Permanent Rotation: Ela Minus

Permanent Rotation is a series in which producers, DJs, and musicians go deep on the albums that have inspired them.

Ela Minus is a Colombian singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer. On stage, she is a triple threat; singing, dancing and playing synthesisers, many of which she has custom-built. The recent tour for her acclaimed second album, DÍA took in parts of the UK, Europe, the US and Latin America, supporting Caribou, playing her own headline shows and performing at festivals.

The album that has inspired her most is a double LP: Piedras 1 & 2 by Nicolás Jaar. In the fellow Latin American innovator (Jaar is Chilean-American), Minus found an artist who is not only technically brilliant and prodigiously creative, but someone who is unafraid to speak up about the things that matter.

Ela Minus remembers the first time she saw Nicolas Jaar playing live. It was in New York, in 2016, and he’d just released Sirens. He was playing the saxophone in the idiosyncratic way he’s become known for — “he treats that sax as if he’s never even heard a sax player,” is how one Redditor described it — his rarefied talent radiating from the stage. “I loved it so much,” says Minus of the show. “It really marked me.” 

Upon reading up on Jaar, Minus was also struck by how he seemed to be handling the non-creative aspects of his career. He’d taken the electronic music world by storm five years earlier with the release of his debut LP space is only noise, and subsequent Essential Mix for BBC Radio 1, an entry still spoken about in hallowed terms fifteen years later. But, in a move at odds with most ascendant artists, Jaar had made the decision to do away with a manager, and was never interested in courting major labels. He founded his own Other People label in 2013. “Everything he did just seemed so inspiring to me,” recalls Minus. 

Last year, a 24-channel installation of Nicolas Jaar’s radio play Archivos de Radio Piedras was on display at the University Museum of Mexico City (MUAC), and Minus went to see it before heading to a Jaar concert the same night, where he performed music from the play live for the first time. “As soon as I saw the entire show and the spoken parts from Piedras and the words about Palestine and so much politics that were so straightforward, I was like, finally,’ Minus says. 

“It just felt so refreshing to see someone stand up for something…his presence and everything he was saying and the music.. he means something, it has weight, and you can feel that.”

Minus’ own work is a combination of the personal and the political, and a fusion of the diverse musical influences she’s absorbed from an early age. Born in Bogotá, Colombia, by 12, Minus was a drummer in a hardcore rock band that toured the country. After graduating from high school, she won a scholarship to study jazz drumming at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where her interest in electronic music deepened simultaneously, leading her to add a major in music synthesis to her degree.

Soon she’d be building her own synthesisers and developing her nascent sound, whimsical and buoyant on her first two EPs before settling into something more tense and prickly on her 2020 debut LP, acts of rebellion. Its oppressive atmospherics unintentionally mirrored pandemic-era entrapment and introversion while also inviting listeners to gaze beyond their navels. 

“I do hope this album serves as an invitation to act, to question your everyday actions and make decisions based on not only what is good for you but what is good for the people around you, even for those you don’t know, and for the planet,” she told The Creative Independent in 2020. 

On the aptly named DÍA, released early this year, it sounded as though Minus had emerged from a claustrophobic bunker into the daylight. Her songs took on an expansive, panoramic quality as she transmuted personal lessons absorbed over the past few years into euphoria fit for communal consumption.  

To listen to it, Jaar is not an obvious influence in Minus’s work, but she cites his “special ear for melody” as a source of inspiration, as well as the unhurried pace of his productions, eschewing pedestrian builds and drops in favour of incremental progressions that are nonetheless impactful. Two tracks from Piedras 1 and 2 [the collection of music from his radio play] stand out as favourites to her: “Aquí” and “El Azar”.

“I just really love the lyrics,” she says of Aquí. “I think he hits the nail on the head with this idea, I think about all the time, both inwardly and outwardly: what does it mean to be from a place?”

“El Azar” is Spanish for chance or fate, however, Minus says the lyrics translate more closely to the concept of randomness, particularly the notion that randomness is not something that exists in computers. “I resonate with that idea a lot, the idea of staying away from computers because they can’t really achieve randomness,” says Minus, who regularly detoxes from technology (apart from her synthesisers) to achieve a calmer state of mind. 

On Minus’ own Essential Mix, broadcast in January this year, she included three Nicolas Jaar tracks, including “El Azar”. “I love starting with his tracks, because I think it sets exactly the mood that I want to create,” she says. “I tend to use them as intros and outros or transitions, and I’ll often include Against All Logic [a Jaar alias] tracks in my sets too.”

Music aside, what’s always impressed Minus most about Jaar is his fearlessness in expressing his politics in his art and on the stage, as seen on the current tour with his band Darkside, where Jaar has been advocating for Palestine in between songs. “When you’re in the audience and you see someone and their existence stands for something, I think the music sounds better, everything is just so much more powerful,” Minus says.

Making good music and performing it well is still crucial, obviously, but it’s also about the sum of your presence. “It’s so much about who I am today, all the decisions I make and what I stand for, that’s what’s standing on the stage,” she says. “That’s why I admire him so much as an artist.”