ARCA DJ & JESSE KANDA AV
A Perturbing Reverie
Those familiar with Arca, the Venezuelan DJ and producer associated with acts such as FKA Twigs and Bjork, may not have been too thrown by last night’s DJ set accompanied by visuals from collaborator Jesse Kanda, but for others it may have been stomach- and ear-churningly hard work.
Sporting a blonde pony tail – as in pony tail – and putting all of humanity’s thighs to shame in a pair of suspenders and not much else, Arca switched between decks and the front of the stage, while Jesse Kanda sat to the left absorbed in his computer screen. Beginning with a heartbeat, layered over with a siren, then followed by a giggling baby, the screen above the stage followed a lone Brahman cow as it wandered Indian streets. Discordant beats opened up from the restraint of the quiet start and Arca took to the front of the stage to pace back and forth singing a hellish scat of repeated vocal pops and giggles looped over one another, while a bunch of white flowers bled on the video behind him.
The video footage flipped to a bewildering mishmash of footage taken from what appeared to be a fishing trawler. Deep house beats overladen with glitchy squeaks, high-pitched female vocals and industrial tics segued into a Latin-vibe with Arca repeating “aishiteiru”(I love you). Things built up and up into a hard-thumping, growly beat which crescendoed and down into a wiggly groove.
And it was here where the discombobulation began to creep in. Rather than what many may have anticipated (more build-ups and breakdowns) Arca placed an interminable “brincar” (skip/jump) over the speakers and paced back and forth while the body of pig decomposed in the background. And so began the promise of things to come, only for them to be withheld – a sonic edging, if you will. While watching a leech suck blood, a goat giving birth, and then something so close-up, abstract, and viscerally pink that people’s mind’s grossed themselves out more than the actual imagery, the music took on a dark industrial atmosphere with discordant beats and breathy pops segueing into sugary pop and out again.
It was a challenging show, something fitting from an avant-garde where we need to suffer for our pleasure – a sadistic DJ playing to a masochist audience? What we caught lacked the ethereal pain of the Arca album, but it was instead a decadent techno that produced the same feelings of discomfort and nausea as watching a Carcass show, and that is high-praise indeed.
