Arca

“Here’s my voice and all my guts: feel free to judge it. It’s like MMA or a bullfight: you’re watching emotional violence for pleasure. So this is a character who, almost as a mockery of the transaction, goes uncomfortably deep, into self-mutilation. ‘You want gore? Here’s gore’”

Arca

Released via XL Recordings in April 2017, Arca's self-titled record is the first to feature the Venezuela-born, London-based producer’s untreated singing voice. It stands as a defiant, delicate statement of intent, and cements her position as one of this turbulent decade’s defining musicians. Previous work has incorporated snatches of song and Arca’s rapping (most notably on the diptych of distorted hip hop mixtapes Stretch 1 and Stretch 2), but on Arca, her voice is front-and-centre on eight of the album’s thirteen tracks.

Frequently, she has used her first-takes, untreated and without post-production: clicks of saliva and burrs of the throat carry melodies of staggering richness and delicacy. Her masterful production knits together vocal tracks like ‘Sin Rumbo’ and first single ‘Anoche’ with instrumentals like ‘Whip’ and ‘Urchin’, each as extreme as the other. Across the album, the tectonics of pure digital sound, her own piano playing and her voice combine, weaving the album together like folds of skin, or wounds healing post-trauma.

She sings in Spanish — the language of her childhood home. “Spanish is the language my parents fought in and they got divorced in,” she says. “It’s the language I witnessed family violence in. The ultimate theatre of emotion, when things fall apart, for me isn’t English. The language I purge through had to be the same.” In doing so, on several tracks, she evokes the tradition of Venezuelan tonal songs Tonadas: “They are the songs that attempt to articulate that there are no words for suffering, for longing: they are songs sang to the moon, to horses, to nature,” explains Arca. “When I see the landscape culturally, the answer is natural: this is how I must engage with the worries of the world.”

It was recorded at home in north-east London throughout 2016. Arca credits long walks and tai-chi sessions in the Victorian burial ground Abney Park. It’s one of London’s largest cemeteries, and a famous spot for cruising. “There were all these gargoyles, and all this sexual tension”, she says. “They became part of the material of the album: it just felt right to be around the dead; and gay men cruising around the dead. There was so much poetry: life. Death. Gayness.”

Arca’s long-time visual collaborator Jesse Kanda has once again directed the videos and shot the album artwork. In a marked departure from the beautifully grotesque digital art of her debut album Xen (2014) and the raw portraiture of second album Mutant (2015), for this album, Arca appears in front of the camera in high-definition. She is dressed as a wounded matador, made mighty with mechanical legs, or bleeding onto a wooden corset. “Bullfighting is a great metaphor: you are fighting a bull, which could be yourself. You are not the victim or the oppressor, you are both. Animality and bestiality conflated,” she says. “Evoking sex invokes our animality.” On this album, the opposite also holds true.

The heightened theatricality was inspired by Greek tragedy: “I’m representing this album performatively, extremely, dramatically. Myth can reach into the deep cortex of the brain: it’s a given that you’re talking in concepts through characters rather than realities. To me, Arca is a freeze-frame of a person singing their swan song with heightened emergency, in the face of never being able to sing again.”