Arca - Mutant
Tiny Mix Tapes 90
Arca
Mutant
Rating:
Patricia MacCormack, a researcher publishing in areas of transgressive media, posthumanism, feminism, horror, and body modification, speaks on “de-signified corporeally massacred bodies…[a] sealed, fascialised, and genitalled body which is complicit with the massacre that capitalist and Oedipal systems perform on the body…” Specifically, she spoke on this in relation to Necrophilia, forming a dense argument for the multiplicity of body and its often painful molecular disorganization by signification and forced relationality. Questions of perversion and subjectlessness are discussed at length, as dehumanization becomes coordinated with the “massacre [that] signification perpetrates upon flesh and desire.” Her thought formulates a necessarily extreme view on how the body unfurls in light of the emergencies it undergoes through identification. Difficult questions emerge: How do our signs work on the plateau of flesh? Does the territorialization of body mutate in death? Is a body without organs mutant?
On a slightly less extreme note, MacCormack’s questioning into body-materiality highlights a drive for indistinction — one perhaps only found in death, but a death of the subject as it de-identifies and sublimates itself in the dance of body dysmorphia. How erotic is it that the body can instantaneously become so foreign? Are you a necrophiliac for giving yourself a phantom limb to masturbate?
The statelessness of body and identity have been common themes in Alejandro Ghersi’s work as Arca, be it through his invented, genderless muse “Xen” — explored fully on his 2014 debut — or within the amorphous representations of bodies done by regular visual collaborator Jesse Kanda. The topic has found a sonic equivalent in the malleability of his compositions, works that bend rhythm and willowy synths over textures spilling over one another perversely, cataclysmically, and serenely. In a few short years, the producer has morphed almost grotesquely into the art-pop of Björk and FKA twigs — even the bravado of Kanye — all the while maintaining a unique voice that finds exhilarating freedom in his solo work. Despite a steady release stream across the plateau of 2015’s electronica fetishes, Arca’s work has been building momentum toward something, perhaps toward extending both body and identity into the virtuality of rotten digital trash, sour samples, and crumbling percussion that exist as extensions of constant work. The prolific output of Kanda’s next-new humanoid form dancing in cadence with Arca’s next-new insectoid track establishes a view on their organic symbiosis and artistic fluidity morphing into indistinction, into dispossession, into multiplicity.
Mutant epitomizes this theme of dissected and fluid embodiment through its brilliant treatment of digital material flowing procedurally and in wild manipulation. Phaser, flanger, and chorus — all favorite effects in Arca’s color palette — are used relentlessly to force sounds into weird stereo-fields. Samples are time-warped and formant-synthesized into queered shapes, made differentiated from their source material as an organ is made foreign when transplanted into another breathing body. A liver can be severed from a warm fleshy abdomen and inserted into another body’s gut — a body perhaps of a different gender, perhaps bearded, perhaps with brown eyes, perhaps short. Similarly, Arca takes disparate sounds and places them in foreign spaces that often emphasize the sameness of all sound when arranged non-hierarchically. Album opener “Alive” begins as a triumphant call for empathy stitched inside devastated sound-terrain; the synths are bruised with phased tonality, while harmonies crawl out of hidden spaces. Quickly after, the album’s title track introduces earth-shattering scrap-metal blasts, bent and molded amongst laser-fire, human screams, and deflating air. The sounds themselves disintegrate, traveling from dry textural landscapes into immense explosions of cathedral-sized reverb in seconds. It’s here, particularly, where Arca’s treatment of space is a consuming force, one pursuing, absorbing, and assaulting in an effort to deterritorialize any position, any footing. The “space” itself isn’t particularized; rather, it’s placed and replaced as an abstracted plateau that sounds momentarily sit upon, only to disappear as feeling disappears suddenly from a body. As Arca states, that traumatic disappearance can be absorbed trauma, as one “uses softness as a weapon when the mind attacks itself.”
Violence is flexed in tracks like “Umbilical,” “Snakes,” and the stunning “Sinner,” the latter of which moves with a force that savagely convulses over splayed-out sirens and piano. These pieces are supplemented oddly with serene works filled with sentiment; or, the harsh rhythms and strange emotionalisms are sewed together, as in the beautiful, explosive flutework on “Snakes.” The works flow into one another often interchangeably, calling to mind Arca’s use of the mixtape format. Fast pacing and fragmentary delivery show how Mutant’s tracks operate as experiments in obsessive dysmorphia, taking flaws and magnifying them to scale drama, affect, and beauty out of digital refuse. Exhilarating moments are found next to tracks that only feature impact tail-ends, panned and swirled around a headspace to suspend spatiality further. The diverse temperament of the tracks visualizes a body separating itself from itself, a phenomenon surrealist Roger Caillois describes as when “the individual breaks the boundary of their skin and occupies the other side of their senses…” He goes on to describe this disembodied space as tragic, as a “dark space where things cannot be put.” Arca literally composes to the struggle for this escape, for this mutation of embodiment through detachment from body, shown sonically in severed rhythms and grossly warped texture. In some ways, Mutant speaks to the trauma and massacre happening through sound manipulation and alienation amongst various modes of music signification — rhythm, symphony, instrument, tone, experiment.
