Harsh Ambient Arca
Arca is a pseudonym for Alejandro Ghersi, a Venezuelan DJ/producer based in New York. He specializes in eerie, glitchy, electronic instrumentals that confound ordinary electronica categories.
A cold, electronic half-keyboard/half-drum machine sputters to life, plucking out an elementary melodic progression, speeding up the rhythm for just a split second each time the chords change. After two rounds of this, there’s a sudden crack and another set of high-pitched drum machines starts rattling along, simultaneously jumpstarting the beat while adding spooky harmonic dissonance. A separate keyboard underlines the melody, putting its own spin on things. Slowly a large, glistening sonic machine rises from the ground up — walls on walls of stainless steel, whirring blades in one corner, with giant gears interlocking, sparks flying, in another. The thing pauses for a moment, wobbles back and forth, uncertain, on the verge of crashing to the ground. Suddenly there’s a ripple in the drum machine (or is that a jackhammer explosion?), and it all starts up again. And so it goes all throughout Mutant, the new album from Arca.
Arca is a pseudonym for Alejandro Ghersi, a Venezuelan DJ/producer based in New York. He specializes in eerie, glitchy, electronic instrumentals that confound ordinary electronica categories — “trance” doesn’t really fit no matter how relaxing one might find the music; neither does “industrial” no matter how vividly the music evokes big metal objects and factory conveyor belts; “EDM” belongs to a different universe entirely — and, once you’ve bonded with said instrumentals (which can take a while), they confound ordinary habits of listening, too. Ghersi was a guest producer on Björk’s Vulnicura, FKA Twigs’s LP1, and Kanye West’s Yeezus, but Mutant, out since November, is more formally imaginative than any of them. Expanding and elaborating on the winning style he invented with Xen, his 2014 debut, Mutant scrunches itself into surprising sonic shapes and bright, gummy colors unfamiliar to the naked eye.
Played in the background, the album will probably prove way too loud, intrusive, engaging; sit down to concentrate on it and you’ll likely wish you’d played it in the background instead. But once you’ve played it X number of times, often enough to have absorbed its various twists and turns, I swear it all coheres in a flash, upon which you’ll be happy to wander its virtual maze. Like the roughly comparable beatmaster Clams Casino’s assorted instrumental mixtapes, Mutant fits the soundscape genre in form but not in feel. It stretches out for just over an hour with nary a human voice to be heard, true, but it altogether lacks the sleepy luxury of, say, Boards of Canada (or for that matter, the neoclassical austerity of, say, Aphex Twin) — it’s too beat-driven; its massive synthesizer whomp would alarm the occupants of any lounge or concert hall. The basic trick of soundscape is to cultivate cool electronic surface while (primarily through melody, but also samples and the like) creating a warm, tender, oddly intimate emotional tone, thus discovering soul in the machine. Arca’s music refuses to comply. Rather, it creaks and scrapes, scratches and crunches, with textures that tend toward the sharp/metallic/screeching and melodies that tend toward the dour. If, as tradition requires in Arca’s genre, he means to create a musical world, that world is an abrasive one, depersonalized and alien, filled with too many machines with too many moving parts, too many rotating knives and spinning wheels and vacuum tubes. Yet this machine does possess its own depraved version of soul, a soul that comes out not through nice tunes or reassuring lyrics but through the deep pleasures of hearing its pitched drum machines and polished keyboards zap and buzz and beep and jitter and invert on themselves, and recognizing that these cool noises proceed from an irrepressible sense of play. Constantly slipping from one rhythm to another, slinking around in patterns known only to the gears grinding away underneath, he always keeps you on your toes. “Many of [Mutant’s] 20 tracks flow together almost imperceptibly, one song springing out of the tail end of another like taffy being pulled,” wrote Philip Sherburne in Pitchfork, and that does justice to Arca’s peculiar style of motion.
Spiraling out of control, spiraling back into control, breaking down and shattering only to magically reform into a different steel contraption entirely, Mutant is the rare album you can get lost in without falling asleep. Its energy, perversity, and taste for big, percussive, tangible textures distinguish it from innumerable contemporary classical chefs-d’oeuvre and/or adventures into laptoptronica, and its taste for melodies that like to hide behind big iron sculptures, revealing themselves only to repeat listeners, ensures that you’ll keep coming back for more. “Snakes” sways back and forth to the haunting lullaby of a high keyboard imitating some variety of stringed instrument, possibly a mock electronic harp, as well-timed grates and jerks echo around in the background, throwing the main instrument off balance. “Vanity” sends its lead synthesizer through a cascading array of filters — first it’s sharp and clear, then it’s blunt and watery, with bubbles floating through, then it topples over, sends the textural roulette wheel spinning, and settles on sharp and clear again — all while embedding little bleeps and flutters and chirps behind the main register, tripping up the rhythm and adding an extra unexpected dimension of harmony. “Sever” conjures up an imaginary harpsichord where the keys pluck wires instead of strings, repeating a simple, dissonant melody for two minutes of glorious key-pounding broken up by a popped bass interlude. But to focus on individual tracks does a disservice to the sheer totality of the album; everything is always morphing into something else, and no matter how many little fragments make up the whole, Mutant makes itself felt as a single slab of concrete sound. I like it when music comes in discrete parts, and believe strongly that one should be able to differentiate one puzzle piece from another. But with Mutant that’s beside the point. Put the track listing aside, close your eyes, and you’ll hear one unified if warped, tricky, nervous, and very beautiful musical entity.
Relentlessly inventive, amusingly neurotic, Mutant may qualify as the harshest chillout environment and the most relaxing barrage of industrial noise any avant-tinkerer has ever dared. Play it over dinner, especially if your guests feel conflicted about modern technology. Play it over headphones, walking aimlessly through the city, staring at skyscrapers and your own reflection. Play it any time you crave a jolt or a blat or a sizzle.
Mutant (2015) and Xen (2014) are available from Amazon and other online retailers.
