“I want to be interested in the music I make until I die. That’s more important to me than the size of my audience.”
― Arca
“It’s grotesque to believe the body we inhabit we want to inhabit 24/7.”
― Arca
“Speaking two languages fluently makes each language not so important.”
― Arca
“When I was younger, I used to say, ‘I’m not making music. I am getting catharsis for emotion.’ For me, vulnerability is an act of uncovering. It’s a revealing: the idea of putting aside your armour and allowing pain to enter.”
― Arca
“It’s not about living my life as a boy or a girl – but I’m also not trans – it’s just that one day, you wake up feeling masculine, and one day, you wake up feeling feminine. The flickering in between those two states is what’s most fertile for me.”
― Arca
“I think, with every kind of creature and every kind of human, there is no better. We’re all just mutations, and I think that each mutation should be celebrated.”
― Arca
“When I was about 13, and I would write in my journal, I’d be like, ‘I just watched ‘Spice World,’ the Spice Girls movie, and I loved it.’ Sometimes I would sign them with the name Xen.”
― Arca
“I think there’s a certain poetry to having your body reflect what you feel inside of you. Perhaps you have a feeling that’s so pure, or overwhelming inside of you that your body disfigures to it – contortions match your confusion.”
― Arca
“Internally, we have so many different parts, both positive and negative. And if you force them together, a spark comes out.”
― Arca
“Someone can only be vampiric if you allow it.”
― Arca
“It’s impossible to exorcise the darkness out of you. We can pretend it’s not there until something bursts.”
― Arca
“With song titles, I try to keep a healthy sense of humor while saying something at the same time.”
― Arca
“With ‘Lonely Thug,’ I constructed a fantasy character who was very masculine and strong and almost threatening, but his demeanor belied some complication.”
― Arca
“That’s been a huge recurring thing in growing up – allowing two things to exist in the same space even though, instinctively, they might not be designated to.”
― Arca
“It’s very human to try to put things into boxes, and it’s hard for us to reconcile with grey areas, and yet somehow, that’s the area I find the most poetic, the juiciest.”
― Arca
“When I sit down to make music, I try to enter a flow; I always open a blank session and just make something that I feel like making. Only after a piece of music is done does my frontal cortex allow me to organize what might be trying to come out of my subconscious.”
― Arca
“When I was making ‘Xen,’ I was surprised at how introverted some of the songs were. I wasn’t deliberately trying to go quieter, but I had to embrace it.”
― Arca
“Arthur Russell is very important to me on many levels, and when I read Tim Lawrence’s biography on him, ‘Hold on to Your Dreams,’ one of the things I took away was: first thought, best thought. I live by that when I make my own music.”
― Arca
“I’ve never written a happy love song.”
― Arca
“I exist in agreement with all the weird chaos, destruction, and agony that is undoubtedly part of the texture of being alive.”
― Arca
“Being knee-deep in sadness or suffering and refusing to look down – to me, that represents something more powerful than someone who’s never gone through difficulty.”
― Arca
“I want to make music until I die.”
― Arca
“I’m an all-or-nothing person.”
― Arca
“I never judge my song titles; I just spit them out.”
― Arca
“I’ve learned to use things like softness and vulnerability as weapons against the things you feel ashamed of in yourself.”
― Arca
“Compulsion is a behaviour that short-circuits you out of feeling ashamed, and then you feel triple-ashamed afterwards.”
― Arca
“We try and banish whole inner realms. Sometimes, you have to touch the thing inside you’re most afraid of and see what happens when you touch it rather than look away from it all the time.”
― Arca
“A mother isn’t someone who does it on purpose; mothers are who they are, and just by existing, they affect the way other people negotiate with the environment and with themselves.”
― Arca
“I feel like, a lot of times, you make music, and you don’t really understand why until with hindsight.”
― Arca
“Theatricality – that’s where you get catharsis. The Greeks went to see drama because they felt like this wasn’t happening to them.”
― Arca
“When I was young, I put on performances for my family and my parents where I would dance like a woman, singing a really exaggerated woman’s vocal in front of my whole family.”
