Arca

“When I met Bjork, I felt like it was a friendship first; it was like an oxygen you get from a person you only can exist with symbiotically. It's one of the most beautiful relationships I've had. She is incredible.”

“I think there's a certain poetry to having your body reflect what you feel inside of you. Perhaps you have a feeling that's so pure, or overwhelming inside of you that your body disfigures to it - contortions match your confusion.”

“Being knee-deep in sadness or suffering and refusing to look down - to me, that represents something more powerful than someone who's never gone through difficulty.”

“Internally, we have so many different parts, both positive and negative. And if you force them together, a spark comes out.”

“I've learned a lot from every musical collaboration I've ever had, but there's something about my relationship with Bjork that is special to me.”

“When you're uncomfortable, that's when you learn something new about yourself.”

“As a kid, I spent a lot of my mental energy hiding who I was and attempting to fit in.”

“When I sit down to make music, I try to enter a flow; I always open a blank session and just make something that I feel like making. Only after a piece of music is done does my frontal cortex allow me to organize what might be trying to come out of my subconscious.”

“Arca was a project born immediately after I came out of the closet in New York.”

“Making music can get so emotional that, if you don't set limits for yourself, it can push you or the person that you're making music with to a breaking point.”

“I exist in agreement with all the weird chaos, destruction, and agony that is undoubtedly part of the texture of being alive.”

“It's not about living my life as a boy or a girl - but I'm also not trans - it's just that one day, you wake up feeling masculine, and one day, you wake up feeling feminine. The flickering in between those two states is what's most fertile for me.”

“When I was making 'Xen,' I was surprised at how introverted some of the songs were. I wasn't deliberately trying to go quieter, but I had to embrace it.”

“When I work with other people, I have to try to make their vision happen. With my own, I don't think about it. The music has its own kind of agency.”

“I want to be interested in the music I make until I die. That's more important to me than the size of my audience.”

“Arca means 'box' or 'wooden' in very old Spanish. It's a ceremonial container where you store jewelry or valuables, an empty space that can become pregnant with whatever music or meaning I give to it.”

“I think for the longest time I used to be kind of embarrassed that if I hung out with someone that had a really, really strong personality, I would end up accidentally catching myself talking like them.”

“I've never written a happy love song.”

“Compulsion is a behaviour that short-circuits you out of feeling ashamed, and then you feel triple-ashamed afterwards.”

“I knew from a very, very early age that I was gay, although in the social environment in Venezuela, you don't ever let that be known.”