Helado Negro

Tour Dates

As Helado Negro, Roberto Carlos Lange stitches together memories, impressions, and atmospheres to make detailed dreamscapes. His songs are awash with vibrant melodies, sharp lyrical vignettes, and subtle, even whispered hooks. Born in South Florida in 1980 to Ecuadorian immigrant parents, Lange switches seamlessly between English and Spanish in his lyrics—you’re so seduced by the melodies that it can, at times, it can take a few beats to notice. His compositions are both intimate and ready to soundtrack a packed club. They’re songs about himself and the world at the same time. It’s music to listen to while disappearing into the horizon line, private offerings to family and friends, and ecstatic audio recordings of the world. Lange transforms space. 

Since his 2009 debut, Awe Owe, across multiple projects and collaborations, through his breakthrough records, 2016’s Private Energy and 2019’s This Is How You Smile, and to 2021’s Far In, Lange’s work continues to move past easy genre assignments. No matter what he explores sonically, though, he has held to a central core: The daily sounds of his childhood and earliest surroundings and, as an adult, his day-to-day life, whether living in Brooklyn, a Texas arts community, or his current home of Asheville, North Carolina. 

Lange has a degree in Computer Art and Animation from Savannah College of Art and Design and works extensively with video, sculpture, sound, and performance. He brings that toolbox to whatever he makes, and there’s a seeming effortlessness to the complexity. He produces, engineers, and mixes his own songs, literally creating and populating his own sonic world. For example, Phasor his eighth album as Helado Negro features guest percussionists and other contributors amid dozens of instruments and outboard effects and processors all piloted by Lange, who remains, as always, calmly at the center. It’s pop music filtered through a window fan, or a warm breeze drifting through the Blue Ridge.