搬运译Pitchfork评Arca 2017年同名专辑《Arca》(Best New Music)

搬运自：网易云音乐专栏【All About Music】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整）

翻译：Bromantique_Victime

The more Alejandro Ghersi gives of himself, the larger his music as Arca grows. His latest feels both intimate and expansive, a connection between his melodic past and a chaotic future.

Alejandro Ghersi在探索自身这一层面上付出的越多，他作为Arca创作出的音乐就越庞大。他的最新作品给人既亲切、私密而又宽阔，是联结他旋律性的过去和混乱未来的绳索。

This album began long before Alejandro Ghersi became Arca. In the nascent stages of his career, Ghersi made dreamy synth pop songs as a teenager in Venezuela under the name Nuuro. These love sketches, sung in Spanish and English, showcased an upbeat singing voice and brightly colored electronic landscapes redolent of Postal Service or Passion Pit. What he did as Nuuro and what he now does as Arca couldn’t seem any more different. Arca’s sound is one of chaos and contortions, further defined by the unsettling visuals of morphing bodies suspended in space he made with longtime collaborator Jesse Kanda. But when Ghersi debuted his newfound (or perhaps rediscovered) singing voice on Arca, it felt like a wormhole opened up—one that connected his prehistoric past to his visions of the distant future.

这张专辑在Alejandro Ghersi成为“Arca”的很久之前就开始投入制作了。在他职业生涯的开始阶段，Ghersi在委内瑞拉以Nuuro的名字创作着梦幻般的合成器流行乐曲。这些用西班牙语或英语演绎的爱情小品，揭示了一个有着欢快乐声和艳丽色彩的电子景观，让人不禁联想到The Postal Service或Passion Pit。而他作为Nuuro所做的和他如今作为Arca所做的，似乎并没有什么不同。Arca的声音混乱而扭曲，Arca的形象也渐渐地在他和长期合作伙伴Jesse Kanda所制作的悬浮在空间中的变异体那令人不安的视觉效果中被进一步定义。但是，当Ghersi在《Arca》中首次展示他新探索的（或许是重新获得的）歌声时，感觉像是开辟了一个虫洞——联结了他已成追忆的过去和他对遥远未来的幻想。

“Piel,” the first song Arca released from this album, felt shockingly new. He hums at first, intimating the cadence of a bedtime lullaby, easing a listener into the song. Then, seconds later, he sings towards the heavens, and acidic drips of distortion, bass, and chorus rumble in the background. The melody feels worn and romantic, and his voice slinks along to the beat like an old prayer. Finally, the music dissolves into a puddle of oozing beats and jumbled clanks. When you listen to “Piel,” there is no question you’re hearing an Arca song. And when you go searching for the answer to why that is, you keep digging into Ghersi’s timeline, trying to figure out how he could make something that feels so ancient and so otherworldly.

“Piel”，Arca在这张专辑中发布的第一首歌，是令人惊异的新。最一开始他在哼唱，伴随着摇篮曲一般的致眠节奏，让听众轻松地融入歌曲的氛围。几秒钟后，他便开始向着天堂吟唱，背景里充斥着迷幻的失真、低音以及和声的嗡鸣。旋律破败却浪漫，他的声音像一个古老的祈祷者一样随着节拍滑行。最后，音乐溶作一滩渗出的节拍和杂乱的滴答声。当你聆听“Piel”时，毫无疑问，你会知道这就是Arca的歌。而当你要去寻找为何如此轻易地得到答案时，你便会不停地挖掘Ghersi的时间线，试图弄清楚他是如何做出听起来如此古老（像是已经存在了很久很久）同时却又如此与众不同的东西的。

The 13-songs on Arca don’t represent an about-face for Ghersi, or even a reinvention. Rather, it imagines what would happen if he intermingled the music of his past (the pop songs he made, the Schumann and Mendelssohn he studied) with the radical noise and boundary-shattering pop he’s invented as Arca. Booming organs, mournful pianos, and classical instrumentation share space with a kaleidoscope of outré production. This juxtaposition is made even more clear by his voice, which proudly wears all of its imperfections: every cough, wheeze, and difficult breath is captured. That he’s using his voice at all is, for Ghersi, an act of time-travelling in itself. He says that his relationship with his voice on this album felt like “communing with [his] teenage self again.” He combines paradoxes and contradictions to create an experience that doesn’t feel like it’s part of our space-time continuum, but a separate universe he’s making on the fly

《Arca》中的13首歌曲并不代表着Ghersi的转变，甚至也不代表什么重塑。相反，想一想，如果他把他过去的音乐（他曾制作的流行歌曲，他所效仿学习的舒曼和门德尔松）与他作为Arca发明的激进噪音和打破边界的流行音乐混合起来会发生什么，《Arca》便是答案。轰鸣的风琴、哀伤的钢琴和其他古典乐器与万花筒式的离奇制作共享同一个空间。他的声音使这种并置愈加明晰，它骄傲地装饰上所有的不完美：每一声咳嗽、喘息和艰难的呼吸都被捕捉到。对Ghersi来说，他使用自己的声音本身就是一种穿越时空的行为。他说，在这张专辑中，他与他的声音的关系感觉就像“再次与[他]十几岁的自己交流”。他把悖论和矛盾结合起来，创造出一种全新的体验，甚至感觉这并非我们所处的时空连续体的一部分，而是他在翱翔中创造出的一个独立的宇宙。

