Arca - Desafío

Venezuela has never been central to contemporary music. Even if it has fine bands like Los Amigos Invisibles and La Vida Bohème, this country's music has always been outshined by other Latin countries like Argentina, México, and even Colombia and Chile. But in the middle of this decade, no other Latin producer is doing what Alejandro Ghersi right now, not only in his own musical project, Arca, but also at producing two of the most avant-garde artist female artists: Björk and FKA Twigs,

In his third album as Arca, Ghersi goes deep in creating a narrative of the mix between sex and abuse, pleasure and pain. In Desafío (Spanish for "Challenge"), he takes his experimentation with dark electronic sounds a step further, if wonderful tracks of his previous albums, like Thievery, suggested a decadent and creepy mood, here he uses his falsetto voice to almost create an operetta that is orchestrated by pulsating synths, discordant strings and alarming sirens. In his poetics, Ghersi uses contradictory images while he pleads "Love me, tie me and behead me". He is never explicit (well, actually that depends on how shocking you find the words "penetrate me"), but there's an implicit imagery of blood and body fluids underlying there, it's aggressive and disruptive, showing the two sides of lust and desire, the opposition of tenderness and raw instinct.

This bold and inventive effort show us an artist very compromised with his craft, he dares to go to places where other musicians rarely dare to go to show us the endless possibilities that sonic art has to offer, because even if his music it's not the most accessible to everybody, it pushes boundaries and challenges the listener. People can reject Ghersi's music, but in his case, it is in the same way on the rejection that we could experiment by contemplating a Francis Bacon painting, reading an Elfriede Jelinek book or watching a Michael Haneke film, because it touches fibers that are almost unknown to us, and let us peek through the aesthetic of violence and decadence, the parts of ourselves that we try hardest to shut down.