This week’s four albums push that principle to a new limit as they hop between sounds and subgenres. Even as every piece of an arrangement seems to mutate over the course of a few minutes, you absolutely feel that a singular personality is driving the action. As the music video squashed and stretched Arca without ever moving her from the center of the frame, it drove home how the key to her art is, counterintuitively, constancy. The standout track, “ Mequetrefe,” subjected playful keyboards to fluttering sound effects, making the listener feel as though they were watching a fancy toucan survive a windstorm. She herself was on that album’s cover (sporting claws and stilts), the guests were splashy (Björk and Rosalía howling), and the songs were catchy (but still scary). The albums are sequels to Arca’s 2020 release, KiCk i, which announced a new, poppier phase for the artist. Despite stretches likely to bore or bug, the best parts demand an obsessive level of replay. Yet these albums include some of Arca’s most accessible and delectable work. That sheer volume feels like a provocation, on top of all the others: robot voices stammering about gore and sex, beats that thunder like garbage trucks over potholes, chords that evoke bruised fruit in their ugliness and allure. The joke captures a feeling vital to the evolution of art: pride in dissonance, pride in difference.įour new albums of often breathtaking music arrived this week from Arca, totaling about two and a half hours of listening time. The answer is “Whip,” by Arca, and as the song’s violent sound effects slam in, the subject of the TikTok starts sashaying, as if to Missy Elliott. In a recent TikTok with more than half a million views, someone is asked what they’re listening to on their headphones. You’ll encounter stans whose worshipfulness is more typical of Taylor Swift listeners than the followers of radical sound designers.
Trawl around social media-especially circles where pop, queerness, or fashion is emphasized-and you’ll run into Arca’s name and image pretty often. Yet over the years, a funny thing has happened. I found her first three solo albums-2014’s Xen, 2015’s Mutant, and 2017’s Arca-to be, in a word, terrifying. Her melodies have the quality of summoning spells. She sculpts sound so that it seems to enter the listener from their gut rather than their ears. Both in collaborations and in her own material, Arca’s style is not subtle. She produced songs on Kanye West’s 2013 album, Yeezus, and went on to make pivotal contributions to the work of FKA Twigs and Björk. If in the past decade you’ve encountered music in which earthquakes of electro noise overtake all else, it may have been Arca’s doing.
Many experimental artists labor in obscurity, but some gain prominence by creating music whose enjoyment feels like deciphering the code to one’s own identity. Yet the deeper link to Aphex Twin is in how her music makes me, and clearly many other people, feel. The music of Arca, the 32-year-old Venezuelan named Alejandra Ghersi, includes a similar blend of twisted rhythms, luminous synths, and lurid vibes. But I did love the feeling of escaping a suburban machismo competition for what felt like a rave in another reality. Staring at James’s creepy grin on the album art, I didn’t know if I loved all of what I was listening to. His music was disorienting and intriguing and generally inexplicable. James arranged electronic beats in complex designs that stimulated both hypnosis and hyperawareness. Some of those solitary moments were spent listening to Aphex Twin, the influential British electronic musician I, as a budding snob, had read about on the internet.
I tended to get eliminated early from matches, head to the car, and encase myself in the headphones of my portable CD player.
I did not love the pathetic feeling of missing all my shots. I participated, but I did not love the rude thwack of colorful projectiles exploding on my helmet. That memory is from adolescence, when my group of male friends would spend whole days playing at a paintball course on the military base near where we lived. Something about listening to Arca, arguably the most important experimental musician working today, reminds me of sitting in a hot car to avoid getting hit by fake bullets.