Through its fragmentation of body’s location in space, Mutant is a definitive statement on the sheer possibility that the DAW affords within de-railed imaginative contexts. The digital workstation is a tool — abstracted and simultaneously linear — a tool that speaks to the access and potentiality afforded to new generations of musicians armed with software and unrestrained imagination. Yet, too often, the tool can constrain work through its linearity — its grid structure can fix a composition into strict BPMs and loop-based predictability. The DAW can assume an almost oppressive context; the artist stares at the computer screen to sculpt their next work, a work materially located in the binary structure of a rhythm/harmony dichotomy or the strict sample vs. synthesis split. Perhaps through his relentless work output, Arca has transcended the limitations of digital structure to arrive at fluid alien-jazz. It’s as if the album’s source material was only constructed from the audio that was projected ahead in the linear space-time of the DAW; silence was inserted to project these sounds into the workstation’s linear future, furthering their “failure” away from more immediate compositions. This “distance” imbues Mutant with an ethereal feel, showcasing the ineffable process of one of this decade’s visionary producers.
Clearly, the album’s trauma isn’t merely the product of sounds colliding and interacting; instead, trauma is found in the melancholic timbre of the subject, located brutally between the onslaught of excessive sound and excessive space: a body spilling over itself through its potential mutation into all possible bodies, or its potential control of all possible sounds. This body contains the potential to wound itself violently in its longing for escape from an internal plight to signify, to identify, to represent itself. Likewise, with limitless creative possibility, how does the artist not damage themselves in choosing to express their longing in sound? Mutant contains an utterly unique language to express this desire. A vitality is found in its dysmorphic dissatisfaction and fluid manipulation, perhaps a desiring production rooted in the anxiety and multiplicity of the morphing body. This body’s music is a music constantly eating itself — the sound of molecules subsuming other forms, crystalline viruses entering the body-field only to be ejected by spindly cells ravenous to eject forms from their host, their life — or the sound of a genome, on fire, mutating itself into goddesses.
01. Alive
02. Mutant
03. Vanity
04. Sinner
05. Anger
06. Sever
07. Beacon
08. Snakes
09. Else
10. Umbilical
11. Hymn
12. Front Load
13. Gratitude
14. EN
15. Siren
16. Extent
17. Enveloped
18. Faggot
19. Soichiro
20. Peonies
Pitchfork 84
Though his music sometimes exhibits the romantic sweep of chamber music and can be marked with skittering beats, Venezuela-born producer Alejandro Ghersi’s work as Arca is defined above all by its fluidity and flexibility. You can hear conventional musicality inside of his tracks—melodies, chord changes—but rather than being fixed on paper, they are always in flux. Individual notes twitch and vibrate, refusing to stay with a single pitch; rapidly shifting clusters hint at proper chords without ever quite committing to them; tempos speed up and slow down according to whims rather than the grid of a timeline. Arca’s deeply organic machine music is defined by Ghersi’s ability to find grace in imperfection.
Ghersi has come a long way in a short time, his career the sort of underground/mainstream hybrid that could only happen in the digital era, when producers rapidly move from sharing home-recorded beats online to working with stars. Though his music has varied greatly, you’ve always been able to hear his voice inside of it. The first music heard from Ghersi was a series of three low-profile releases in 2012 that made small waves among electronic music heads but were little heard outside of that circle. But among that group was someone working on Kanye West’s 2013 album Yeezus, and Arca wound up contributing to four tracks, including "Blood on the Leaves" and "I’m in It". That same year, he also produced for FKA twigs, helping to create a futuristic pop that was simultaneously dense and spare and defined by its elusiveness. Xen, Arca’s 2014 full-length debut, expanded Ghersi’s range further, sounding like a bent version of modern classical music crumpled into a ball with a post-dubstep beat tape. Music created for a fashion show in Italy earlier this year spoke further to Ghersi’s ability to move between genres, scenes, and high/low art boundaries, and his continued collaboration with artist Jesse Kanda on the visual aspects of his work make Arca a project with a rare thematic integrity. He’s developing quickly but building on a clear foundation.
If Aphex Twin took the playful communal energy of early-'90s rave and turned it to highly personal art, and producers of the early '00s like Fennesz and Tim Hecker showed how emerging software could be used to create new worlds, Arca is making the abstract electronic music of our current moment, music for an idea of humanity that exists outside of binaries. "Xen is a genderless being," he told The Guardian last year. "It’s about resisting labels and integrating different sides of ourselves." Accordingly, Arca tracks are never one fixed thing: Conventional beauty is swirled together with ugliness, aggressiveness exists alongside serenity, chaos and form fail to cancel each other out. Mutant is an album of contrasts, and Ghersi has an uncanny ability to let extremes interact with each other to create something new.
