reviews / 2020

ARCA - @@@@@

Name: ARCA – @@@@@
Item: @@@@@
Rating: 7
Author: Francesco Nunziata

2020 (Xl)

deconstructed club, experimental, sound collage

by Francesco Nunziata

Released last February on her own YouTube channel and later made available digitally through XL Recordings, “@@@@@” is the monster single (sixty-two minutes!) with which Arca returns to the spotlight, immersing herself in the identity of one Diva Experimental and broadcasting from a pirate radio station in a parallel universe dominated by the oppressive force of an authoritarian regime.

On the cover, the Venezuelan producer (born Alejandro Ghersi) appears as an entity whose humanity has by now fallen prey to the machine world, so it comes as no surprise to find, across the thirty fragments that make up the work (which Arca herself has called “quanta”), a sound (essentially that of deconstructed club) poised between the orthodoxy of a still “human, too human” sensibility and the anomaly injected into it by a reckless, experimental use of electronics.

In its deconstructive fury, Arca pushes that sound's forms and timbres to the extreme, warping its abstract carnality and immersing it in a stream of consciousness that often verges on dreamlike dazzlement, amid obsessive pulsations, derailments and explosions, ghostly looping voices, harsh-noise discharges, sweeps of sickly ambient music, chemical fog, industrial fetishes, oblique liturgies, vertiginous stretches tending toward unchecked dissolution, and nightmares that threaten every possible after-hours.

There's no point singling out one "quantum" over another. Just know that in “@@@@@” you'll find the essential traits (mystic-leaning synths, rhythms like the arrhythmias of an ailing heart, processed voices that seem to arrive from some heavenly source, and tortured machines) of a style that is by now instantly recognizable and ever more a mirror of the frenzied, slightly hallucinated life of these last few years.

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05/05/2020

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Francesco Nunziata, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition

Tracklist

1. @@@@@
2. Diva
3. Construct
4. Turner
5. Devastation
6. Survivors
7. Recursion
8. Monstrua
9. Bebé
10. Amputee
11. Chipilina
12. In the Face
13. Predator
14. Pacifier
15. Psychosexual
16. Mujere
17. Cypher
18. Murciélaga
19. Phantasy
20. No lo digas
21. Amantes
22. Membrane
23. Apuro
24. Saintly Pride
25. Avasallada
26. Dysphoria
27. Gaita
28. Form
29. Travesti
30. Heaventsent
31. X

ARCA online

Official website

Arca on OndaRock

Monograph

Arca

A new grammar for imagining the future

Venezuelan producer Alejandra Ghersi Rodriguez has proven to be a decisive figure in reshaping a sound that had long stood still, establishing herself as one of the boldest and most visionary minds in contemporary electronic music