright pink stickers: initially it started with just nailing down technical cues – when to start this sequencer, or what MIDI-channel to use, and things along those lines. But gradually, this ritual became more expressive – placing handwritten mementos on the stickers that reminded her to stay in the moment – instructional mantras like “Stay present!” and “Listen!” planted to fight complacency and rigid routine. It’s a kind of combative spirit in electronic compositions that made Ela Minus’s music ripe for the physicality of a live performance.
As a producer and songwriter, she paved quite a runway for takeoff when her artistic vision took shape on debut LP acts of rebellion. Just as her career lifted off, the pandemic forced Minus to crashland any lofty prospects to explore said physicality – something so paramount to her music – even further. Once again, the bird was caged. Serendipitously, acts of rebellion‘s insular qualities made it a quintessential pandemic-era club record. On the thrilling techno-epic “they told as it was hard, but they were wrong” Minus speaks with a deadpan whisper, “We know in the first minute or so / If something is worth staying for” – echoing her fatigue with the creative situations she had indulged in the past. “Now you see how easy it could be” she asserts with an almost indifferent aplomb, and then backs her words up by dropping one of the most satisfying drops of the decade.
The tongue-in-cheek slacker synth pop of “dominique” candidly narrated that ‘starving artist’ haze of creative isolation – with Minus living off coffee and liquor in a murky apartment. The song captures Minus being in such neurosis that even the feint buzz of a fridge disrupted her hyperfocus: “I should probably eat something that is not liquor,” she coos with a numbed, deflated intonation. Creating a mildly funny day-in-the-life episode about mental disorder felt simpatico with a time where everyone was experiencing these levels of seclusion.
Where acts of rebellion was audibly conceived from a stationary place, DÍA – both in its premise and overall makeup – has a much more panoramic quality to it. Once Minus finally found a means to spread her wings and soar away, it’s easy imagine the anxiety taking hold: ‘Yay, I’m up here now, but where to go next?’ The 10 tracks that make up DÍA‘s streamlined 33 minutes and 47 seconds channel that volatile orientation honestly, not forcing itself into a deliberate linear sensibility. Geographically as well I might add: over a three year period, Minus crafted the songs in her native Colombia, Seattle, New York, London, Mexico City – and finally – California’s Mojave Desert at various intervals of the creative process.
Concurrently DÍA‘s opening track “ABRIR MONTE” roughly translates to “open the mountains”, alluding to the struggle of opening a new path within a stasis of overwhelming, endless possibility. It feels as no coincidence that this piece of music reminds of “Hyperballad” by Björk. Like on “ABRIR MONTE”, “Hyperballad” employs clattering sounds, like metallic objects falling down some landfill, expressing the stark fatalism behind this perceived freedom. The composition serves as a long-windup for “BROKEN” which employs the full-blown arpeggiated bliss of a Caribou or M83 song, but cuts through it with admissions of disillusionment for flying too close to the sun.
Three years into making the album, Minus initially thought she had things wrapped up, until for whatever reason, the lyrics became more important – meriting at least an additional year to chisel away at what she’s really trying to say. Given “BROKEN”‘s strong contrast between reverie and melancholy, the question remains how radically Minus adjusted her vocals and words once the instrumentation was fully realised. There’s definitely some pretty swift mood shifts here: the earnestness of “BROKEN” vaults into the slippery,The Knife-esque “IDOLS” where the trademark wit pervasive on acts of rebellion (“Bright music for dark times” as said one of Minus’s pink stickers) resurfaces.
Minus’s voice sharply gasps and bites through the center like a machete, as synths scurry around the like distorted bird calls: “It’s a shame it takes pain to know who we really are,” she declares, right before the song marches into a mid-tempo stomp. The song seems to take aim at those who can’t look beyond the skin-deep aesthetics, and how questions of authenticity usually require you to spend more time with a piece of art and music: “Chasing after phantoms / Bowing down to someone else’s idols.” All artists are a combination of a unique synthesis of different influences, and not every similar-sounding work is immediately tribute to something made before. Everyone carves out a different path to get there. And for someone like Minus, who takes pride in not not only being a composer, but also a builder, one can imagine these questions are especially burdensome. And she is not afraid to confess it within the songs themselves.
But to build a compelling structure, one must be aware of what makes up the soil beneath, which is why it’s rather naive to consider the more free-form, beat-less tracks on DÍA merely as connective tissue between more propellent romps like “QQQQ” and “UPWARDS”. “IDK” sounds like an overgrown digital jungle – a howling, piercing synth and textures skittering like bugs on a carcass. The lyrics explores the dark flip side of ego unchecked (“How am I supposed to know which way to go / when I have never heard the word ‘no’?”), and doubt as a vessel for change and progress. “AND”, meanwhile, is a menacing avantgarde-piece where a sub-bass lurks like a predator beneath the surface – another canvas where Minus has free license to experiment with sound design. They are like a primordial soup ripe for more fully-formed song ideas to potentially take shape.
Though DÍA is undeniably an album project, it feels like an honest bid for Ela Minus to show the listener her progress over something fully materialised, even if it means sacrificing the idea of making everything sound like it’s part of the same organism. The advance stream of the album made an implicit point by also listing the album as one long 33-minute track, making sure the listener understood the merit of the transience between the songs – even in all their bold briskness and miscellany. Though the art style of DÍA shows Minus in full color with a rather downcast expression, funnily enough, its contents evoke the cover art of her previous album more aptly: staring at you without flinching, gradually emerging from the dark void. An image yet partly obscured, but one you immediately realise is worth staying for.
