The Rare Experimental Musician to Embrace the Spotlight

Something about listening to Arca, arguably the most important experimental musician working today, reminds me of sitting in a hot car to avoid getting hit by fake bullets. That memory is from adolescence, when my group of male friends would spend whole days playing at a paintball course on the military base near where we lived. I participated, but I did not love the rude thwack of colorful projectiles exploding on my helmet. I did not love the pathetic feeling of missing all my shots. I tended to get eliminated early from matches, head to the car, and encase myself in the headphones of my portable CD player.

Some of those solitary moments were spent listening to Aphex Twin, the influential British electronic musician I, as a budding snob, had read about on the internet. Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James arranged electronic beats in that stimulated both hypnosis and hyperawareness. His music was disorienting and intriguing and generally inexplicable. Staring at James’s , I didn’t know if I loved all of what I was listening to. But I did love the feeling of escaping a suburban machismo competition for what felt like a rave in another reality.