Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Hip-hop, at its best, is disruptive.
Someone can only be vampiric if you allow it.
I never judge my song titles; I just spit them out.
The first CD I bought was Brandy and Monica's 'The Boy Is Mine.'
I feel like every record I've ever made, on some level, is urgent.
First thought, best thought. I live by that when I make my own music.
Speaking two languages fluently makes each language not so important.
It's grotesque to believe the body we inhabit we want to inhabit 24/7.
I like contradictions, and I like exceptions. I don't like rules and dogma.
I knew that I would have to leave Venezuela in order to figure out who I was.
When you're uncomfortable, that's when you learn something new about yourself.
Arca was a project born immediately after I came out of the closet in New York.
As a kid, I spent a lot of my mental energy hiding who I was and attempting to fit in.
With song titles, I try to keep a healthy sense of humor while saying something at the same time.
I feel like, a lot of times, you make music, and you don't really understand why until with hindsight.
It's impossible to exorcise the darkness out of you. We can pretend it's not there until something bursts.
If you try and kind of focus on hope, but you know what it's like to be in the dark, then hope is more meaningful.
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.
'Xen,' to me, was a necessary excursion inward, into myself. 'Mutant' is a response to it and is more extroverted.
Once you share what you're communicating with your audience, then you can make more sense of it in a subconscious way.
Compulsion is a behaviour that short-circuits you out of feeling ashamed, and then you feel triple-ashamed afterwards.
I try to get my subconscious to puke out as much stuff as I can because I'm really not judging myself while making music.
I've learned to use things like softness and vulnerability as weapons against the things you feel ashamed of in yourself.
Internally, we have so many different parts, both positive and negative. And if you force them together, a spark comes out.
I exist in agreement with all the weird chaos, destruction, and agony that is undoubtedly part of the texture of being alive.
I do love the idea that something can make you forget that you're listening and just transport you to somewhere else in your head.
Theatricality - that's where you get catharsis. The Greeks went to see drama because they felt like this wasn't happening to them.
A lot of me figuring out how to love myself more involves finding the things that I'm ashamed of and looking them right in the eye.
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.
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.
If I gravitate toward someone, I bridge the gap between us somehow, and I accidentally maybe start seeing the world through their eyes.
I guess all of us have a little bit of both masculinity and femininity, and bridging the gap between those two things is really fertile.
I have an interesting relationship with my voice. I give myself tons of freedom in how to engage with my voice because I respect it a lot.
You become more animalistic when you don't know what's coming next - you have to be on guard, but at the same time you're also more receptive.
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 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.
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.
With 'Lonely Thug,' I constructed a fantasy character who was very masculine and strong and almost threatening, but his demeanor belied some complication.
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 have a very healthy dose of scepticism towards what identity is and what personas are, maybe because of my life journey. Identity is something so malleable.
That's been a huge recurring thing in growing up - allowing two things to exist in the same space even though, instinctively, they might not be designated to.
I think, with every kind of creature and every kind of human, there is no better. We're all just mutations, and I think that each mutation should be celebrated.
When you actually make a new friend, and you make music and laugh really hard together, that can give you a lot of confidence and nourishment and encouragement.
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.
It's very human to try to put things into boxes, and it's hard for us to reconcile with grey areas, and yet somehow that's the area I find the most poetic, the juiciest.
It's very human to try to put things into boxes, and it's hard for us to reconcile with grey areas, and yet somehow, that's the area I find the most poetic, the juiciest.
Something I keep coming back to in my music is the tension between two extremes: healing and chaos, hope and anxiety - these big themes are inside us, flickering, all day.
I try to have things change before I get bored, and I figure other people might enjoy that too; I try not to let anything repeat for long enough that you can get used to it.
When I was young, I put on performances for my family and my parents where I would dance like a woman, singing a really exaggerated woman's vocal in front of my whole family.