There's a gorgeous tension in the air before listening to any new music from Arca. A genuine unpredictability, something that — while we might not like to admit it — is largely lacking in the electronic music of the moment. With the Xen producer though, it's a genuine mystery as to how a track will behave once you've pressed play, where it will wind and end up, whether it will pull you into a soft menacing lull or whether it will tear you down with shattering stabs and discordant chaos. "Soichiro", taken from the producer's upcoming second LP Mutant, is a case of both dynamics coming into play. It starts with a wash of melodramatic pads, before staccato, percussive rattles begin to punctuate the landscape. Before long the whole thing has descended into the mood Arca does so well: playful malevolence. As he tweeted earlier, "Soichiro" is apparently the middle name of long time visual collaborator Jesse Kanda — leading us to assume it is Kanda behind the tracks suitably obscured visuals. Listen below.Follow Angus on Twitter.
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