Words matter. These are the best Arca Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Once you share what you’re communicating with your audience, then you can make more sense of it in a subconscious way.
With ‘Lonely Thug,’ I constructed a fantasy character who was very masculine and strong and almost threatening, but his demeanor belied some complication.
It’s impossible to exorcise the darkness out of you. We can pretend it’s not there until something bursts.
Arca was a project born immediately after I came out of the closet in New York.
If I gravitate toward someone, I bridge the gap between us somehow, and I accidentally maybe start seeing the world through their eyes.
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.
I exist in agreement with all the weird chaos, destruction, and agony that is undoubtedly part of the texture of being alive.
I’m an all-or-nothing person.
Internally, we have so many different parts, both positive and negative. And if you force them together, a spark comes out.
There’s something in glitchy music that I like to get lost in.
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.
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.
‘Xen,’ to me, was a necessary excursion inward, into myself. ‘Mutant’ is a response to it and is more extroverted.
I feel like, a lot of times, you make music, and you don’t really understand why until with hindsight.
When you’re uncomfortable, that’s when you learn something new about yourself.
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.
Hip-hop, at its best, is disruptive.
Speaking two languages fluently makes each language not so important.
Someone can only be vampiric if you allow it.
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.
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.
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.
I feel like every record I’ve ever made, on some level, is urgent.
Compulsion is a behaviour that short-circuits you out of feeling ashamed, and then you feel triple-ashamed afterwards.
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.
I never judge my song titles; I just spit them out.
I’ve learned to use things like softness and vulnerability as weapons against the things you feel ashamed of in yourself.
As a kid, I spent a lot of my mental energy hiding who I was and attempting to fit in.
I’ve never written a happy love song.
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.
I like contradictions, and I like exceptions. I don’t like rules and dogma.
