Arca: XXXXX review – a wild, brilliant album that taps into our bodies’ most feral frequencies

By Shaad D'Souza · The Guardian Culture

(XL) In the follow-up to her Kick series, Arca jumbles the building blocks of electronic music to create a beautiful, disorienting sound world XXXXX, the new album by Venezuelan producer-vocalist Arca, is reportedly laden with meaning: a press release claims that “suspended between posthuman augmentation and raw emotion, XXXXX exposes the mainframe”. But the reason Arca, real name Alejandra Ghersi, has become such a star of electronic music – and a mainstream-adjacent one at that – is not because she lets philosophy postgrads in Berlin write her marketing copy: it’s because, for well over a decade, she has been putting out records like XXXXX, which seem to tap into the body’s most primal, feral frequencies better than nearly anyone else. That ability has resulted in recent callups to collaborate on Madonna’s Confessions II and remix pop singer Addison Rae , and she has amassed a large, loyal fanbase – uncommon for someone making such outre music. The follow-up to her phenomenal Kick series – five albums, each highlighting a different side of Arca’s work – XXXXX sometimes channels the frenetic feel of Aphex Twin (as on Everything) and zeroes in on the wild, footwork-y high-tempo club music she made her name with (like on Fxck, a breathless and grimy rebuke to patriarchy). But it also delves more deeply into worlds the musician has previously skirted around. The sound of a tolling bell on Willow rings into a song that’s harsh and uncompromising; Raver jumbles the building blocks of classic mainstream EDM into a piece of beautiful, disorienting sound design. Continue reading...