The album "KiCk i" by Arca (2020): "cross-border" music of a new "transnormality"

Содержание

Like many people, I started studying the famous Venezuelan musician Arca (born Alejandro Ghersi) at the wrong end (although the topic of "wrong ends" is the one that Arca seems to be most interested in). I started, having learnt about him as a visual artist, by watching his music videos. And that instantly turned me away from the performer. You have to agree: it's hard to perceive music when in the clip you are constantly being poked in the face with a phallus sticking out from under torn women's thongs, when the camera is diligently recording poorly shaved male Latin American paws, hardly squeezed into stiletto shoes, on which the musician is rushing from behind the console to the dance floor. In general, one gets the impression that it is hysterical jumping out that is the main thing here, and not any experiments in the field of music.

This time, having been surprised to see several laudatory reviews of the 2020 album by competent and respected critics, I decided to take a second step in the perception of this transcultural ex(peri/cre)ment. I didn't look at the booklet as a matter of principle, having limited myself to the gable with some scarecrow. So, I listened to it - hmm, I was hooked!.. I listened to it for the second and third time - yes, it's really a new type of music. It's both "transcultural" and "non-binary".

Arka's music is complexly composed IDM with elements of fusion bass, post-dubstep and other new-fangled curiosities. But, unlike IDM classics, who went deep into the wilds of experiments with the possibilities of computer sound and listeners' tolerance, there is harmony here! Even melody! All these creaks, clicks, howls are put together in a rather light and simple (not primitive!) sound picture. In it you recognise the echoes of the modern city with its omnipotent gadgets, disruptions, strange nutrition, lack of attention, internet surfing, snippets of songs overheard from passing cars, reflections from other people's windows and smartphones. It is a collective slice of subconsciousness, densely filled with various pieces - but quite survivable at that! It is the sound of the modern lifestyle enveloping you, soothing your jagged rhythms with the promise of all possibilities in the cybernetic paradise of the almost-come future, where there are no contradictions. Man and machine, man and woman, child and adult, idiot and professor, expert and profane, power and nothingness, filth and sterility - all this feudal contradiction, all this ejaculate of long-standing traditionalism pouring 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 everywhere in it. There is just as much chaos and disharmony in it! And the sound of the Arch, while embracing the harmonic structures familiar to the ear, or freely decaying in grinding dissonances, as if paving the way for some new worldview - to such a degree of probability and acceptability that it even becomes a little scary.

Arca, who is neither man nor woman, DJ nor dancer, composer nor plagiarist, exclusive creator nor postmodern collagist, healthy nor disabled, shows us all our hidden and explicit passions and passions, desires and urges.

This music is both sophisticated and simple - it can be played by travesties in bourgeois penthouses, but it is also associated with the immigrant poor, laying tiles for penny wages. It's music for both drugged-up metropolitan show-offs and staid, domesticated housewives. It can be heard everywhere - everyone will feel its own way in it.

There are and have been many freaks who fancied themselves pioneers of such "non-divinity", "normal chaoticness" - Mercury, Bowie, Nomi and P-Orridge have all made their mark in these positions. Musically, of course, all this sound comes from Satie, Messiaen and Stockhausen, who "reconciled" man with his environment - urban, industrial, artificial, virtual, computerised. Nowadays, the image of the posthuman is slowly leaving the monstrous ghetto of "Paris fashion weeks" and crawling into the musical mainstream, combining musical extremism with visual extremism: Skinny Puppy, The Prodigy, Rammstein, Marilyn Manson, Die Antwoord, even Little Big - all of them are now fashionable poseurs whose musical side is noticeably inferior to their external pretentiousness. But Arka is different: here we hear, first of all, a talented composer-innovator expanding the boundaries of perception of popular music (not "pop"!).

But look at the booklet and again we see a twisted and distorted body, dressed in shiny rags, from under which the male breasts protrude with visible traces of vacuum attempts to transform them into female breasts. We see a grimace of inhumanity, showing the absence of teeth and sense in the eyes. We see some kind of non-, anti-, posthumanity. And all this is beyond kitsch. In this cesspit of images and images, it is difficult to identify a heroic transgender person who decisively pushes the civilisational conditioning of thinking, behaving and feeling. Rather, we are looking at a chewed-up transvestite from Soi6 who lacks money to continue his hormone injections and is no longer allowed to go to his home village....

If you start studying a musician with the main thing, with his music (and this is a test of maturity, objectivity, endurance and readiness to understand), and only then move on to the shell - only then will Arka reveal himself as a herald of not just some new music, but as a crystalliser, a designer, an honest herald of a new sensuality that is already everywhere. The album "KiCk i" is a conceptual masterpiece (we are just ashamed to admit it - especially here and now).

Yes, many capital city show-offs (and especially show-offs) can boast that they "liked" this album, as well as the image and visual preaching of Arka; they can boast about the lack of disgust that I had to overcome as a conservative music lover brought up on the very binary. Others, on the contrary, flaunt their inability to transcend such a slap in the face to public taste. But one thing is fashion or ideology masquerading as "authorial courage" or "traditional values", and quite another is the feeling of a colossal anthropological shift (felt by Arka) that makes the whole familiar picture of our world come apart at the seams, disintegrating into multiple and phantasmagorical identities enjoying their own uniqueness. Sometimes more than necessary... Almost always more than necessary!