‘Thievery’ is taken from the forthcoming Arca album ‘Xen’ available November 3rd (4th in US) on Mute and is an artistic project in collaboration with Jesse Kanda.
Japanese-born, Canadian-raised Jesse Kanda and venezuelan producer Arca, aka Alejandro Ghersi met online together on an artistic community when Kanda was 15 and Arca was 13. They know each other in real seven years later and start to collaborate.
In The Fader‘s new story on Ghersi, Kanda describes Xen as such:
Alejandro is very multi-sided as a personality, and he can sometimes become what we call Xen, jokingly. And it’s this very sassy, confident, very feminine side of him. And it’s like, ‘Ohhhh, she’s out,’ we say—mainly when we’re smoking weed, just fucking around. ‘Xen’s out.’ And he’s, like, going crazy, changing his outfits or whatever. That’s Xen inside of him. It’s this kind of ghost. A spirit. Alejandro’s spirit.
On his Coming Out Arca talks about himself
“For some reason I would write all these love songs, even though I didn’t know what love meant. I wasn’t even very sexually charged back then. In fact, I was very, very closeted. I knew from a very, very early age that I was gay, although in the social environment in Venezuela, you don’t ever let that be known. I was kind of always prepared to never come out…I just imagined myself marrying and just playing that role, I think. I remember praying for it to stop. I prayed that I would become straight or something…
“[Coming Out] was like jumping off a cliff…My survival instincts—everything I’d trained myself to do— were telling me not to do it, but something inside of me drove me forward. You jump off a cliff because you know that when you land, and you crash like a bunch of Legos and you fall apart, you’ll pick up the pieces that are left of you. But you don’t reattach the ones that are not useful to you, that don’t feel like they’re you. Every time you jump, you have this opportunity—this really beautiful, fertile, uncomfortable period—where you’re not whole, but your essence is helping you attach things onto you, things that inspire you, things that you think are full of life. That’s kind of like what happened to me.”
The 24-year-old electronic artist, who has worked with Kanye West and FKA Twigs, is co-producing with Björk to complete her first LP since 2011. He lives with the photographer and multimedia artist Daniel Sannwald
Website: arca1000000.com
Facebook: facebook.com/arca1000000
