8/9/2023 0 Comments Arca bleep![]() You trade something for something else: Transitioning might change how safe it is to be in certain places at certain times, it might make locker rooms a nightmare, it might make strangers mention what they think to me, even though I’m just trying to get groceries. After transitioning, I took that dissonance and put it outside myself. “That was a very mournful record, I was tackling shame. “I wanted to have a silence between the self-titled record and whatever came after it,” she tells me over Zoom, a few hours before her Twitch stream. She moved to Barcelona in 2018, after stints in New York and London, and began transitioning. By the time 2020 arrived, the 30-year-old musician had not released a new album since 2017’s Arca, a melancholy collection of futuristic torch songs that cemented her reputation as a diva from another dimension. This was supposed to be Alejandra Ghersi’s year. “We’re here with you live and direct, with so much love and tenderness and trust.” “This whole thing is really a labor of love,” Arca gushes, some two hours in. Everything happens so fast, there’s no way to make sense of this exuberant explosion of activity. She even plays a song by her boyfriend, the Spanish multimedia artist Carlos Sáez, who turns up on split screen from another room in their apartment, dancing shirtless and euphoric. At her fans’ urging, she plays a song she made as a 14-year-old under her Nuuro alias, a wistfully emo electro-pop ditty that sounds like Owl City. ![]() She makes up a beat on the spot, her Ableton session superimposed in a corner of the screen. Digging into the depths of her hard drive, Arca dusts off rarity after rarity: unreleased collaborations with Shirley Manson and Tim Hecker edits of Britney Spears and Elysia Crampton a mashup of bleep-techno veterans LFO with minimal hero Ricardo Villalobos. She wears a sheer black top and deep red lipstick, and the asymmetrical cut of her jet-black hair is as severe as her beats.įor her superfans, known as Mutants, this must be like a visit to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. The accompanying chat is an endless scroll of all-caps passion: “ARCA MAKE VOGUE MUSIC PLEEEEEASE I LOVE IT” “GENDER EUPHORIA VIBE” “YESSSS SHE NOTICED ME AGAIN” “DALEEEEEE DIVA.” Every now and then, in between discreet vape tokes, Arca leans into her mic and shouts, “Radio Diva Experimental FM!” in Spanish, punctuating her makeshift station ID with rolled Rs and icy blasts of digital reverb. There are even occasional blasts from a smoke machine, for that genuine nightclub atmosphere. Beneath a rainbow banner, animated hearts, cat videos, latex harnesses, hospital scenes, and other visual non-sequiturs float across the screen. ![]() Seasick synth riffs, whip-crack samples, and woozy reggaeton beats roll in waves while she plays the part of ringleader and philosopher, her digitally processed voice chirpy and high. She’s not performing music so much as channeling pure chaotic energy. The Venezuelan experimental musician is streaming live from her home studio in Barcelona via the gaming platform Twitch. ![]() It’s a Friday night in late April and, quarantine be damned, Arca is thriving. ![]()
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