Self-portrait by Arca

Pitchfork: It seems like there's a new aesthetic being developed by artists like you, Lotic, Rabit, Elysia Crampton, and Total Freedom that's heavy on stretched and plasticized sounds, explosions, breaking glass. Most of the artists affiliated with this sound are also queer. Do you think that's a coincidence, or is there a conscious attempt to create a new, experimental queer aesthetic in electronic music?

A: I attribute that explosive cacophony—that soul-baring quality—to Total Freedom and Shayne Oliver and Venus X’s GHE20G0TH1K parties in New York, which was the complete birthplace for that style. I always call Shayne my gay mother. When I moved from Venezuela to New York when I was 17 and went to that party—it was like a modular synth patching all this energy into a route that could be catalyzed and harmonized and amplified. Meeting all these individuals who were so free and comfortable with themselves was an important part of my musical journey. I remember going alone for my first GHE20G0TH1K. It was in some basement, the cover was like $3, and I was there too early because I was really nerdy. I was blown the fuck away. They were playing, like, slowed down hardstyle with a Rihanna a capella over it. It was about exploding highbrow and lowbrow.

Shayne was playing the CDJs like an instrument. He was using cue points and cutting up the tracks and using it like a drum machine before anyone ever did that. Shayne invented a style of DJing that was so confrontational and aggressive and euphoric, like clashing up an industrial song with a Three 6 Mafia track. This completely punk energy—Shayne is the king of that.

And then Total Freedom is the king of painting through chaos. He pioneered a way of saying something really quiet in the middle of a thunderstorm. He's exploding people's eardrums, and what comes after that is sweet and tender. One of the most magical moments I've had in a club was when he played glass crashing for five minutes. Everyone stopped dancing. And then he played a YouTube rip of Beyoncé singing the national anthem, drowning the whole room in echo. Everyone lost their minds. It was so insanely free. That was a miracle to witness. That's why he's so magical to me. Just being himself, Total Freedom taught me a whole vocabulary of chaos.

Total Freedom: Rinse FM Mix (via SoundCloud)

Pitchfork: You use a lot of voices on the album, but they're rarely distinguishable as voices.

A: I have an interesting relationship with my voice. When I was 14 or 15, I was making pop music and singing over all of it. I had an unspoken treaty with myself to never lie in my lyrics, so, for a long time, when I wrote love songs, I would use genderless pronouns, like "dear" and "darling"—like some kind of granny! At some point, to get more popular in high school, I started pretending that I was straight, and saying "girl" or "chica." When I went to college, I pulled the plug on all of it, because I didn't want to lie to myself, and I went into a cocoon. When I came out of that cocoon, interestingly enough, I came back with instrumental music. And then I slowly added vocals again—and that became Stretch 2. I had a whole record after Stretch 2 that was more hip-hop-based, with tons of vocal manipulation, but it felt like it wasn't something that only I could say, so I pulled the plug again. I give myself tons of freedom in how to engage with my voice because I respect it a lot.

There is also a particular frustration that I have with language. It's so clumsy. There's often two words that are close in meaning, yet what I'm trying to say is in between them, or it might be a little more layered and nuanced. Having this conversation with you is exciting, because I can feel you resonate, even though we're on the phone. That's really beautiful to me. And the reason I'm feeling that is more because on your breathing and your intonation than the actual words. It struck me at some point that the things I wanted to say had to be wordless. I had to renounce words in order to go deep into thepractice of making materials and textures that would express what I'm trying to say more accurately. But I do love voices so much that I will use them and manipulate them. The presence of a human voice in a piece of music is really exciting, even if it's just someone's breathing.

Pitchfork: I thought I heard the sound of a wolf breathing on the album.

A: Totally. I live with a dog named Hank, and he's snarling in there.

Arca: "Soichiro" (via SoundCloud)

Pitchfork: The track "Soichiro" is somehow named after your friend and visual collaborator Jesse Kanda, right?

A: Yeah, that's his Japanese middle name, which I think is really badass. It's like a Yakuza name. And the track "Snakes" is a nod to Björk, because we're both snakes in the Chinese Zodiac. I mention this because I'm keen to be really explicit about howmy way of seeing the world is influencedby the people I love and have around me. If Xen was me sending a letter into the depths of myself, then Mutant is a big celebration. It's more social and open.

Something about the way "Soichiro" quivers, and the way it was really bold, reminded me of Jesse. Jesse and I met when I was 14 and he was 15, so talking about him is like trying to talk about your left leg or something—you have so many memories with your left leg, but where do you start?

Pitchfork: There's a contradiction in some of your work together. On one hand, it celebrates a fluidity between genders, but there's also an element of the grotesque to a lot of it.

A: It's been a growth process for each of us to understand why we find certain things beautiful. And if we do find something beautiful, we'll chase it, because you want to understand yourself and what your psyche is creating. The [“Vanity”] video is like a whole other level of insanity. I'm just preparing for it to be taken off YouTube.

A lot of me figuring out how to love myself more involves finding the things that I'm ashamed of and looking them right in the eye. And something I always find beautiful about Jesse's work is that he finds beauty without any calculation. People say that his work is dark, but he never sees it as such. For him it's all almost about educating people to process why they feel disgust.