The Nomadic Confessions of Ela Minus

In 2020, Ela Minus found herself unable to afford her rent. The Colombian producer and songwriter had been living in New York City for several years, making music and building synthesizers for the boutique instrument maker Critter & Guitari, but staying put had become too expensive. Instead of establishing roots in a more affordable locale, Minus began traveling around without a permanent base, booking a week here or a month there. She spent time in CDMX and in the mountains of México, back home in Bogotá, out in London, roaming with her rack of synthesizers and drum machines in tow. 

Minus had no plan, but her nomadic lifestyle seemed to inspire her production and songwriting. “There's something to be said about being a female, going it alone, and having the tools to allow me to make whatever I want,” she tells me on a video call from Mexico City. “Because then I can go deeper, without thinking about anybody else’s opinion.” She began polishing her sense of melody and developing more complex compositions than the ones she offered on Acts of Rebellion, her rousing 2020 debut album on Domino Records. Minus had promised herself she would sing more, so she created a mellifluous universe of techno and pop melodies for Día, her second album. After working for awhile in Los Angeles, she figured Día was complete and booked a week in a Seattle apartment right off the Puget Sound. She’d been there before, and she knew its beauty would give her some perspective .

Looking out onto the Pacific inlet and at the mountains above her, she realized that there was a block between her and what she really needed to say. “I listened back to the demos, and I was like, This is a front,” she says. “Not consciously, but I was using my go-tos, which is what I did on the first record, where it was just kind of level-one lyrics. I was feeling way more things that I realized I wasn't singing about yet.”

Minus and I met for the first time in September, at Domino Records’ Brooklyn office, a few days after a show in New York where she played the bulk of Día. Its major-key arpeggios made the cavernous Knockdown Center feel like it was about to achieve liftoff, and the delicate ascension of her singing voice echoed like a satellite beaming missives to the sky. Four months before its release, almost no one knew the songs, yet her performance had the techno-inclined crowd in a trance. She wore a black tulle skirt and stood with her back to the audience, projecting her face onto a screen behind her as she played her synth rack; when she turned to sing, she mostly faced the side of the stage, perpendicular to the crowd. Her mesmerizing live performance, she told me then, was inspired by “tapping into that teenage girl who went to a really good show and my life was changed forever.”

When we speak again over Zoom in January, a few days before Día’s release, Minus seems settled, at least for the moment, in a white-walled Mexico City apartment. Synths and an upright piano surround her; high-altitude light streams in from a window onto her BOOKS ballcap, from the Brooklyn bookstore Books Are Magic. “It looks like I'm very settled because all my gear is set up,” she says, but that’s only because she’s been rehearsing for a months-long tour that will take her across four continents. “It's like, very minimal. I have nothing.”

Acts of Rebellion was a politically charged work, with Minus’s muted electro curling around English and Spanish lyrics about feminist protest (“Megapunk”) and artistic defiance (“They Told Us It Was Hard, But They Were Wrong”). She started her touring career in the early 2000s as the tween drummer in the Bogotá punk band Ratón Perez, and studied jazz drumming and electronic production at Berklee College of Music. For her, singing had been just another tool, like her MPC or her Pocket Piano—a “utilitarian way of giving more humanity to my music,” she says. 

On Día, Minus “decided to take responsibility for the fact that I’m singing” and built up her voice, which soars between resolute alto and misty soprano, like she’s giving herself over to the siren call. In Seattle, she dumped all her lyrics and began anew, feeling compelled to voice how fucked up everything is now. Starting over was freeing, even therapeutic. “Si va a ser así/Que se acabe el mundo,” she sings in a distorted snap on “QQQQ,” with a sharp pitch-shifter and bass march thumping her on. If it’s gonna be like this, let the world end. She still gets choked up when she sings Día live.

“I've never done therapy, but I found a lot of similarities with how I was dealing with myself while making the record, where I was like, Okay, I sang this sentence. Where did this come from? Why am I feeling this way?” she says. “I realized that I'm kind of a fixer, like a very optimistic person, and whenever there's a problem, I'm like, It's fine, we're gonna fix it this way. That was my way of writing lyrics—trying to be comforting always, never speak the truth or talk about anything difficult, just being like, Yeah, everything's fucked up, but it’s gonna be okay, guys. Whereas this time I tapped into the discomfort and the realization that I have no answers, and I honestly don't know if it's gonna be okay.” 

Minus is soft-spoken and thoughtful. You can tell she’s used to spending hours and days on end by herself, just programming sequences. But she remembers a time, right after she got signed by Domino in 2019, that she got swept up in the vagaries of the industry—meeting famous musicians, going to parties, basking in new attention—and it “went to my head a bit,” she admits. Her perspective shifted, though, when one day she woke up in the hospital; her last memory was from days earlier, at an 8 p.m. party in London where she had been sipping on a beer. Minus rarely drinks, and has never done other substances—“I was in a hardcore band”—but she realized she had been drugged. 

She was “physically okay,” she says, but the experience shook her out of the industry’s false dazzlement, and its systemic devaluing of women. “It really made me question everything and see that world through a different lens. I realized, What am I doing? I don't care about any of these things.” She wrote Día’s unsettling third track, “Idols,” through that lens, letting its raft of darkwave synths fall away for her anguished chorus: “Chasing after phantoms/Bowing down to someone else’s idols.” 

Minus may have embraced existential skepticism in the writing of Día, but hope still hovers across its alluring synth textures. “Broken” captures a crisis of faith set against a twinkling crescendo of synths; “I Want to Be Better” is a dance anthem about personal failure that sounds like gleaming stalactites in a dank cave. She offers an optimistic denouement on final track “Combat,” a melancholy lullaby about maintaining the fortitude to fight back against your oppressors. “Los pájaros nacidos en jaula, no le tenemos miedo a nada,” she coos—birds born in cages aren’t scared of anything. She sings the mantra “De no parar hasta quemarlo todo” over a deep chord, then abridges it for the album’s final words: “De no parar.” We’re not stopping until everything is burned… not stopping. It works as an indictment of the world’s most destructive powers—those that foster war, inequity, the climate crisis—until that last line, urging the underdog never to back down.

It’s understandable why Minus considers writing Día a form of therapy; it can be terrifying to strip away that block between your art and the truth. But it’s revealing, too, and her unflinching inward look has made Día more powerful, the kind of album that reflects back your own humanity and reminds you never to sublimate it. “It feels like the entire record is this kind of acceptance that everything is over, but I really don't think it's a pessimistic album at all,” she says. “It's a very realistic album.” 

Part of Día’s inherent optimism lies in the way Minus made it: That is, from scratch, with her own hands on every granular detail of songwriting and production, down to the very design of her synthesizers. It isn’t just perfectionism; it’s determination, in a world of corporate homogeny, to express something human. “It's completely handmade—like a macaroni necklace, and I made the macaroni from scratch, and I made the string,” she laughs. “It took me a year to make this all for you, and it was taxing, too. Sometimes I think, Why am I doing this? Like, why am I doing the macaroni from scratch, when I can just go buy it in the store? But it’s worth it.”