The Frequency Kelela Works In

Her 2013 EP Hallucinogen already made the case: Kelela operates in a register just to the left of contemporary R&B, where the production is cold and abstract and the vocals carry everything warm. It was a revelation in the literal sense—not something new so much as something that felt like it had always been true and nobody had found the right sound for it yet.

Take Me Apart, her first full album, extended that logic across a full record. She talked about weaving it like a carpet: things that will appeal to very different listeners and challenge them at the same time—often both within a single song. That’s a precise description of what the album actually does. It doesn’t resolve. It holds opposing feelings in suspension and leaves them there.

She brought Take Me Apart to Berghain in Berlin that December, which in retrospect was the obvious fit. The venue’s mythology usually gets in the way of describing what actually happens there, but sometimes the space and the music find each other and the mythology becomes accurate. Kelela’s work is layered, oscillating, reaching back into the history of R&B and forward into something harder to name—and Berghain is just a room full of people who’ve dropped the pretense of not wanting anything. The sound in that space was exactly what I’d expected and then a little more than I’d accounted for.