Arca: "Thievery"

“Breakbeat” is one of those words that often comes prepackaged with a specific adjective: dusty. Whether we’re talking about the excavated grooves of early hip hop or the beat science of drum & bass, breakbeats have usually been sourced from vinyl—old funk recordings—and fed through early, bit-gnashing samplers, and so they come with the attendant qualities of grimey old things.

The breakbeat that anchors “Thievery”, the first track to emerge from Venezuelan producer Arca‘s anticipated album Xen, is not dusty. It is slow, heavy chrome, the kind of breakbeat Michael Bay might erect if he needed a backbone for quivering synth knots and alien half-utterances. And that’s what’s striking about “Thievery”: the contrast between its radical sonics and its widescreen ambition. Like an air show, there are uncomfortable bursts of noise, sharp nose-dives, and plenty of space-age technology deployed in the service of generating oohs and aahs. When Arca finishes untangling those glassy synthesizer whorls, the song is carried out by a simple, staccato piano melody. It’s a tease of simplicity after minutes of chaos, a nice reminder that Arca’s just arranging tones and melodies like everyone else, something that “Thievery”‘s explosions can make you forget.

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