It sounds strange to say it now, but when Arca’s &&&&& dropped out of the blue in the summer of 2013, it felt like we’d finally arrived in the future. The 25-minute mixtape sounded like a celebration of speed, of the infinity of musical information that the internet puts at our fingertips, of the wild emotional contrasts of a night spent staring down the barrel of one’s feed. And to top it all off, it played like one continuous track.
Though the Venezuelan producer’s source materials (grime, trap, glitch, dub) derived largely from club culture, &&&&& seemed to take a mischievous pleasure in disrupting the metric grid that dance music was built on—reveling in a sonic rubberiness that her previous two EPs, Stretch 1 and Stretch 2, had hinted at in name. Even the image that accompanied it—a bird-like creature with distended legs and translucent skin, courtesy of artist Jesse Kanda—seemed to suggest the birth of something new, quivering inside an amniotic sack of digital slime.
In truth, &&&&& was probably less the dawn of a novel genre of electronic music than the crystallization of a perspectival shift that had already been in the works for some time—and not just in the foggy rooms of GHE20G0TH1K, the joyfully irreverent LGBTQ and POC-focused dance party where Arca interned as a college student at NYU, though it probably started there. Where the cool kids of the late ’00s had met the rising tide of technology with a retreat to the obsolete sounds and formats of the past (think: the vinyl collector culture driving the global techno scene, the cassette tape fetish of the chillwave generation), a new generation of producers and DJs at the turn of the ’10s—armed with CDJs and sample packs and vape pens—seemed to see a new revolutionary potential.
It wasn’t just that the tools of electronic music production were becoming more widely accessible, or that the internet seemed to be having a democratizing effect on music, catapulting unknown artists to overnight fame; it felt like the old distinctions between high and low, underground and mainstream, club culture and pop culture, were finally on the verge of collapsing once and for all—and rattling the foundations of the culture industry in the process.
Arca had given only one formal interview to date, but what we did know about her seemed to situate her in the cultural crosshairs of that moment: Hood By Air, the avant-garde fashion brand co-founded by GHE20G0TH1K’s Shayne Oliver—and for which Arca would compose the occasional runway soundtrack—was galvanizing the worlds of streetwear and couture with its vision of a gender-fluid, multicultural future. Auteurist experimentalists like Mykki Blanco and FKA twigs, who’d also tapped Arca for her lurching, ballooning sound design, seemed poised to become crossover stars. Just a month before she unveiled &&&&& to the world, Kanye West had dropped the era-defining Yeezus, an album with enough crunchy synth strobes, expressively deformed samples, and blood-curdling screams to sound right at home at a semi-legal warehouse party at peak time. In what critics roundly heralded, somewhat paradoxically, as a sign that underground music had finally entered the big leagues, he’d enlisted Arca’s own services for the production, alongside fellow eclectic beatmakers like Evian Christ and Hudson Mohawke.
Even with so much in flux, it is hard to overstate how novel &&&&& felt when she uploaded it to SoundCloud. Though it was technically “released” by the label Hippos in Tanks, a home for brain-bending sounds that seemed to emblematize this “Wild West” moment in music, it didn’t actually seem to be for sale anywhere; and though Arca was billing it as a digital “mixtape,” a format that derived from hip-hop but that was becoming increasingly popular as a promotional vehicle in SoundCloud producer circles, it didn’t exactly seem to be teasing a more finished work to come (though Arca did…
Read More: Arca: &&&&& Album Review | Pitchfork