Time, from Arca’s fourth album KiCk i, reduces a booming, bass-heavy 4/4 kick drum to a whisper that oscillates around Alejandra Ghersi’s blurry, anaesthetised words. “It’s time to let it out / And show the world,” she coos from a condemned space that evokes the atmosphere of a toilet stall at Berlin super-club Berghain. In the three years since her acclaimed 2017 album Arca, Ghersi has fallen in love and simultaneously found confidence from affirming her non-binary identity. If her previous album evoked a melancholy sci-fi opera set on a drifting space station, KiCk i is a live-streamed party, finding Ghersi at her most unrestrained, mischievous and joyful.
It’s an album with a liquid heart, Arca shapeshifting through a look book of sonic identities. “We don’t have to be any one fixed thing in a nonstop way in order for us to be normal,” she said earlier this year. “When are we ever not in flux? We’re literally, like, fucking fluid.” It’s billed as the first in a series, with each transmission based on a specific theme. KiCk i’s concept is pop, and Ghersi skims ideas from her extensive history working with bonafide icons – from megastars such as Kanye West, Björk and FKA twigs to thought leaders Kelela and Dean Blunt – to offer us a vision of what pop could be.
If Arca was primarily known over the last near-decade for her role as a producer, this album puts all eyes on her art and identity. “Regenerated girl degenerate to generate heat in the light,” she chants over clattering foley sounds of blades sharpening, heels clicking and guns cracking on Riquiqui, never letting the libidinous rush reach its amyl peak. On Nonbinary, she echoes the paradigm-shifting wordplay of poet Juliana Huxtable, whose psychedelic lyricism (most vivid on 2017’s Mucus in My Pineal Gland) unpicks New York City’s muddled tapestry of art, music, identity and queer sexuality. “Speak for your self-states,” Arca deadpans, as the words “your”, “self” and “states” melt into one another.
She pirouettes through reggaetón, techno, power ballads and bubblegum electro, absorbing each element into a chaotic buzz of high-definition sound design and glossy, post-PC Music sonic detritus. Haunted, gender-fluxing rap is twisted with wobbling melodies and the clattering rhythms of shell casings hitting the floor. Calor takes Ghersi’s Björk influence to an operatic crest, before the Icelandic singer appears on Afterwards: “Papi I’m your Mami. Come, let’s trade milk,” Ghersi replies in English to Björk’s Spanish verses, which buzz around the honey of desire.
Other collaborations land less evenly. Avant-flamenco star Rosalía appears on KLK but adds little to the mix other than a Spanish voice in a reggaetónera’s clothing. Sophie, another producer-turned-pop star who has been instrumental in bending pop to her whims, assists on La Chíqui, a messy cacophony of femme rap, pneumatic club and cartoonish noise that sacrifices her usual charm for aural fireworks. More successful is Watch, fusing south-east London singer and DJ Shygirl’s lyrical badness (“gyal like me on a flex daily”) with a beat that’s as incessant and urgent as a doorbell the morning after an endless night out.
If this sounds hyperactive, it’s undoubtedly by design. Ghersi cut her teeth attending Venus X’s GHE20G0TH1K parties in New York City, where a daring new style of DJing was pioneered – a CDJ-focused, anything-goes routine where Memphis rap, footwork, mainstream pop and extreme noise could exist in the same continuum, often at the same time. The danger of this level of fusion is part of its appeal: when something doesn’t work, the failure acts as a reminder of the complexity of existence. Perfection is not revolutionary, but change is. And while KiCk i is not as subversive as the work of Arca’s black contemporaries such as Zebra Katz, who don’t benefit from her level of exposure, it nonetheless offers a red pill to a more hopeful future.
