Album "KiCk i" by Arca (2020): "transboundary" music of the new "transnormality"

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I started studying the famous Venezuelan musician Arca (born Alejandro Guersi), like many others, from the wrong end (although the topic of “the wrong ends” is precisely what Arque seems to be most interested in). I started by learning about him as a visual artist by watching his videos. And it instantly turned me away from the performer. Agree: it’s hard to perceive music when in the video you are constantly poked in the face with a phallus protruding from under a torn female thong, when the camera carefully captures poorly shaved male Latin American paws, hardly squeezed into stilettos, on which the musician quickly breaks out from behind remote control on the dance floor. In general, it seems that it is hysterical jerking out that is the main thing here, and not some kind of experiments in the field of music.

This time, having been surprised to see several laudatory reviews of the 2020 album from competent and respected critics, I nevertheless decided on a second approach in the perception of this transcultural ex(peri/cre)ment. In principle, I did not look at the booklet, limiting myself to a pediment with some kind of monster. So, I listened to it - hmm, I was hooked!.. I listened to it for the second, third time - yes, this is really music of a new type. Here and "transcultural" and "non-binary".

Arka's music is a complex IDM with elements of future bass, post-dubstep and other newfangled curiosities. But, unlike the classics of IDM, who delved into the jungle of experiments with the possibilities of computer sound and the tolerance of listeners, there is harmony here! Even melodiousness! All these squeaks, clicks, howls add up to a fairly light and simple (not primitive!) sound picture. In it, you recognize the echoes of the modern city with its all-powerful gadgets, disruptions of the regime, strange nutrition, insufficient attention, Internet surfing, snippets of songs overheard from passing tin cans, reflections from other people's windows and smartphones. This is a kind of collective section of the subconscious, densely filled with assorted shreds - but quite tenacious, moreover! This sound of modern lifestyle envelops, soothing your broken rhythms with the promise of omnipotence in a cybernetic paradise of a near-future that has no contradictions. Man and machine, man and woman, child and adult, idiot and professor, specialist and profane, power and insignificance, dirt and sterility - all this feudal inconsistency, all this ejaculate of old tradition poured out of the subconscious testifies to itself only as one of the possibilities , but not the norm, not the rule. The world is great and beautiful - but not because order and harmony are visible everywhere in it. There is exactly the same amount of chaos and disharmony in it! And the sound of the Arch, either embracing the harmonic structures familiar to the ear, or freely decomposing in grinding dissonances, seems to break the path for some new worldview - to such an extent probable and acceptable that it even becomes a little scary.

Arch, who is neither a man nor a woman, not a DJ and not a dancer, not a composer and not a plagiarist, not an exclusive creator and not a postmodern collage artist, not healthy and not disabled, shows us all our hidden and obvious passions and addictions, desires and attempts.

This music is sophisticated and simple at the same time – drag queens in bourgeois penthouses can light it up, but it is also quite associated with the immigrant poor laying tiles for penny salaries. This is music both for besotted metropolitan show-offs and sedate domesticated housewives. It can sound everywhere - everyone will feel their own in it.

There are and were a lot of freaks who imagined themselves to be the pioneers of such “non-duality”, “normal randomness” - and Mercury, and Bowie, and Nomi, and P-Orridge were noted in these positions. In musical terms, of course, all this sound comes from Satie, Messiaen and Stockhausen, who “reconciled” a person with his environment – urban, industrial, artificial, virtual, computerized. Nowadays, the image of the posthuman is gradually leaving the monstrous ghetto of “Paris Fashion Weeks” and crawling into the musical mainstream, combining musical extremism with visual: Skinny Puppy, The Prodigy, Rammstein, Marilyn Manson, Die Antwoord, even Little Big are all now fashionable. poseurs, whose musical side is noticeably inferior to external pretentiousness. But the Arch is different: here we hear, first of all, a talented innovative composer, expanding the boundaries of perception of popular music (not “pop”!).

But we look at the booklet and again we see a twisted and distorted body, dressed in a brilliant flaw, from under which a male breast protrudes with noticeable traces of vacuum attempts to turn it into a female one. We see grinned inhuman grimaces, demonstrating the absence of teeth and sense in the eyes. We see some kind of non-, anti-, post-humanity. And all this is already beyond kitsch. It is difficult to recognize a heroic transgender in this garbage heap of images and images, resolutely expanding the civilizational conditioning of thinking, behavior and feeling. Rather, we have before us a chewed up transvestite with Soi6, who does not have enough money to continue hormonal injections, and they are no longer allowed into his native village ...

If you start studying a musician from the main point, from his music (and this is already an exam for adulthood, for objectivity, for endurance and readiness for understanding), and only then go to the shell - only in this case, Arka will reveal itself as a herald of not just some new music, but as a crystallizer, designer, honest herald of a new sensibility that is already everywhere. The album "KiCk i" is a conceptual masterpiece (we're just ashamed to admit it - especially here and now).

Yes, many metropolitan show-offs (and especially show-offs) can brag about the fact that they "went" this album, as well as the image itself and the visual sermon of the Arch; can boast of the absence of disgust, which I had to overcome as a conservative music lover, brought up on that very binary. Others, on the contrary, flaunt their inability to overcome such a slap in the face of public taste. But it's one thing - fashion or ideology, masquerading as "author's boldness" or "traditional values", and quite another - the feeling of a colossal anthropological shift (felt by Arka), forcing the whole familiar picture of our little world to burst at the seams, disintegrating into multiple and phantasmagoric identities, enjoying their uniqueness. Sometimes more than you need... Almost always more than you need!