Arca

Arca, the project of New York-based and later London-based Venezuelan-born producer Alejandro Ghersi, debuted with the mixtape Baron Foyel (2011) and with three EPs that ranked among the most original revisions of the hip-hop canon of the decade. The four-song EP Baron Libre (Uno, 2012) has a manifesto of sorts, Covenant, that shows how Ghersi can blend (non-rapping) vocals, electronics and beats into organic extraterrestrial beings. By making those elements even murkier and more fluid, he obtains the industrial psychedelic horror atmosphere of Is This Love. The seven-minute dub-hop fantasia Spira is basically a demo of the many facets of experimentation that Ghersi would pursue in the next few recordings. The six-song EP Stretch 1 (2012) was less shocking. First of all, the vocals lean towards a more traditional rapping style, and, secondly, the audio collage is more restrained. The eight-song EP Stretch 2 (Subtrahendonist, 2012) fared better as Arca returned to supernatural electronic vocal music such as Fortune and Strung. It also featured some horrendously deformed songs, evoking psychedelic or at least psychoanalytic trip, such as Maiden Voyage and Broke Up. The closing pieces point in different, almost antithetic, directions: Meditation is almost "musique concrete" infected by industrial music, whereas the melodic and exotic Manners winks at evocative themes of film soundtracks. The 25-minute mixtape &&&&& (2013) is divided into 14 brief pieces that explore a plethora of styles. Knot is anchored to a melodic theme that sounds like a hybrid of Bach and Middle-eastern pop. Arca's trademark vocal games permeate pieces such as Fossil And then there are enigmatic Brian Eno-esque vignettes and (Anaesthetic) and at least one comic Todd Rundgren-esque skit (Coin). There are tortured beatscapes and more of his favorite hallucinogenic atmospheres. And, last but not least, the melancholy closing carillon of Obelisk. Too bad that each piece is only a fragment of an idea.

The first official album, Xen (Mute, 2014), covers an even broader range of formats. The twisted eclectic ambitions are well summarized by opener Now You Know, whose synths paint pomp and suspense over spastic beats. That is almost the peak of intensity. The only moments that get close to a violent feeling are the haunting disjointed flickering cubistic collage of Xen and the swirling industrial dance of Bullet Chained. There is, in fact, an opposite drift at work, heralded by the piano sonata Held Apart and fully expressed by the album's standout Sisters, which is almost a neoclassical singalong. But the neoclassical tension of Wound never coalesces and Family Violence is torn between shrieking violins and pulsating cellos, two pieces that are emblematic of Arca's tendency not to reach a conclusion. On the lighter front, the album boasts the stuttering, chopped-up tv theme of Thievery, as well as more trivial melodic ditties such as Slit Thru and especially Lonely Thugg. Somewhere in the lighter repertory one must also fit the surreal Fish, that sounds like a fractured remix of Enya fronting a Caribbean combo. The limit of this highly creative music, again, is that it is so fragmented (even within each song). There is a chronic inability to reach closure, but then, maybe, this is precisely Arca's point.

Mutant (Mute, 2015) does not match the brutal pathos of Xen even if its claustrophobic electronic chatter has been refined. The exuberant first half of Alive is a catchy pop tune scientifically vivisected in thousands of small parts, each a simple click. Mutant is a peak of audio expressionism, a seven-minute collage of abstract "musique concrete" that at the very end magically spawns a sort of romantic melody. En emits asthmatic drones to a chain reaction of videogame impulses. Soichiro is a savage maelstrom of stammering organ phrases, mauled vocals and factory noise, that, after a surreal break of Bach-ian organ solo, resumes the free fall into the black hole. Front Load is a syncopated dance of androids mumbling muffled lullabies. There are melodies. One just has to discover them. Vanity is the best one, a sonata for detuned xylophone in the middle of a nuclear explosion. This 20-song album contains too many unfinished pieces. It should have been a six-song EP.

