Let me just preface this article with the following statement: Alejandro Ghersi is really, really attractive. I feel the same way about the music he's released under the name "Arca" and his work with FKA twigs and Kanye West which laid a solid, ethereal foundation for his music and helped him define a sound. Then "Xen"happened — wait. Poor word choice, “happened.” More like "Xen"thundered out of the gates. I think of "Xen" as the image of the trophy singer sitting on the piano, this beautiful, genderless alien being in a long black dress. It was a triumph, a solid homage to classical music and a powerful piece in its own right. Songs like “Xen” and “Sisters” made me question what was allowed in electronic music, how far you could push past Richard D. James’ envelope. The thing is, "Xen"didn’t feel like an Aphex Twin album to me for one second. This felt real, new, breathing. "Xen"was my favorite album of last year’s, hands down, and I didn’t think it could be followed up.
Last week, Arca released "Mutant," his follow-up to "Xen." In Pitchfork’s review of the album, Mark Richardson says, rightly so, “It’s not an easy listen; this is glorious music that sounds like a living thing, and it can be hard to connect the album to anything outside of itself.”After much, much thought, I have found a total of one touchstone. In Neil Gaiman’s "Coraline"(not the movie) there’s a chapter in which the novella’s titular character ventures into her basement and discovers the mangled aftermath of a being that she once mistook for her father. The blind, fleshy, wormlike thing chases her around the basement until she escapes, locking it below her house forever. However, the creature is long dead before the basement door locks; its dialogue with Coraline comes from a place that's almost post-mortem, in agony but complacent, accepting and generous with how open it is about its downfall. Despite being alive, doubtlessly and with such vigor, there’s something so desperate and painful about "Mutant." The title track encapsulates this for me — the near eight-minute piece is less of a song and more of a soundscape slowly being built by something that surely has more than four arms, slowly, painstakingly, and with great precision.
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There is so much at stake on "Mutant," anddespite all its life it is in no way a human album — it edges on it, that’s for sure, breaking into something a person could have imagined on “Enveloped” and “Front Load”, but at the end of the day the vocal loop in “Umbilical” is the one real (if slight) trace of personage we get from "Mutant." This is an interesting choice on Ghersi’s part, as he, with constant collaborator Jesse Kanda, have built Arca’s entire visual aesthetic atop the uncanny valley. All but one video for the music on "Xen" — “Sad Bitch,” “Thievery” and the title track —depict a computer-generated human body undulating. Compare this choice to the videos for “En,” “Vanity” and now “Front Load,” which put Kanda and Ghersi’s bodies on a pedestal, favoring a realist visual against a backdrop that is anything but. It’s like the two are on a tipping scale: as Arca’s music reaches a peak of unreality, Kanda’s visuals dip back into the real. I’m not complaining though: "Mutant"is less of an album of music and more of a duo soundscape/think piece. If "Xen"proposed a genderless, beautiful future, "Mutant"takes this proposal a step further, asking us to consider a being separate from our understanding of what being is.
