You could be forgiven for expecting Arca’s set at the Pitchfork Music Festival to be a somber one. The Venezuelan producer’s recent self-titled album plays like a dirge for a faintly remembered lover. It’s the first Arca project to feature prominent vocals, which often take the shape of wails and jagged gasps or carry the rich inflections of the Venezuelan folk songs called tonadas. The album Arca conjures profound desire and profound suffering, but the producer’s show on the festival’s Blue Stage on Friday pushed aside that weight in favor of play, camp, and welcome confusion.
While Arca’s first two albums, 2014’s Xen and 2015’s Mutant, worked through bodily incarnations of identity—Xen is named for a feminine force that Arca says he’s felt running through him since childhood—this spring’s Arca zooms in on the festering welt at the intersection of desire and violence. He pleads with invisible lovers to be killed, tortured, or subsumed as an act of love. The simultaneous beauty and harshness of the music can be disorienting or even comic—at one point, a quietly lovelorn ballad breaks open into an instrumental track consisting only of whip sounds. During his set, Arca teased out the comedy and beauty of extreme contrast, dancing around the stage to screams and distortion like his song had just come on at the club.
