Arca

Official Review

Released by XL Recordings in 2017, Arca is Alejandra Ghersi's third album and the first in which the Venezuelan composer's voice takes center stage, after two previous works that were almost entirely instrumental. It's also the record on which Ghersi sings for the first time in Spanish, the language of her Caracas childhood, in a vocal delivery often operatic, electronically distorted to the point of losing any stable perceived gender — high and low registers alternate within the same track, sometimes within the same phrase. The production keeps the fragmented, syncopated aesthetic already developed in her earlier work with FKA twigs and Björk, but applies it here to more intimate, explicitly autobiographical material. "Anoche" and "Reverie" build near-art-song episodes over unstable electronic textures that break apart and reform without warning; "Desafío" and "Coraje" work in a more aggressive, almost industrial register, while "Castration" — its title openly declaring the theme — stages a vocal body that refuses anatomical stability as much as harmonic stability. This is a record built explicitly around Ghersi's experience as a transgender woman, and the way it treats the voice — never fixed in one register, never resolved into a coherent sonic identity — isn't a stylistic device isolated from the content, but its direct formal expression. The body here isn't represented from the outside but inhabited from within, in a continuous becoming that refuses any final categorization, of musical genre as much as of gender in the broader sense. This logic of unfixed subjectivity, in constant negotiation with itself rather than anchored to a stable identity to be defended, connects directly to Rosi Braidotti's notion of the nomadic subject in her affirmative posthumanism: an identity constituted in movement, in the crossing of boundaries — of gender, of species, of category — rather than in their defense. It's not a reading the record states explicitly, but the consistency between the compositional gesture and the theoretical one is hard to ignore. Some years on, Arca remains one of the most radical records in how it treats voice as plastic material rather than a transparent vehicle for meaning — a work that opened a path later followed by much of the most recent experimental electronic music.