The Rare Experimental Musician to Embrace the Spotlight

[Celerity]

On her four new Kick albums, Arca makes music that provokes, invites, and, ultimately, inspires.

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/12/arca-kick-review/620891/



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. 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. I participated, but I did not love the rude thwack of colorful projectiles exploding on my helmet. I did not love the pathetic feeling of missing all my shots. I tended to get eliminated early from matches, head to the car, and encase myself in the headphones of my portable CD player.

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. Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James arranged electronic beats in complex designs that stimulated both hypnosis and hyperawareness. His music was disorienting and intriguing and generally inexplicable. Staring at James’s creepy grin on the album art, I didn’t know if I loved all of what I was listening to. But I did love the feeling of escaping a suburban machismo competition for what felt like a rave in another reality.

The music of Arca, the 32-year-old Venezuelan named Alejandra Ghersi, includes a similar blend of twisted rhythms, luminous synths, and lurid vibes. Yet the deeper link to Aphex Twin is in how her music makes me, and clearly many other people, feel. 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.

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. 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. Both in collaborations and in her own material, Arca’s style is not subtle. She sculpts sound so that it seems to enter the listener from their gut rather than their ears. Her melodies have the quality of summoning spells. I found her first three solo albums—2014’s Xen, 2015’s Mutant, and 2017’s Arca—to be, in a word, terrifying.

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