Ela Minus
DÍA

LA RECENSIONE

One of the most surprising lessons I had as a child was how ice could be so cold that it burns: in my mind, this had to be an antinomy. With DÍA by Ela Minus, something similar happened to me, but the other way around: DÍA has all the characteristics to seem like an electronic album coming from Ny-Ålesund (the northernmost location in the world in the Svalbard Islands) and instead it is the work of Colombian Gabriela Jimeno.

Tearing away the veil behind which she hides, Ela Minus is the solo project of New York-based producer and author Gabriela Jimeno, but the surprises do not end here! Despite the purely electro-pop matrix of her songs, Gabriela grew up with punk (traces of which remain in the social themes of some tracks) and heavy metal, musical genres in which she engaged by playing drums as a teenager.

After moving to the USA to attend the Berklee College of Music (majoring in jazz drumming), the revelation came on the way to Boston when clubbing and synthesizers converted her to electronics; so much so that she added a specialization in synthesizer design to her studies. Her resume even includes an experience at Critter & Guitari, a musical instruments and synthesizers company in Brooklyn.

The result is that Gabriela composes and performs all her material on self-assembled hardware, and this gives her music a concreteness that is difficult to achieve with virtual instrumentation.

DÍA is her second album, following the 2020 debut Acts of Rebellion, both released under Domino Records (although the sound very much recalls Ninja Tunes or Morr Music).

The surprising thing about Ela is that she manages to combine songwriter-style writing, featuring personal lyrics that lay her soul bare, with colorful and captivating producer bases alternating synth-pop, techno, noise, and electro-pop; with allusions no less than to Bjork and Radiohead.