Ela Minus: acts of rebellion | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- acts of rebellion is the debut full-length album from Colombian born, New York based synth artist Ela Minus. “Bright music for dark times” is her mission statement, a message she scrawled on her keyboard after the election of Donald Trump four years ago. The liner notes of the record elaborate, saying it “is a collection about the personal as political and embracing the beauty of tiny acts of revolution in our everyday lives.”

The lyrics are a bit more cryptic, her short clipped phrases in both Spanish and English rarely enunciating exactly what we should be rebelling against or how to do it. Megapunk, the most overtly political track, mixes the defiant chorus of “You won’t make us stop” with verses that are a bit more circumspect - singing “We can’t seem to find a reason to stay quiet/We’re afraid we’ll run out of time to stand up for our rights”.

Megapunk is also the heaviest moment on acts of rebellion, with its synth drones and clattering drum machines. Most of the album is light and minimal, Ela almost whispering over carefully layered synths. Despite her relentlessly black and white visual aesthetic and machine oriented instrumentation, it is a warm and gentle record - interspersed with ambient instrumental tracks, and opening quite beautifully with a human breath juxtaposed against the similar sounding whirr of a machine.

Ela Minus’ dedication to analog synthesizers gives acts of rebellion a very retro feeling, conjuring the early synth music of the 70’s - Kraftwerk of course, but also UK synth acts like The Normal and early Human League. At times it also reminds me of the short-lived electroclash genre that came out of Ela’s home of New York in the early 2000s.

Interestingly, these two eras of music are also examples of the way making music can be intrinsically political. The DIY possibilities of both bedroom synth compositions and newly formed independent label networks reshaped the economic base of pop music in the late 70’s, opening up new possibilities for everyday people making uncommercial or experimental music. And electroclash came at a time when clubbing in New York was genuinely under threat - Mayor Rudolf Giuliani used archaic laws to actually shut down nightclubs for the crime of having patrons dance. Making club music at the time was an act of civil disobedience, though listening to those electro-clash songs now they don’t sound very political.

So Ela Minus is correct to remind us of the value of “tiny acts of rebellion in our everyday lives”. The question does remain though whether those tiny acts are enough - when we face imminent ecological crisis, when the US for all its wealth and power has proved spectacularly unable to handle a public health crisis, when fractures in society threaten the ability of a mass movement to create lasting change. We will find out this week whether four years of musicians speaking out against Trump can sufficiently affect the ballot box.

Still, there’s no formula for changing the world. Tiny acts of rebellion are definitely better than apathy or defeatism. Ela Minus’ gentle synth-pop is a reminder that humans on machines can still create something warm and hopeful - like the scrap of pink tape lighting up her black and white album cover, she can find a touch of brightness for dark times.

- Andy Paine.
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=4206945663/size=large/bgcol=f…; seamless><a href="https://elaminus.bandcamp.com/album/acts-of-rebellion">acts of rebellion by ela minus</a></iframe>