Ela Minus interview – “It’s by far the most inward looking record I’ve ever made”
The Minus who’s a big plus
“It’s more for you to find the right words than me,” says Ela Minus, lightly laughing at her own cheekiness as she says it to us.
The young Colombian producer and songwriter is quite right, of course. Music is her purest form of expression rather than being an interviewee – it’s down to us writers to put it all into concrete sentences and prose.
It was our suggestion that her just released DÍA album, her second, contained an element of “self-examination” that elicited the comment. As well as being a fantastic showcase for her stirring synthpop sound, songs like ‘I Want To Be Better’ and ‘Upwards’ are also among her most honest and candidly personal work yet.
She doesn’t deny it, but nor does she concur completely.
“I shy away from words that start with self,” she tells us. “All my life I’ve been trying to make music that’s not egocentric, that’s not about me. But at the same time, I understand that the deeper I go within myself the deeper I can connect with other human beings. So it’s by far the most inward looking record I’ve ever made, that looks inside of me, yes.”
Minus is staying in East Williamsburg in the New York borough of Brooklyn, and inhabiting a rather curious space. She’s staying in the building she called home for seven years – but in a different flat, staying with a neighbour.
“It’s my old neighbourhood so it’s very surreal, as I used to live here for seven years, in this building – so it’s the same but it’s not my apartment.”
New York is the place that feels the most like home, after her native Bogotá of course. She’s just done her first show in the Colombian capital since 2022, a truly emotional experience. “It was incredible,” “I’ve never felt so much love as I did in that room that night.
A launch for the album, it was held in the city’s planetarium no less. “It was the first time I’ve done anything like that I Bogotá – I want to bring music into different spaces.”
Landing five years on from her debut Acts of Rebellion, DÍA was made in multiple locations across several continents in fact, from Colombia and Mexico to New York and LA and numerous other locations in Europe. Not at all by design, she hastens to add.
“It was completely out of necessity. I couldn’t afford rent in New York any more, at the beginning of 2021, so I went back to Columbia for a little bit, but I didn’t have the mindspace to decide where I wanted to move to permanently. 2021 and 2022 were weird – shows kept getting confirmed and then cancelled then confirmed again. It was very difficult to plan. I wanted to move to London but I couldn’t get on a plane because there were no planes, it was a very weird time.
“So then I decided to prioritise making music rather than prioritising where I wanted to live. So I had to go to studios I could use, either places owned by the label or places where I had friends with studios I could borrow.”
Does the enivornment – or in this case, environments – seep into the record at any point, or was she simply locked into the task wherever she was?
“I was very focused on what I was doing,” she says, “but I think inevitably I think the outside world got into the record. I think it’s inevitable, you know. So both. The first track (‘Abrir Monte’) I made literally in the middle of nowhere in Northern Mexico – it was just this cabin, nothing else, just nature. It feels like nature to me. To me it sounds like the birds, the insects, the sound of the night in the countryside.
By way of contrast, the song ‘Onwards’ was written during the first week of Coachella – “a little bit live” she says, explaining that new songs often emerge from the improvised interludes between songs in her live sets.
“Being at Coachella is what that song sounds like to me,” she continues, “I guess to be fair it was a very specific time – it was the first or second festival I’d done after not doing shows for so long so it was intense. Just the scale of it all was intimidating. It’s a lot of things, good and bad, combined into one big monster. So rather than putting it into words, that song has the emotions and things I was feeling in it. I mean, it’s crazy. You’re in the middle of the desert and then you come across this idyllic place.”
The album is very much a one woman affair, from the songwriting and production down to the singing and lyrics. No wonder, then, that she’s inundated with requests about production on her Forthebirds.xyz platform, a website which she’s created to connect with her fans about anything they want to chat about, and share the results with the public.
“It’s been really moving to be honest, to see it, to read the letters. It’s been really inspiring. To be completely honest, there’s a lot of questions about production, much more than I was expecting. Like a lot of very technical questions. Which is a surprise to me. But I think there’s something about the fact that I do everything on my own, and the fact that I’m a woman, that means people feel they can ask me. There’s a lot of that – 70% maybe – and then everything else, you know… Existential questions to everyday life.”
Perhaps she shouldn’t be that surprised, given that her pedigree includes a stint working for a small synth company in Bogotá. She admits she very much the kind of musician who’s happy to get her soldering iron out and take the back off her equipment for a bit of quick modification. She even helped to build a synth and amp for Jack White as part of a strictly limited record release the White Stripes man planned.
Did she get to meet him? “No,” she says, “but there were only four of us working in the company at the time, so I got to see all the emails.”
Never mind, we venture. After an extensive European jaunt this Spring in support of Caribou, including three nights at London’s historic Roundhouse, we foresee a highly busy summer of festival action for her. At some point, we reckon, she’ll find herself face to face with White somewhere backstage pretty soon. And when she does, she’s got the perfect reason to chat to him and point out her role in that highly desirable release.
“Yes,” she laughs in conclusion, “that’ll definitely be a good ice breaker!”
Ben Willmott
To buy your vinyl copy of DÍA by Ela Minus, out now on Domino, click here