The new mixtape was the 25-minute piece of Entranas (2016), largely a gratuitous improvisation.

Arca's masterpiece of this period, however, was his production work for Bjork's Vulnicura (2015).

Bjork's influence may have played a role in deciding to impersonate a singer-songwriter on Arca (XL, 2017). The result is disappointing. His lied for slow croon and spare electronics Piel is inspired by liturgical music, but the same idea applied to the ballad Anoche or to the house beat in Desafio backfires badly. Sin Rumbo indulges in operatic excesses of this kind of catatonic crooning. Luckily, Reverie, also crooned al crawling tempo but reminiscent of court music of the Renaissance, is bombarded by a pyrotechnic show of glitch dissonances. His electronics is much better at destroying than at building, at mutilating, camouflaging and recycling all sorts of matter. So the apocalyptic Urchin and the brainy, grime-infected Castration come as a relief.

Arca, who had relocated to Barcelona in 2018 and now preferred to be called Alejandra and referred to as a woman, followed up the one-hour mixtape @@@@@ (2020) with the album Kick I (2020), an uneven collection of non-songs ranging from floating ballads (Calor and Afterwards) to cubistic deconstructions of voices and instrumentals inspired by Latin music. The latter is the real attraction of the album, especially the glorious tryptich of Mequetrefe, La Chiqui (a collaboration with Sophie) and the reggaeton KLK, concoctions of energetic intricate beats and chopped-up vocals that decompose and recompose at lightning speed (Rip the Slit is a close fourth). The album should have been an EP: four or five songs did not deserve to be released, certainly not in the company of those cubistic masterpieces.

Meanwhile, Arca released a 62-minute single, @@@@@ (2020) and 100 remixes of one of her songs, Riquiqui (2020).

Kick I was followed by four more albums, released in four days. after the pop indigestion of the first volume, Kick II (2021) is torn between that user-friendly style (the tedious reggaeton Prada, the silly dance ditties Lethargy and Tiro, the moronic ballad Born Yesterday, a collaboration with Sia Furler) and the abstract cubistic art that is her real forte: Arana is the more challenging puzzle here, followed by the brief Confianza. The fusion of the two styles yields intriguing creations like the pulsating ambient chant of Luna Llena, the lethargic quasi-psychedelic Munecas, and Femme, a mix of white noise and dubstep. Instead the promising glitch-electronica of Andro gets lost in trivial synth doodling that any teenager could do. Like its predecessor, it could have been a great EP if she had removed the fluff.

The fluff dominates Kick III (2021), a goofy take on pounding electronic beats. The music is mostly trivial dance-pop camouflaged as intellectual post-modernism (Joya, Incendio) At best, this attitude yields the sensual Senorita and the emotional tornado of the second half of Bruja (that feels incomplete). The highlights are Intimate Flesh, which sounds like warped, psychedelic world-music, and especially Rubberneck, with its intricate polyrhythms and vocal games. On the other hand, Fiera is a facile exercise of distortion and syncopation.

Kick IIII (2021) contains one great moment: the haunting vignette Xenomorphgirl. And little else: Lost Woman Found is one of her best dilated cyber-ballads. She returns to her dance-pop mode with Queer (not exactly groundbreaking). She experiments with the ambient ballad with classical strings (Paw) and with the ambient ballad with dissonant piano (Boquifloja) but the results are amateurish.

And so the mostly instrumental Kick IIIII (2021) ended up being just embarrassing. There's a folkish carillon inside the instrumental Estrogen, and the piano ballad Chiquito feels like a martial expressionist lied, but the childish piano strumming of Ether and La Infinita is hardly worthy of an ambient album in the tradition of Brian Eno and Harold Budd. The wavering lament of Musculos over piano and syncopated beat, and the spartan, whispered ballad Tierno are more posture than music. The least embarrassing piece is the hyponotic litany Crown, which is not an instrumental.

What is truly amazing about these "Kick" series if the cover art: