FEATURE: Spotlight: Ela Minus — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Ela Minus

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ONE of the exceptional debut album…

that I almost overlooked this year came from Colombian-born artist, Ela Minus. acts of rebellion was released on 23rd October, and I was aware of her work before the album came out. acts of rebellion is a remarkable album, and one that I have been playing a bit recently. If you have not heard of Ela Minus, then follow her on social media (there are links at the bottom). Her Electronic music switched between quite dreamy and immersive sounds and something more buzzed and hardcore. As a vocalist, I get embers of Lana Del Rey and Grimes, but Minus is very much her own artist. I love what she is putting out, and it will be interesting to see what she released on future albums. I think acts of rebellion has enough to keep Dance and Electronic super-fans happen, but the compositions are quite accessible and you will find yourself coming back to them time and time again. I want to sort of do things backwards and do things differently. I will source from some interviews soon but, as acts of rebellion is quite fresh and has got a lot of praise, I will bring in some reviews first. This is what Pitchfork said when they reviewed the album:

“On the album’s second half, Minus looks inward, and when she draws from life’s everyday scenes her songs become far more nuanced. On “dominique,” she describes a haze of nocturnal living: spending too much time alone, sleeping well into the evening, and surviving on coffee and liquor. Her voice is breathy and light—a timbre she maintains throughout the album, but one particularly suited to the lone narrator wandering through the wee hours.

“The world is made for those who sleep at night,” she speculates over a bittersweet melody that sounds like New Order noir. It’s dance music interested in the loneliness of late-night partying, and Minus tends to the subject with a subtle hand.

acts of rebellion examines the quiet, intimate moments of life as well as concepts that are vast and difficult to convey. Minus approaches both with rich and sophisticated electronic music; it may not be outwardly provocative, but it serves as a place to process initial visions of resistance, those that existed in her private space as she wrote these songs. Perhaps that is a kind of everyday change—acts of rebellion are sometimes dreamt up in your room, but they’re rarely completed there”

In a hugely positive review, NME extolled the talents of Minus and highlighted a few tracks from a truly wonderful album:

“With its anti-capitalist, anti-oppression cause – “we’re afraid we’ll run out of time, to stand up for our right, there’s no way out but fight” – the pounding ‘Megapunk’ is a boots-on-the-ground anthem. It stays true to Ela’s mission to make ‘bright music for dark times’, a mantra she scrawled on her synthesizer case when Donald Trump was elected US President in 2016. Forceful hardware synths and her softly-sung and insistent vocals (“nothing is… impossible”) elevate a seemingly generic slogan into a fierce rallying cry.

‘El Cielo No Es De Nadie’ – which Ela says refers to the Spanish phrase, ‘I’ll give you the sky’ – is just as powerful, though equally danceable thanks to electro buzzes and its infectious hummed chorus. Her music-with-a-mission bangers is particularly timeless, but as Ela put it to NME back in April: “There’s so much shit happening in the world and we all need to act on it”. This debut harnesses the spirit and will to overcome forcefully and with inclusivity.

‘Dominique’, though deceptively soothing, details the perils of being ground down, as her world-weary drive for change takes its toll. “Today, I woke up at 7pm; my brain feels like it’s going to break“, she sighs over juxtaposing dream-like synths. “I haven’t seen anyone in a couple of days“, Ela admits in a rare moment where victory does not seem quite the inevitable outcome”.

I sort of listened to Ela Minus’ music before studying and doing some research. I think that she is a really fascinating artist and, rather than me trying to explore her past and how she got to this point, I am going to take some bits from a couple of interviews that paint more of a picture. As we learn from a very in-depth and amazing interview with Stereogum, music was very much in Ela Minus’ bones very young:

“Born Gabriela Jimeno in Bogotá, her love affair with music started early: First with strains of metal creeping through her older brother’s door and then with drumming in a punk band alongside her childhood friends. For much of Jimeno’s pre-teen and teen years, that band — Ratón Pérez — was the focal point; she and her bandmates all dreamt of going on to study music at Berklee for college. They went as far as playing at SXSW, but then the band dissolved when only two of them got accepted at Berklee. One of them was Jimeno.

Those years in Boston proved transitional and educational, though not always in the academic sense. Jimeno felt out of place within that kind of environment, unable to relate to the competitiveness and/or career goals of her classmates. Two things seemed to salvage that time for her: Becoming a student of the drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, and beginning to go out to clubs around town and dancing to techno. At the same time that Jimeno studied jazz drumming, she double majored in music synthesis. After college, she wound up in Brooklyn — picking up session drumming gigs, playing in an indie band, building synths for a synth company. Things were pretty good, but they weren’t quite right.

I think that acts of rebellion is Minus’ finest work, but she has evolved and built herself as an artist since her earliest days. It is really interesting seeing how Minus’ work has come on and developed. In the interview, she discusses how her E.P.s differ to what she is producing now, in addition to what it was like growing up in Colombia:

Ela Minus began experimenting and figuring out her sound across a couple of EPs. “I remember thinking I was just going to make EPs, because I want to work fast and show my process,” she explains. “Because I have no idea what I’m doing so I want to experiment as I go, without thinking, keeping the honesty of it.” While she’s cited Radiohead and Kraftwerk as formative influences, there was a certain set of contemporary electronic artists she looked to as inspirations: Acts like Caribou, Four Tet, Floating Points, material she describes as “electronic music with heart and soul.”

As Jimeno figured out what Ela Minus could be, that was a north star of sorts. “There’s a place — and it’s a beautiful place — for straight techno songs, but there’s another place for songs,” she says. “On the recording side of it, I think I’m interested in that.” That became the other form of synthesis for Ela Minus, a club environment mixed with songwriting. People took notice; she toured a ton in recent years, and if not for the pandemic would’ve joined Caribou themselves on the road this past spring.

“I think growing up in a place like Colombia, it’s not really a choice to be political,” she reflects. “I don’t know, still, if I would consider my album a political album. I think it’s the album of someone who’s living in 2020 and was writing in 2018.” Acts Of Rebellion, instead, speaks to a personal level of action, a choice to keep moving through the mess of the 21st century and make something out of it. Even if Jimeno’s background means the personal and political are more deeply intertwined than, at least at certain points in semi-recent history, we would’ve regarded them to be in America, the album still fires off in various directions beyond its handful of defiant tracks”.

I want to end by sourcing from Subgenre, as their interview is really interesting. The nature of Minus’ work appeals to me; how she can be quite improvisational but sound so tuned and layered. In the interview, she was asked about her working method - in addition to whether she would be collaborating with others on future releases:

“I feel like a lot of the time as artists, we feed into perfectionism and want to be almost controlling over our work, but you’ve described your process as very improvisational. How did you learn to trust your intuition when making art?

I’m not sure if I learned to trust it, I think I just learned to take chances and remove myself and my fear out of the equation. So, I think that helped a lot.

I really love the cover art for this album. Can you talk me through the process and inspiration behind creating that?

Yeah, absolutely – the idea was that I often share these moments when I’m on stage where I get off the stage and look at people in the eyes and make very direct eye contact, and I wanted to emulate that moment with the cover. And I wanted people to have that moment with them, at home. So I just wanted to be able to look at them directly in the eyes.

With the changing nature of the music industry this year, making collaboration not impossible but certainly much more difficult, have you found that your creative process has changed a lot, or has it always been quite independent?

I think since I started this solo project it has been very independent. Before this, I only – I did it the complete opposite way. Everything I did before was communal, and in bands, and in groups. I actually felt, after making this record, so disconnected from everything. I had wanted to start collaborating more which, as you say, definitely not the right year for that. But yeah, I think there’s a lot of valuable ways of working, and I think even if you get to collaborate with more people the, like, the initial part of it being very personal and very, uh – yourself by yourself. Like, writing the first ideas. It’s still the way I think I would work regardless.

In future do you see yourself continuing this process? You have one collaboration on the album – do you see that increasing? Or how do you see that changing in the future?

Yeah well, I think more so, more than anything, I’m very happy that now I have, I feel like I’ve found more my kind of people if that makes sense. Having found Domino and the community around it, I’ve definitely been able to reach people that I think I would love to collaborate with so I definitely see that increasing. Also I’ve been very focused in getting to the bottom of what I can do with very limited resources, like with very limited machines and synths and just myself, and I really wanted to push the limits of how far I could go by myself before I could reach out to other people and other synthesisers also. And I think I’ve reached that point where I know myself enough to know what I can bring to the table and what I can’t, and I think that makes collaborations even better, you know. Because they’re truly you looking for something that you know you don’t have out of a creative idea and not out of, like, a lack of ideas, you know? Or like, not because you’re missing something but because you wanna, uh, you want something that someone else has specifically. And I think that’s the way to do it. So definitely increasing”.

Go and investigate Ela Minus and the acts of rebellion album. It is an incredible work, and one that hooked me in when I first heard it. I hope that she puts out more music very soon, as one can feel lifted and rejuvenated by listening to Minus; there is also a more relaxed tone in places that eases and cools you. I think she will be a big star of the future so, for that reason, make sure Ela Minus is…