The discoveries Ghersi makes on Arca allow him to write his most relaxed and intimate songs. His work is still mysterious, but not as opaque—it doesn’t keep you at an arm’s length, instead he offers up his pleasures more readily. Take for example the three-song sequence of “Coraje,” “Whip,” and “Desafío.” “Coraje,” is the album’s simplest song—Ghersi’s take on the piano ballad. The keys plink away as Ghersi searches for notes high and low. He even sounds like he’s crying at one point—moaning and whispering—his delivery becoming more watery as he reaches the finale. Seconds later, on “Whip,” he rips you from this emotional moment with a minute-and-a-half long track that’s mostly just the sound of a bullwhip rapidly moving back and forth. Then, on “Desafío,” he channels all the pop music he’s written for Kanye, FKA twigs, Björk, Kelela, and others into a single point. It’s warm, impossibly catchy, but densely detailed. It begins with the sound of an air raid siren, but then it cracks open, and Arca unleashes this joyous synth melody and airy drums. He sounds at ease, dancing between notes as he talks about the touch of lover feeling like the kiss of death (“Tócame de primera vez/Mátame una y otra vez”—“Touch me first time/Kill me again and again”). It’s as close to a straightforward pop song Ghersi might write under the name Arca, and it’s outstanding.

Ghersi在《Arca》中的发现使他能够写出他最放松和最亲切的歌曲。他的作品依旧神秘，但不再那么不透明、难以捉摸——它不会与你保持距离，相反，他随意地分享着他的乐趣。以“Coraje”、“Whip”和“Desafío”这三首歌的曲序为例。“Coraje”是专辑中最简单的歌曲——Ghersi选择用钢琴芭乐来呈现。Ghersi在高处和低处寻觅着音符，琴键则叮咚作响。他甚至在某一时刻听起来像在哭泣——呻吟或是低语——当他的声音来到尾声，表达变得更加含蓄。几秒钟后，便到了“Whip”，他用一个长达一分半钟的曲目将你从原先的情感中剥离出来，这个曲目主要就是一个鞭子快速地来回抽动的声音。然后，在“Desafío”中，他把他为Kanye、FKA twigs、Björk、Kelela和等等其他人写的所有流行音乐都集中同一个点上。它温暖、不易上口，却又充斥着庞杂密集的细节。它以空袭警报的声音开始，随后崩裂开，释放出欢乐的合成器旋律和空气中的鼓声。他让一切听起来很轻松，像在音符之间跳舞，他还谈到情人的触摸感觉就像一次死亡之吻（“Tócame de primera vez/Mátame una y otra vez”、“仅仅是第一次的触碰/便将我一次又一次置于死地”）。这可能是Ghersi以Arca的名义写的最接近于真正流行歌曲的作品，而且非常出色。

Throughout Arca, Ghersi strings together moments like these, finding beauty in contrast. And it’s not just because there is something dazzling about how different each moment feels from one to the next. There’s something legible, more direct about all of this. Hearing him castigate a lover on “Fugaces” (“¿Por qué me mentiste?”—“Why did you lie to me?”) or just saying something as simple as “I miss you” on “Anoche,” is something Ghersi hasn’t done before. Some of these songs sound like they were delivered as if he was right there in the room with you. Even if he claims many of the lyrics were improvised, there is still a strong intention—he’s reaching out and offering his hand. This close-quarters proximity gives these songs a pulse, a warm human heartbeat that seemed buried in all the noise of his older songs.

在整张专辑中，Ghersi将像这样的时刻串联起来，在交相辉映中发掘美的存在。这不仅仅是因为每一时刻给人的感觉都有一些令人眼花缭乱的地方。而是，所有这些都共有着一些可识别的、更直接的东西。听他在“Fugaces”中谴责一个情人（“¿Por qué me mentiste?”——“你为什么对我撒谎？”）或只是在“Anoche”中说一些像“I miss you”这样简单的情话，这是Ghersi过去从未做过的。这些歌曲中的一部分听起来就像他在房间里和倾诉你的小秘密一样。即使他声称许多歌词是即兴创作的，但确有着一个强烈的意图——他正交付着他的双手。这种近距离的接近给了这些歌曲一丝脉动，一些温度，像是有了人类心跳，而这似乎也曾被埋没在他的过去作品的所有噪音中。

Ghersi recently revealed that he chose the name Arca because it was an old Spanish word for a “ceremonial container.” Arcas are “empty spaces” that can be filled with meaning. He has never been one to believe in anything as concrete as identity or category, but there is a sense on Arca that he’s looking back at what he’s done in order to reach something else altogether—he’s filling up his box with all the best possible versions of himself: past, present, and future. It’s all for the sake of imagining a world better than the here and now.

Ghersi最近透露说，他之所以选择Arca这个名字，是因为它是一个古老的西班牙语单词，意为“ceremonial container”。而“Arca们”则意旨“empty spaces”，需要“意义”来填充其中。他从不相信任何像身份或类别那样具体的东西，但在Arca上有一种感觉，他正在回顾他所做的事情，以达到另一种共同的目的——他正在用所有可能的最佳版本的自己填充他的空间：过去、现在和未来。这都是为了想象中的那一个比如今更美好的世界。