The 20 tracks here stretch for over an hour, but lines between them are unclear, and when heard at once the record can seem like one long suite, treating us to an array of sounds and moods. You can imagine "Vanity" as a piano solo, so pretty and memorable are the central melodic motifs, but Ghersi’s production on the track is essentially a series of controlled explosions, the sound of a song breaking into a million pieces and re-assembling itself. "Alive"’s drones are positively cavernous, sounding like a memory of an ancient civilization bubbling up through a hole in the earth, and he breaks up the static drift with splattering breaks that jolt the song at irregular intervals. The repeated vocal loop on "Umbilical" is one of the few sounds on the record connected to life on planet Earth, but it’s mixed in with some of the album’s harshest and coldest electronics. As the tracks tick off and you lose track of how far into the album you actually are, the clarity of Ghersi’s vision comes into focus. The broken-ness of the music takes on an empowering energy, as oblong fragments bind together into gorgeously weird shapes and dynamic shifts that shouldn’t make sense feel perfectly logical.
Compared to Xen, Mutant feels less composed and less indebted to classical music. With many tracks on the former album you could squint a little bit and imagine them being performed by a daring new music ensemble, à la Aphex Twin with Alarm Will Sound. But Mutant leans toward soundscape, avoiding proper songs. There are moments in the back half, particularly on "Enveloped", where beats crop up and you can imagine them being used to back a pop production of some kind, but even here the warped instrumental patch used for the melody is too strange and otherworldly for an artist that has ever been on the radio. It’s not an easy listen; this is glorious music that sounds like a living thing, and it can be hard to connect the album to anything outside of itself. Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí said that the straight line belongs to man and the curved to God; on Mutant, Ghersi turns a fixation on porousness and instability into a kind of spiritual pursuit.
Fri May 27 00:00:00 GMT 2016The Quietus 0
Tempting though it is to read the distinctive 'otherness' of Venezuelan producer Alejandro Ghersi's work as the product of his background – growing up in a destabilised Caracas, gay in a gay-intolerant culture, a classical piano student who was a fan of Aaliyah and Autechre – biography alone can't possibly explain his complex, teeming creations. That nothing else really can, either, is what makes them all the more compelling.
It's easy to see why Kanye made a move on the then barely known Arca for his Yeezus album of 2013 and what drew Björk to him for Vulnicura; here was a young electronic producer with deep hip hop empathies and a seemingly inexhaustible talent for bravura invention. But if Arca's full-length debut, Xen showed only glimpses of his hip hop past, so well had the grafts of chip tunes, bass music and minimalist composition taken, then on Mutant, those glimpses are reduced to nanosecond flashes, allowing Arca to reveal himself in a birth-slicked new skin.
This set is out there in the way that an exoplanet is out there – identifiable, but also thrillingly unknowable, able to bend your senses with its endless shape shifting and knock you sideways with its hallucinatory beauty. It's not without precedent – the spirits of Coil, Debussy, Iannis Xenakis, Aphex Twin, Mozart and Phillip Glass hover in the wings – but instead of simply dicking around with recognition triggers, Arca blows the fuses of expectation.
Track titles like 'Umbilical', 'Anger' and 'Faggot' point to very personal themes, but despite its intrinsic Arca-ness, Mutant dictates nothing. Its trick is to set up a series of blank screens onto which we can't help but project ourselves, both slithering, dread-filled id and euphoric, in-control ego. And however vivid this record's interplays between light and dark, delicacy and brutality, intimacy and alienation, allure and repellence, they're instantly, intensely subjective, bypassing thought to make a beeline for the limbic brain.
There's no slow build here – the 20-track set twitches with vitality from the start. 'Alive' opens with a cascade of shattering synths that becomes a frenzied, polyrhythmic drive, abruptly stopping and starting to allow a sweet melody to flood through. It's a celebration, clearly. The title track less so. In one panoramic sweep, it conjures the death throes of a nuclear reactor and the skin-crawl skittering of insects across an alien landscape, acknowledging melodic convention only half way through and even then, barely. 'Sinner' is truly, deeply unsettling, suggesting Mutant as a companion volume to Mica Levi's score for Under The Skin, while 'Faggot' is a symphony of angry discordance that's developed with 'Soichiro' and resolved by the beautifully warped and watery piano piece 'Peonies', which closes the album.
Each track underscores Arca's talent for emotional translation. As ear-swivelling and rarefied as his sound might be (and if 'minimalist baroque' seems like a contradiction in terms, then too bad), it's somehow rooted in our collective unconscious. Whatever the aural equivalent of a spectacle might be, that's Mutant, which firmly establishes its creator as an auteur. Where he goes next is an interesting question. With several EPs and two albums under his belt, Arca is no longer the new kid whose maverick vision will reflect well on any premier-league artists putting out a collaboration call. He's now the competition.
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Fri May 27 00:00:00 GMT 2016