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.
