Bleep

With the 2013 mixtape &&&&&, Arca announced a bold new force in electronic music. Originally released in collaboration with celebrated imprint Hippos In Tanks, the record’s innovative productions work both as a series of short vignettes and a coherent whole, with tracks and sounds morphing into one another as the collection progresses.

Even several years later, and after Arca has gone on to collaborate with a variety of artists including the likes of Björk and Kelela, &&&&& makes for hugely arresting listening. Sonically she twists up an array of contemporaneous electronically-based musical styles here. The sounds of trap, cloud rap, deconstructed club and the hypnagogic sonics of fellow Hippos In Tanks artists Hype Williams and James Ferraro are moulded into strange new forms by Arca here.

Much like Jesse Kanda’s mutated forms which grace the covers of many Arca records, the aesthetic of &&&&& is at once slightly sinister yet also strangely alluring. There are also a few points where Arca manages to find beauty amid the turbulence - ‘Coin’ is a beatific bit of off-beat hip-hop while ‘Obelisk’ plays with sounds of dream-pop and neo-soul in a manner which anticipates what Yves Tumor would later explore on LPs like Heaven To A Tortured Mind.

Arca’s debut mixtape &&&&& set the Venezuelan artist on the way to becoming one of the most important electronic musicians of our times.