With Arca singing largely in Spanish and reeling off the names of Venezuelan states on ‘Tiro’, it often feels rooted in the country where the producer grew up. Opening this new collection of ‘Kick’ records, ‘ii’ draws heavily on reggaetón, before warping its rhythms with menacing washes of synthesiser, and wonky vocal manipulation. While ‘i’ hopped between choral hypnotism (‘Calor’) and harshly robotic menace (‘Rip the Slit’), its successors present more distinct worlds.
Right down to the hugely varied sonic palette, these releases wilfully resist any sense of definition. “Tee hee, bitch”.Ī year later, Arca now presents the previously announced trilogy ‘Kick ii’ (which was released last Friday, a week early), ‘Kick iii’ and ‘Kick iiii’ – along with a surprise fourth, ‘iiiii’ – to complete a giddily vast new quartet of records. “ What a treat it is to be nonbinary, ma chérie,” Arca declared on its opener.
Often it was filled with the joy of scrawling out the destiny etched out by a society structured around binaries and fixed gender. Released last year, its first instalment, ‘Kick i’ – which featured the likes of Shygirl, Rosalía, Björk and the late SOPHIE – moved away from the discordant unease of her three earlier albums, and was Arca’s most accessible work yet. The ‘Kick’ album series, the Venezuelan producer Arca has previously explained to i-D, begins with the idea of a “prenatal kick that instance of individuation, that unmistakable moment where parents realise their baby is not under their control but has its own will to live, its own impulses that are erratic and unpredictable, separate to their own.”
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