ARCA
XXXXX (XL)
Innovative and cinematic, Arca’s first album in five years allows us to witness both rupture and rapture. XXXXX is at once frightening and abrasive and yet delicate in its dealing with issues of patriarchy, desire, and humanity.
Arca can be characterised as something of a technological siren. Building from whispers and distorted breathing to glitches, sinister bells, throbbing bass and even the sounds of stabbing human flesh on Taconeando, the album is a collage of aural terror. Fusing hints of Greek mythology and sexuality on the album cover with avant-garde electronica, XXXXX is an album of integration and reconsideration, probing the tender conflicts between past and future, humanity and technology.
These conflicts are undeniably rich; their product feels as alien and experimental as it does intimate and familiar. In the posthuman landscape she constructs, Arca invites us to consider what it is to be human with, inside, and against the machine.
words MENNA WILSON
