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Since releasing her initial solo EPs in 2012 and working in the producers’ room for Kanye West’s 2013 album Yeezus, the Venezuelan-born artist Arca has made a name for herself using dextrous and playful mutations of electronic music’s familiar forms. Vocals appear on nearly all of her full-length works, but until her self-titled 2017 album, they were shrouded in icy digital effects. Arca allowed her to stake new ground as a singer, an artist who used the (mostly) unmodified sound of her voice to great effect alongside carefully orchestrated synthesizer production. Arca’s latest, a 62-minute single titled “@@@@@,” calls back to her early music both in its name and its slippery, wandering structure. But it integrates what she learned from molding raw vocals to her unmistakable sonics, resulting in some of her most delicate and astonishing work.

Framed as a radio broadcast by a character named Diva Experimental, “@@@@@” corrupts the listening environments into which it was released. Though it moves much like a mixtape, flitting from sequence to recognizable sequence (Arca calls them “quantums” and has named and demarcated them with timestamps), the song appears on streaming services as a solid hour of sound. If an algorithm eats it up and sorts it into a playlist, it will profoundly disturb the usual automated flow. If a listener hopes to hear a specific moment in the outsized track, they’ll have to pan through its length by hand, dropping their cursor in a precise spot on the progress bar like aiming the needle of a record player at a specific groove. By its nature, “@@@@@” reintroduces some measure of physicality to the listening process, disrupting the inscribed habit of letting Spotify’s impartial code do all the work.

Throughout the piece, moments of turbulence—stuttering drum beats, chopped and looped vocals, detuned synth leads, all familiar gestures in Arca’s music—give way to serene oases. The conceit behind the music proposes a world surveilled by omnipotent AI, a dystopian future that feels a heartbeat away from our own technocratic present. Fear courses through the music, punctuated by palpable relief. An ominous background drone gets crowded out by a sample of near-maniacal laughter; the panopticon looms, and the Diva frolics away from its gaze.

Arca invites moments of play and serenity even within the piece’s most oppressive tones. Her voice, muted and processed but recognizable in its grain, coos from beneath the roar of an electric guitar or a cascade of irregular beats. During the quantum “Psychosexual” (around the 23-minute mark), a digitally deepened and abraded voice invites the listener to “shake that pussy, bitch...I don’t care what genital you were born with/You can shake that pussy.” Pussy is rendered as a construct, a state of mind rather than of biology.

As in her previous work, the most compelling moments on “@@@@@” are also its most mournful. “No me lo digas, no lo digas,” Arca repeats near the track’s halfway point—don’t tell me that, don’t say that. Her voice is pitched up to an icy soprano, but unmistakable in rhythm and phrasing. Beneath her words, a chorus of background voices hums and a sparse beat lurches forward. “No lo digas/No lo digas/A menos que lo sientas/Porque no quiero que haya resentimiento.” Don’t say it unless you feel it, because I don’t want resentment. Her voice warps in the tangles of the machine she’s using to manipulate it. The quantum builds to an emotional peak, never losing its charred undertones but finding in them an opportunity for romantic vulnerability, a place to beg a partner not to dissemble, to lay bare their needs.

In the stunning climactic quanta, “Form,” Arca’s voice slithers beneath a membrane of effects—garbled, bedazzled, and Auto-Tuned. Her words come through only in glimpses, language forming and then dissipating. No percussion accompanies her, only languid washes of synthesizer. Her voice, in all its processing, shines through with immense tenderness. Her music has never sounded so warm or so intimate; never before has she beckoned quite like this.

Under seemingly omniscient surveillance, the question arises of how to communicate with others while remaining unintelligible to the hostile infrastructure that hosts our words. How do we find each other across gulfs that want us separate, alienated, desperate? Music, especially future-tuned music like Arca’s, slips beneath language. Its structures can be algorithmically analyzed, its emotional overtones guessed at by machines, but what it does to people, how it moves them and binds them to each other, can be unpredictable, harder for a computer to grasp. How do you survive in an environment spilling over with the stress of being watched? You look for what surprises you, for confusion, for those moments and objects which feel as if they hold the power to repel the gaze of the watcher.