Arcas Xen may have been released in 2014, but its re-release with bonus tracks in 2015 means that it has been included here. Whether that is cheating or not is fairly irrelevant, as Arca's Xen is the most important and innovative electronic release of the past two years. The only reason it misses out on top spot here is, effectively, because the original album is from last year. Arca's game-changing debut album deserves to be heard and discussed at length. Xen is an abstract release with textures that, at face value, seem wilfully non-representational. Xen, according to Arca, is a part of his fragmented identity that comes out in much of his work. He is a fan of the writing of Judith Butler, believing that gender is a performance and that queer artists must break down the notion that sexuality is black and white. He rejects the term "alter-ego" to define Xen, as she is actually a part of him that is not restricted by the limitations that clumsy language place upon defining such an abstract entity. She is "more joyous and messy" than a mere other him that he's performing. Xen (pictured in the album artwork and in Arca's visual accompaniments, all produced by friend and collaborator Jesse Kanda) is a source of inspiration for Arca and his sound encompasses the complex emotions and ambiguities that comprise his relationship to her. He draws upon the blurry love-hate relationship that comes from the fact that "her mere existence is kind of repulsive and attractive at once". The most natural format for him to express these nuances of his inner self is through the highly digital textures that define his work, and ironically it was these digital textures that resulted in a bemused reaction to the record from critics. Yet this simply reveals how futuristic and experimental Arca's textural approach is - reviewers failed to acknowledge its emotionality and intimacy precisely because the producer is attempting to explore those sensations through his abstract, digital soundscapes. Effectively, Xen is a sonic conceptual painting. It is non-representational in a traditional sense, but instead offers abstract images of the conflicting emotions that Arca experiences while admiring, rejecting and ultimately embodying his ungendered "other" self. The "haphazard" nature of the albums structure, swinging wildly from one style to another to the bemusement of reviewers, is absolutely intentional. Delicate keyboards clash with aggressive strings and sexualised beats. These confrontational mood-swings and juxtapositions represent fluctuating queer identity, while their digital textures evoke the technological symbioses of contemporary existence. As Arca has suggested, the multiplicity of his "self" is not straightforward or constantly enjoyable. It can be painful and it generates many simultaneous contrasting emotions. The instability of Xen which shifts from beauty, to sorrow, to sexual aggression reflects the ungraspable nature of identity and gender in a world where everyone, but particularly those that identify as queer, inhabits multiple identities simultaneously. Whether or not reviewers grasped this malleable, distorted and contortionistic approach, the fact is that Xen attempts to do things that very few electronic albums have successfully done previously. It explores organic human sensations and emotions through the sounds of machines and technology. Unlike, say, industrial music, which emphasises the mechanical nature of its technological sounds, Arca seeks to highlight the shape-shifting humanity of a world populated by both people and their digital devices through ungraspable, discomfiting electronic sound-shapes. Like it or not, Xen is one of the most important albums in recent years.