― Arca
“I feel like every record I’ve ever made, on some level, is urgent.”
― Arca
“Making music is an inward and outward gesture at once. I make it because I’m communing with a side of myself that might help me look people in the eye. But at the same time, I’m reaching out, in a way.”
― Arca
“I kind of roll my eyes when people say they make music for themselves or they make art just for themselves, because, maybe in their head, what that means is that they’re making it for someone who they don’t think is real. Their audience isn’t real. But it’s still a communicative act. It’s still an outward manifestation of longing.”
― Arca
“I’ve learned a lot from every musical collaboration I’ve ever had, but there’s something about my relationship with Bjork that is special to me.”
― Arca
“Making music can get so emotional that, if you don’t set limits for yourself, it can push you or the person that you’re making music with to a breaking point.”
― Arca
“It’s a really deep and layered psychological situation – making music with someone – if they’re trying to make something real and personal. It’s almost like dating: you allow yourself to be consumed by the other – not in a bad way, but in a way that happens in nature.”
― Arca
“When I work with other people, I have to try to make their vision happen. With my own, I don’t think about it. The music has its own kind of agency.”
― Arca
“The first CD I bought was Brandy and Monica’s ‘The Boy Is Mine.’”
― Arca
“I knew that I would have to leave Venezuela in order to figure out who I was.”
― Arca
“Arca was a project born immediately after I came out of the closet in New York.”
― Arca
“The only thing that mattered to me with ‘Xen’ was setting things up against each other in an uncomfortable way. If there’s a really soft piece of music, and then you’re hit by a painful explosive sound, your brain does this funny somersault trying to make sense of why this happened. And at that very moment, your brain is malleable.”
― Arca
“When you’re uncomfortable, that’s when you learn something new about yourself.”
― Arca
“I guess all of us have a little bit of both masculinity and femininity, and bridging the gap between those two things is really fertile.”
― Arca
“If you try and kind of focus on hope, but you know what it’s like to be in the dark, then hope is more meaningful.”
― Arca
“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.”
― Arca
“I think for the longest time I used to be kind of embarrassed that if I hung out with someone that had a really, really strong personality, I would end up accidentally catching myself talking like them.”
― Arca
“If I gravitate toward someone, I bridge the gap between us somehow, and I accidentally maybe start seeing the world through their eyes.”
― Arca
“As a kid, I spent a lot of my mental energy hiding who I was and attempting to fit in.”
― Arca
“I like contradictions, and I like exceptions. I don’t like rules and dogma.”
― Arca
“’Xen,’ to me, was a necessary excursion inward, into myself. ‘Mutant’ is a response to it and is more extroverted.”
― Arca
“I’ve come to the conclusion that the best way for me to grow is in a very self-forgiving way: to take a risk and, in response to how a record pans out, take a risk in the opposite charge.”
― Arca
“When I met Bjork, I felt like it was a friendship first; it was like an oxygen you get from a person you only can exist with symbiotically. It’s one of the most beautiful relationships I’ve had. She is incredible.”
― Arca
“Hip-hop, at its best, is disruptive.”
― Arca
“I hoped that being attracted to men might go away, but what I never ever hoped would go away were the feelings of femininity, and of softness and fragility, that could live inside of a boy. They were private, but they were mine.”
― Arca
“There’s something in glitchy music that I like to get lost in.”
― Arca
“Arca means ‘box’ or ‘wooden’ in very old Spanish. It’s a ceremonial container where you store jewelry or valuables, an empty space that can become pregnant with whatever music or meaning I give to it.”
― Arca
“I have a very healthy dose of scepticism towards what identity is and what personas are, maybe because of my life journey. Identity is something so malleable.”
― Arca
“Once you share what you’re communicating with your audience, then you can make more sense of it in a subconscious way.”
― Arca
“I always make a point to make my records different. Let’s say I have a record that’s influenced by hip-hop in an abstract way; for the next record, I’d try not to do that. They are all connected in a personal way but it’s important not to repeat myself, because then I can always learn something about myself through my work.”
― Arca
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