As the sun set on day three of Womadelaide, under the bat colony at Tainmuntilla (Botanic Park), the audience were in a trance. The Brooklyn-based Colombian musician Ela Minus mixed her voice with synthesisers, prompting a roar from the crowd; strobe lighting pulsed over the moving mass of bodies. The surrounding pine trees somehow seemed to make the reverb echo even stronger, lifting us up through the canopy to the open stars above.
Minus’s music is complex and expansive, pop music meets house. We were all hypnotised, dancing as one, slick with a day’s worth of sunblock and sweat. Her 45-minute set was over too fast: a set so good it sent me into a stupor for two hours, aimlessly wandering in search of something that could possibly continue the high.
