Alejandra Ghersi – Arca – is one of the most influential musicians on the planet in the last decade. Even aside from working with huge names like Björk and Kanye West, her ultra-detailed, high drama, electronic abstractions have set the pace for a legion of artists from very underground to ultra-pop. And the combination of mind-bending textural shifting in her sound, outré performance and collaborations with visual artists like the master mutants Jesse Kanda has created an archetype (Arca-type?) for a generation of queer and gender non-conforming artists who find analogies for transformation and complex relationships to sense of self in the constantly shifting, monstrous and beautiful, sound and vision.
Now, with typical ambition, she has decided to almost double her discography in one fell swoop. Following last year’s KICK i come ii, iii and iiii each released on successive days, all of them packed to the gills with noise, weirdness and no small degree of charm. ii and iii are heavy on the populist modern rhythms of Latin America like reggaetón and cumbia, while iiii is altogether more abstract and often beat free.
Pop, street, high art, gothic darkness and aggro noise all blur one into the other, and the range of guest musicians is no less bamboozling. They range from the super-artsy (cellist/producer Oliver Coates on the gorgeous near-ambient “Esuna”, Brit-in-Estonia Planningtorock on the brain-fizzing AutoTune dark pop workout “Queer”) to megastars (gazillion-selling hitmaker Sia on “Born Yesterday”, Garbage’s Shirley Manson regally intoning spoken word on the apocalyptic “Alien Inside”).
It can be pretty disquieting, and not just because of the relentlessly shrill and penetrating high frequencies deployed throughout. An artist who was born into wealth (Ghersi’s father is a Venezuelan investment banker who moved to the US) and moves in high art, high fashion circles, adopting sounds like reggaetón isn’t wrong in itself. The placing of such proletarian forms on a gallery-like pedestal by embellishing them with infinite and expensive sounding sonic detail, however, can certainly feel a bit off. And the presence of Sia, so soon after her ghastly, ableist film Music which caused deep upset to autistic people and their allies across the world certainly throws into question whether Arca's examinations of identity come with much empathy.
Which is not to write this music off, by any means. Discomfort and wrongness is all part of the Arca aesthetic, and there’s a lot here that’s truly beautiful, and potentially inspiring to many. But like that other recent sprawling project by a hereditarily rich artist who spans pop and underground – last year’s seven-disc, two-and-three-quarter-hour 7G by AC Cook – it’s hard to escape a sense of something that is somewhat haughtily demanding that you do the hard work of unpicking its workings, rather than focusing its own message. But fine, there is beauty, and thought-provoking innovation here. Just don’t expect it to be handed to you on a plate.
Hear "Prada/Rakata":