Review Summary: The "moments in-between" are sometimes the most crucially important.
The concept of Mutation was the name of the game for the two juggernauts of experimental music in 2015. Daniel Lopatin of the venerated Oneohtrix Point Never project was inspired by the entropic mechanisms involved in process of mutation. During a track-by-track breakdown of his newest album, Garden of Delete, Lopatin explained to Vice’s Emilie Friedlander that “mutation on a biological level is as punk as anything can be—it just flies in the face of order.” His sentiment is accurately reflected throughout the album—namely in the slimy blast-beats of “Sticky Drama” or the masterfully off-kilter rhythmic and timbral crevices of “Ezra.” Alejandro Ghersi, AKA Arca, on the other hand, is stimulated by the transitory aspect of mutation; things that are in the process of morphing into other things. Arca is interested in isolating the amorphous spaces in between the discrete, and trying to structure them in an affecting way. What Arca crafts on Mutant reconciles, confronts, and celebrates moments of emotional and social flux. In his own words, "those in-between states where you can talk to people about things that maybe aren't OK to talk about otherwise—things that are taboo or repressed within us, things that we would never admit to ourselves." The remarkable process of shape-shifting is one that remains constant and well composed on “Mutant,” resulting in an album that feels even more whole and poised than Lopatin’s G.O.D; which makes astounding strides forward in compositional technique in its own right.
The vigor with which Arca’s goal of unceasing metamorphosis is pursued sounds almost quixotic to those who don’t listen carefully. Arca has this amazing way of structuring his music such that it always morphs into something you would never expect, let alone imagine. The frenzied noise-gates and SOPHIE-esque funhouse mirror rush of percussion halfway through opening track “Alive” make the track sound like it’s teetering on the edge of a chord progression beyond the melody repeated from the very beginning, but instead of going down that path, the track’s frantic effervescence gradually wanes into a subdued ambient passage. Notice how I never said that the music “resolves,” and therein lies the central fulcrum of “Mutant.” No sounds on this album ever “resolve,” or coalesce into anything other than something different from whatever point it started from.
The record’s discontinuity is so immaculately forged that it creates a sense of continuity unto itself. The title track begins with seismic waves of arrhythmic, concrete-cracking sub-bass, and ends with an unexpectedly trite chord progression from a synthesizer that’s anything but esoteric. Given where the track starts, it makes no sense as to how it gets to where it goes, but by the end you still feel like you got somewhere, and it’s uncanny. Having said that, segues between tracks are imperceptible—listening to the album without glancing at the track list makes it feel like a dense, formless blob. However, paying attention to the track list as the album plays gives “Mutant” a quantum particle-like quality in that how it behaves depends on how you’re looking at it. Far more details reveal themselves on the smaller scale by paying attention to when the tracks change while listening.
One of the album’s most fun features is the vast assortment of timbres and textures that Arca uses across the track list, but unlike with Daniel Lopatin’s music, you don’t need to be cognizant of what he’s using and when he’s using it to “get it.” When Lopatin used midi stand-up bass on “Ezra” or the Chipspeech software on “Sticky Drama,” the associations we have with these kitschy sounds help to cultivate an enjoyable irony. “Oh wow, I cannot believe he is using these sounds, that is hilarious,” the OPN listener thinks to himself. A lot of Lopatin’s artistry lies in his self-aware utility of sonic artifacts that would be considered silly (or RuneScapian) in other contexts. The great thing about “Mutant” is that sonically speaking, it’s a much more singular album than “GOD,” and Arca makes it engaging for the listener in a completely different way. By serendipitously mixing familiar timbres with the more abstract ones, the listener isn’t lost in the void. This is done well on “Sinner,” where a foreboding piano and eerie siren sound effect feel like the lights at the end of a murky, static-y tunnel of percussion that would otherwise be too relentless. But beyond the elegant contrast of textures on this record, some of the sounds heard extend the existing sense of the surreal. Some parts that come to mind are, on the title track, the part shortly following the introduction that sounds like squealing air escaping a neon balloon. Another that comes to mind is the beautifully reverberous pealing of chime/bell/string chords on “Gratitud,” which I first heard on an early morning (5-6 AM) drive from Dallas to Houston. The sun had just begun to rise, and the way that the rays of light illuminated the wide open Texas sky I drove against created one of those perfect moments that music sometimes gives to listeners that I won’t forget any time soon.
No arrangement of words in this review, however intricately descriptive, can possibly impart the endlessly detailed nuance of “Mutant” in a way that corresponds one-to-one with what you would be able to experience by listening. Trying to describe or understand this record using words alone is like trying to design an aircraft that flies without using any significant figures while making measurements, running calculations, and sketching blueprints. Objects as discrete as integers cannot be used in aerospace engineering to construct an airplane that flies reliably. In the same way, English morphemes cannot be written and read in a sufficient way that constructs a satisfactory assessment and appreciation of this album’s genius. It is the case that this album, more so than almost any album from 2015, must be heard to be understood.
