ARCA 黑胶唱片和CD

Review: Many critics have been quick to praise Arca's latest album (her fourth in total), highlighting the startling vibrancy and accessibility Barcelona-based Venezuelan's latest work. Where she was once renowned for wilfully challenging experimental sounds, "Kick I" combines her long-standing lo-fi noisenik instincts in ear-catching leftfield pop vocals, fiendishly heavy beats variously influenced by dancehall, reggaeton and Kuduro, sparkling bursts of kaleidoscopic synthesizer sounds, and bass beefier than a herd of highland cattle after a few months on industrial strength steroids. As a result, it's an album that beautifully balances ear-catching attractiveness with serious dancefloor grunt and just the right amount of experimental noise.

Review: You wait three years for a new Arca album and then two come along at once. The Barcelona-based, Venezuelan artist has already dropped 'Kick I' and 'Kick II' on his standard XL stomping ground this month, and has now decided to remind us why we fell in love in the first place. &&&&&& is the producer's seminal debut album, and it still sounds fresh today.

Occupying a space somewhere between techno, the proto-footwork and juke popularised by the likes of Addison Groove at the turn of the last decade, IDM and ambient, it's a difficult thing to get your head around, from the strange piano discordance of 'Mother' to 'Feminine''s suggestion of intense 140s and the submerged liquid downtempo of 'Anaesthetic'. A seminal moment in recent dance history.

Review: It's been a rapid rise over the past few years for Alejandro Ghersi's Arca alias. Following some years spent as Nuuro, his current project launched with aplomb on UNO in 2012 before moving on to Hippos In Tanks, and then last year shored up at Mute with the Xen album in a demonstration of true ascendance through the leftfield ranks. Now Ghersi returns to Mute with a new album Mutant, which sees further exploration of his detailed, unusual style touching on elements of noise, bombastic ambient and neoclassical. "Soichiro" lays down wispy threads of trap in amongst dramatic stop-start dynamics while "En" flirts with lingering piano and static interference in the most artful of ways, just two examples of an album loaded with surprise and intrigue.

Review: The music Venezuelan artist Alejandro Ghersi makes as Arca first came to the fore via UNO, the New York label who issued a trio of compelling releases in 2012. Arca's brand of glossy, high grade beat experimentation has seen him go on to work with Kanye West and FKA Twigs as well as release on venerated US indie Hippos In Tanks. An album deal with Mute may seem unexpected yet the UK label have a long and proud tradition of challenging conventions. Entitled Xen, Mute have described the 15 track set as full of "mercurial forms, fluxing unpredictably from smooth to spiked to sweet" and you wont get much of an idea from the soundclips. If you were charmed by the FKA Twigs set this is an album that will get your serotonins bubbling.