Ela Minus Loves Her Tiny Wooden Synthesizer
The Colombian songwriter, producer, and synthesizer designer talks about the Pocket Piano, a piece of gear she likes so much she named a song after it.
Gear Me is a column in which we ask some of our favorite musicians about the racks, stacks, and instruments they love best.
At one point during Ela Minus’s set at Brooklyn’s Knockdown Center in late September, the Colombian singer and producer’s hypnotic pop-techno made it feel like time had turned inside out. The lineup was stacked—Nourished By Time, Sofia Kourtesis, a Yaeji DJ set—but for 45 minutes the stage was Minus’ own intimate universe. She stood with her back to the audience, so that her giant rack of gear faced the crowd, while a camera projected her face in staticky black-and-white on the screen at the back of the stage. She looked like the tulle-swathed captain of a thumping holodeck.
With a set-up that solved an age-old problem—how to entertain an audience while you’re twiddling with knobs, so to speak—Minus performed a set of elegantly mind-altering songs from her forthcoming second album, Dia (out in January on Domino Records), that almost no one knew. The audience was mesmerized anyway. “Broken,” the first single from Dia, sounded like careening through a sparkly wormhole.
A few days after the show, Minus and I met at Domino’s cavernous Brooklyn office, where I asked her about bridging the gap between emotionally connecting with the audience and focusing on her instruments. “The way I play live, every decision I’ve made, comes from tapping into that teenage girl that went to a really good show and my life was changed forever,” she said. “Every decision I’ve made comes from that intuition of, ‘How do I make myself feel that magic that we all feel when we go to a show?’”
The gear is integral to the magic. Minus was first drawn to electronic sounds as a student at Berklee College of Music, and later got a job designing synthesizers for the boutique instrument company Critter & Guitari. I was curious about the heavy-looking synths she was carting around, but her favorite was a palm-sized and button-covered wooden one called the Pocket Piano, which she likes so much she wrote a song about it (“Pocket Piano,” from her debut album Acts of Rebellion). When she first handed it to me, I had no idea what to do with it, but she let me mess around and, as someone who can make my way around the 88 keys, I can confirm—though it doesn’t look much like a piano, it does play like one.
Below, Ela Minus demonstrates the power of the Pocket Piano.
So, what’s your gear?
This is called a Pocket Piano. I don’t know if you know about the Pocket Piano?
I do know about the Pocket Piano, thanks to your song.
I built this one myself. I don’t really work for this company anymore, but they’re like my family. This specific model is older. They don’t make it anymore. Their new pocket pianos are more—“technological,” is the grandmother way to say it. They’re more advanced. But this one is super simple. Even though I have all of the new ones, this is the one I use live. I improvise a lot with it, precisely because it doesn’t look like a piano.
Did you also invent this?
No, but I designed the Organelle, one of the newer ones. It was really hard for me, because the original is the coolest thing ever, because of how simple and unpretentious it is. So it was hard for me to help design a better version of it, because I feel like it was perfect. I do use the Organelle a lot in the studio, but live, the original is just like—maybe it’s an emotional thing because I’ve used it for so long.
What draws you to an instrument like this? Is it the hands-on aspect?
When I was at Berklee, I was studying drums and music synthesis, and everybody was making electronic music on laptops. I was also doing a minor in coding, and my ear got really used to recognizing the sound of laptops. That made the experience of going to shows like ugh, a fucking laptop! Not visually, I could hear it. It all sounded the same. I was like, maybe hardware is more where I gravitate. There are so many beautiful and interesting machines.
Somebody gave me the Pocket Piano as a birthday present. It’s beautiful, and it does not look like a piano or any other synth. And that immediately makes me play music differently, because I’m not seeing white and black keys. My hands have to physically be in a different shape, so I don’t go to the typical chords I would usually play.
When you saw it, you were like, “What the fuck is this?” But I also feel like it’s so immediately musical that anybody can play something. When I got it, I thought, This is amazing because a kid could play it and make something musical. I was obsessed with it. I sent them an email as a fan, and that somehow turned into a job, eventually.
Basically every time I’m improvising live—a lot of it comes from how I still, even after so many years, get surprised at what comes out of this thing when I’m playing it. I’m just like, Oh, my God, this is so beautiful. Even though I have expanded my synth vocabulary to so many more complicated synthesizers, I always keep coming back to this because of the musicality, the portability, and how everything I play with it turns into something I like.
