In some ways, XXXXX seems like a survey of what Arca might have been listening to lately. She recently interviewed 2hollis and expressed admiration for his music, and you can hear his influence (and maybe Skrillex’s) in the muscled EDM-rap of “Fxck.” I also hear the glory days of wonky, post-dubstep, and deconstructed club all over: “Raver” recalls the word-blotting broken beat of Jamie Vex’d, “Grip” channels the hi-tech EDM sound design of EPROM, and the hyperactive “Taneando”—which pleads, “I know you want me to come,” in Spanish over and over until it sounds like a threat—is something like a cybernetic upgrade of Jam City’s paradigm-shifting “The Courts.”
Those are helpful entry points, but Arca’s music also resists being compared to anyone else’s. She’s spent her whole career constructing an identity, and a sonic universe, from the ground up. Just look at the sleeve of XXXXX, the latest in her Giger-esque series of covers featuring cyborg-like beings, where her body is attached to what looks like some kind of tank or ship. It looks like how the music sounds: mechanistic but sinewy, caught smack dab in the middle of the transformation of person into machine.
There’s a through line all the way back to Arca’s first two mixtapes, Stretch 1 and Stretch 2, which put her on the radar of the underground dance music world before she crossed over into producing for Kanye, Björk, and Madonna. Those releases were queasy, dank, almost fetid, as though Ableton could manipulate flesh as well as frequencies. As her album artwork depicts, Arca has moved toward distinctly electronic and digital sounds, but the flesh persists, especially on XXXXX’s closing run. After “Everywhere,” a stuttery synth epic that ranks among Arca’s most emotionally stirring tracks, the LP ends with Arca screaming, distorted and Auto-Tuned, almost like a black-metal shriek: “STOP DYING!” It’s a desperate full-body plea, and feels like a harrowing moment of clarity, both moral and sonic, following 40 minutes of sonic confusion.
And that’s very Arca. As she is wont to do, she’s throwing all kinds of stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks in real time. She’s never been one to edit herself, which is her music’s greatest strength as well as its occasional downfall. Arca has collaborated with much bigger, more crossover-friendly artists, but her solo work remains doggedly original and unfiltered. XXXXX is more of what we’ve come to expect from her: mostly brilliance, full of sharp turns and right angles with the occasional meander into something that’s more interesting to think about than listen to (like like the trifling “Cinch,” which halts the album’s momentum about halfway through.) It’s not her most essential album, but it has some of her rawest and most ambitious music—the latest transmission from an artist who refuses to conform to anyone’s standards, and instead keeps making her own.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
