&&&&& [Vinyl]

Arca – &&&&& [Vinyl]

For anyone who can remember, Arcas &&&&& was a moment. Its 25-minute stretch of coiling, contorted grime and glitch; dub and hip hop dropped with the buzz of an impending co-production credit on Kanye Wests Yeezus in 2013. It included cuts of sound and beats that were too weird for that pop project, while becoming a piece of experimental art that what would come to define what is by now broadly known as a post-club sound. Its music that is as visceral as it is experimental; made as much for the mind, as it is for the body. Released with no warning seven years ago, &&&&& became a bridge between Alejandra Ghersis time partying and collaborating with her queer peers, while still living in New York to the next stage of her career releasing on Mute in London. Shed go from making beats for rapper Mykki Blanco and fashion label Hood By Air, posting lurching bass reworkings of pop hits on YouTube, and producing her first fluid mixtapes with DIS Magazine, to finishing off this seminal mixtape on the synths in Daniel Millers studio. After dropping three impressive EPs the year before, &&&&& marked a transition. Continuations and extrapolations of material from Stretch 1 and Stretch 2 appeared in the mangled RnB sampling of Century and Arcas signature vocal layering in the pitched flow of Waste. Along with the fluttering, muted heartbeat of Obelisk, and the lumbering piano chords of Mother, fourteen sonic sketches were elegantly woven together into a single, downloadable whole. As Alejandras course turned toward moving to Europe from the United States, &&&&& became a remarkable challenge to the form of the mixtape, which was a relatively new trend taking hold of the online-oriented underground at the turn of the 2010s. But where many, if not most mixtapes where treated simply as a showcase of individual tracks presaging a more official release to come, &&&&& was a complete piece in its own right. I wanted to make something that was my best work, Alejandra says about a record that has stood the test of time, I listen to it very fondly today. The release is fully remastered by Enyang Urbiks, with artwork by Jesse Kanda, and etched vinyl

TRACKS
SIDE A:
01. Knot
02. Harness
03. Fossil
04. Feminine
05. Anaesthetic
06. Coin
07. Century
08. Mother
09. Hallucinogen
10. Pinch
11. DM True
12. Waste
13. Pure Anna
14. Obelisk