Arca’s new album, reviewed

Whereas Arca’s previous pentalogy clearly hinted at a more melodic and accessible song-writing logic, her newest album “XXXXX” decidedly dethrows every preconception about what it means to follow up a rather successful series of albums. Here, the artist acts less like her own storyteller and more like a bio-engineered character in the thralls of a certain techno-tropic possession, carrying with her the same logic of catharsis through abjection that is so inherent in many works of so-called “body horror”. One must, thus, consider Arca as already intrinsically connected to the bio-technology of the machine she is feeding, becoming the cosmetic surgeon of sound itself. Yet, whereas her previous albums cemented her capacity for striving towards a particular result, much like the work of the scalpel breaking the patient’s nose in order to re-beautify it, this newest album is more concerned with laying open the process itself; a kind of Cronenbergian operating table in which the body isn’t cured but enshrouded, becoming the carrier for machinic intention, seeing how far it can blur the lines between the organic and the inorganic before the system’s failure becomes the new rationale for operation.

With an album cover that seems to venture into a kind of cybernetic parthenogenesis, the machine fxcking itself in order to produce, one must ask: if we are, here, presented with an acoustic operating table, what might the result look like? Is there even a result, or is this a constant becoming, perhaps already implied by the word “mutant” that Arca has adopted at various times for her own mythology. In her recent effort, Arca arguably hints at the chaotic becoming of the mutant not as a definitive subject, a primordial monster of Frankensteinian proportions but, instead, as the practical methodology of a complete dissolution of the self. The change in genome is certain yet unexplored, a kind of Mimoid of self-propelling identity loss. In fact, Arca herself has been decidedly public about notions of “slow transitioning”, a kind of becoming in perpetuity of oneself that delineates the axis of being neither in time nor in space but in a biologically gender-betwixed parallelism in which becoming itself is not achieved through temporal distance but because of temporality’s spiritually endless yet-to-be. Even when the body, eventually, succumbs to it temporal reliancy, its objecthood will be the ground for the visual confirmation not of having been but of having been-between forevermore; death, the unruly regulator of all, only a benign eventuality in the afterlife of the mutant.

Here, the logic of both the album and its insurrector follow a Deleuzeian logic of the middle, of that between things, that which does neither seek and end nor a beginning and, by doing so, remains in a constant environment of picking up speed to and fro. This betweenness, much like Arca’s own mutantcy and the album’s almost concave exploration of machinic plateaus, does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to another and then back again but acts as a transversal plane undermining its own trajectory. It is, thus, no wonder that the album must, almost explicitly, be met with mixed reactions, precisely because it is the nature of reactions themselves that it effectively dismantles. Here, the auditor cannot but be dethroned from their planting the seed of opinion for opinions, and thus reactions, must bow to the standard of points of entry, of beginnings and ends, of determinations within its walls of certitude that know nothing of mutant dissection. The listener must necessarily meet the end of their own anthropocentrism within their own lack of judgement-vocabulary in order to be inserted into the logic of the mutant-to-and-fro. Yet, once insertion is complete, knowledge must not be understood as sequential and instant but as even more distant and peripatetic. The animalcula integrated into the new biotope knows nothing of its offsprings. The machines, virtual or physical, serving to Arca’s advantage know nothing of their manipulation, only of their beginnings and ends. They might be pushed, pulled, exasperated, briefly localized, mapped, plotted but never really known. This is not a question of contact but of attraction, of trans-magnetism between various poles simultaneously, (neg)entropic in their voyage yet entirely devoid of points of arrival. “XXXXX” is a body of organizational debauchery just as much as the human body is entirely flummoxed by the possiblílity of being analyzed by the mutant. Yet, the mutant finds itself equally at odds with the possibility of the humanocentric body because for it such as prerogative would entirely dismantle the significancy of the body as a site for mutantcy in the first place; its own para-reality would be under siege by the arrival – not as a beginning but as a virtual end, where it not for plastic surgery – of the human’s finite, hyper-gender-aware body. The mutant has no vocabulary, speaks both braille and morse and none of the two and cannot and will not comb the fraying edges of such an all-too-perfect body. The mutant must refrain from contact. The mutant must make mutant music for mutants, unbothered by the human with as much vigor as that of the human that has tried all too long to discard the mere possibility of the to-and-for on the first place.

It seems that Arca is hyper-aware of all of this already, aptly exemplified by the opening track’s title “No End”; not one and not the multiple but the multiplicities themselves (a)rranging themselves in all of their sporadic glory. The only remnant of the human found in the album is tantamount to a merely diffraction, a ghost inside of the machine, an imaginary ideal (which does not imply a necessary upholding of such an ideal) at the heart of songs like “Eidolon” and “Futurality”. The middle’s logic if further intensified by the placement of the song “Finisher” approximately half-way through the record, a kind of visual and sonic testament that even after the final move, the album still keeps on morphing away into its own indeterminate meontology; not to be mistaken for a resignation towards depersonalization, the mutant’s meontology is if concentrated in the nucleus of its own being, in the end of Shelley’s novel, where, even in its own finality the fate of the mutant is left up to interpretation, both coming and going synthesized into non-meaning (for the human). The mutant might be busy raving or finding new techno-sexual metaphors that describe its own a-human pleasure – expertly deploying in a title like “Cinch”, both certainly a reference to actual electronics and cable-culture but perhaps also a nod to the explicitly sexual act of “plugging” a phallic object into a “hole” in order for the phallic rod to have any meaning and effect – or perhaps it might be expanding its own sphere of restless disprovability. The mutant as a hermit entity deprived of the process of generation in as much as it has no particular point of arrival.