“What’s up, Manchester?” yells 24-year-old Alejandro Ghersi, aka Arca, before sensually removing his clothing, in front of a screen image of a gyrating male nude. Moments later, he’s striding down a catwalk and aggressively rapping in Spanish, wearing little but PVC thigh-length boots and women’s lingerie. Then he clambers down and walks through the crowd, towering over and rapping in the faces of amused, and perhaps faintly alarmed, members of the audience.
Known mainly so far for his production work with FKA twigs, Kanye West and Björk – who is in the crowd – the young Venezuelan is an unlikely but thrilling figure to be found interacting with the mainstream. His acclaimed album, Xen, is named after the female alter ego that offered sanctuary when growing up gay. His live show is a sensorial barrage of colliding extremes – masculinity and femininity, pulverised hip-hop and sublime symphonic sounds. Accompanying retina-melting imagery is provided by Arca’s childhood online friend, Jesse Kanda, who sits grinning at a laptop, in a dress.
At times, it’s hard to know quite what is going on. Is that a 1970s lava lamp or an intestine? A dancing body or a male sexual organ? Similarly, everything from depth charges to fractured electronica is put through Arca’s laptop/keyboard blender, but whenever it becomes uncomfortable, the beautiful melody of Sad Bitch or the sublimely dissonant, cut-up pop of Brokeup emerges to mesmerise again.
In these conservative times, it’s refreshing to be confronted by something that asks so many questions – about sexuality, beauty, music and performance – and for all his avant-garde originality, Arca is an entertainer. The most incongruous sounds are his polite “thank you”s after every song and he exits, to much cheering, with his girdle on the floor.
