Throughout June, RA is hosting four mixes on BBC Radio 1, airing Friday nights after the Essential Mix. Following mixes from AceMoMA, Deena Abdelwahed and Skee Mask, the series finishes Friday night with a one-hour club mix from Arca.

In his 1996 paper Standing In The Spaces: The Multiplicity Of Self And The Psychoanalytic Relationship, American psychologist Philip Bromberg suggested the understanding of the human mind was shifting away from the idea that there is a single self, and towards a view of the self as decentered. In his research, now widely popularized, selfhood was "a configuration of shifting, nonlinear, discontinuous states of consciousness in an ongoing dialectic with the healthy illusion of unitary selfhood." Put more simply, Bromberg believed our sense of "me" is made up of multiple "self-states."

Perhaps no artist explores this concept more than Alejandra Ghershi. As Arca, the Venezuela-born, Barcelona-based producer and performer has spent the last decade eluding categories across genre, format and identity. With her art and personality, Ghersi does not hold back, resulting in a brilliant body of work built on chaos and contrast. She has produced for mega stars like Kanye West and Björk, while staying true to the digital queer underground. She sings like an eloquent and old world romantic, while producing psycho beat tapes and futuristic noise. She creates cutting-edge performance art for galleries, while filling her Instagram with chihuahua memes.

Over the past year or so, what Ghersi shares has only grown more chaotic. This is because she has ramped up her social media presence, taking to livestreaming as an informal medium to connect with her fans, known as Mutants. On Instagram Live, Ghersi drops new music and gets real about her experience transitioning to being a non-binary trans woman. On Twitch, a channel she started during lockdown, she experiments with all kinds of sensory overload, from ASMR and Final Fantasy streams, to Ableton sessions and hours-long live sets full of unreleased Arca deep cuts. Perhaps most intimate, though, is the Mutants1000000 Discord server, a community where Ghersi regularly participates as an admin, overseeing channels like #feral-entropy, #identity-philosophy and #español.

None of this comes off like press or performance as we know it. Ghersi's content is as unorganized and unruly as a teen on TikTok, yet her freeform sense of being incites a mysterious sense of wonder. Even if the content of her glitchy videos can be rambling and uneventful, it is never dull—the thrill is watching pieces of Ghersi's personality unfold. After all, a personality can be more fluid, absorbing and provocative than the most complex piece of art.

This is important to keep in mind when listening to Ghersi's new and fourth studio album, KiCK i. Viewed one way, it's the artist's love-filled entry into pop, where dissonant sounds and styles rub up against each other at a freaky party, made even more fantastic by its featured guests: Björk, SOPHIE, SHYGIRL and Rosalía. But viewed another way, the album is a story of intense psychological processing and self-discovery. "Speak for your self-states," Ghersi raps on opener "Non-Binary." In the lead-up to KiCK i's release, we had 30 minutes to chat on Zoom, where Ghersi sat joyfully amid a digital rainbow and went deep on identity, philosophy and the multiplicity of the self.

Tell me about your Discord server.

Yeah! I'm the admin. I used to be a moderator and admin on forums and like 2D MMOS when I was a teenager. I never thought I would return to that, but the lockdown world brought me back to my nerdy roots.

I found out about it from watching your Twitch streams. Let's start there. Can you tell me about your channel and why you started it?

I'd been talking about it for a while. I would tease this idea of wanting to share my love of gaming, specifically. Paradoxically I've done a couple of video game streams, but mostly I've been using it for music performance and kind of like a talk show. It combines a lot of things that I'm passionate about. Interactivity and communication is something that I love between audiences and, you know, anyone on any kind of stage. Because there's this potential for the stream—the broadcast, the show, the transmission—to surprise the person putting it on. That's something I really relish. This idea of not being in control, of there being some chaos, some entropy and connection.

When the lockdown started, I was really craving connecting with my audiences and just connecting with people. When I grew up, I would put on shows for my family. You know, very typical, I loved entertaining people and feeling that attention. There's pros and cons to that, that idea of feeling like performing in front of an audience gives you life. That can be as healing and therapeutic as it can be scary and isolating sometimes. I've gone through all kinds of ups and downs and phases. An extreme example of ways in which it's scary is, like, sometimes on stage I'll go into these weird trances. Maybe I'll self-harm a little bit on stage and people are just like, "Oh it's just part of the show." But there's an acting out element, you know? For me at least. There's an element of acting out and then making sense of the show afterwards. It's a very powerful thing.

I see performance as a ritual. A pre-linguistic ritual that has a lot of connective power. In some sense, I just felt it was silly to exclude Twitch and livestreaming from having any kind of correlation or relation to ritual. Because I think the fact that it's immediate and spontaneous really lends itself to have the potential to be meaningful, both for people tuning in and for people streaming. I mean, Twitch started as a lifecasting service, did you know that?

Where people stream 24-hours of their lives?

Yeah. Like kind of a voyeuristic kind of thing.

Would you do that?

Mmm... No. But I would be into some durational things. That's also part of why I like Twitch. Because sometimes I go on tour and hop on a tour bus and then a plane and then do the soundcheck and then a hotel. And, like, all that just for one hour of a show? Sometimes it felt crazy. Sometimes you don't even know how long your set time is until you're about to go on stage or something. The festival's like, "Oh your slot's 50 minutes." Or, "Oh your slot's two hours." It's not as important. Some festivals cram more acts. The freedom of not having to know when the stream ends and starts is actually quite liberating. There's lots of things about it that are kind of unique. I'm interested in it.

Are you afraid to show your raw personality on something like a livestream? Or is it the same feeling as when you're performing?

Honestly, the reason I had the bravery to go for streaming with abandon was because I feel more comfortable being raw than I do pre-packaging myself. When I did the Mutant;Faith shows at The Shed, there were no setlists. That was kind of a big thing for me. I didn't want to be in control. I was really tired of it. I had this feeling, like, if you have a setlist that's airtight, it kind of tends to work, but in the way that a really functional storytelling film works. You know? There's kind of classic things that lead to catharsis. Dynamics. A moment of silence before a very loud moment tends to make the loud moment feel louder and the silence feel more silent. I was feeling a little bit like a robot. Even if the audiences seemed to be happy, sometimes I would feel a little bit hollow inside because I didn't want to feel like I was manipulating the audience by using different techniques and effects that tend to elicit emotional reactions. I actually wanted to be in the audience. Or I wanted to include the audience in the creative act rather than just carrying out a script.

If anything, sometimes I have a problem and I overshare. When I tend to talk to my analyst, it's like, "Oh you can keep that for yourself. You don't have to put everything into the performance." I think it's a yin and yang. If you're more on the side of being really overprotective and being afraid to be vulnerable, it serves you well to try to open up a little bit. But there's also an opposite to that, which is like hyper-vulnerability. It can be as distancing as isolation. Because then you don't really know how to draw boundaries. So I think it's a nice tension to try to think of as a performing artist. We're not just one or the other. We oscillate back and forth.

Your last album, to me at least, felt very hyper-vulnerable and also internal and isolating. Is that why you're going a different direction with KiCK i?

I got goosebumps when you said that. When I remember the process of making the self-titled album, I really felt like I idealized this belief that I could go into a void inside of myself and bring back something so, you know, deep that... [Pauses to collect herself.] I mean, I can't not think about that record and kind of get bummed out. Not in a bad way, it's just... There's so many sad songs and I didn't really plan it. So I was definitely careful when I was putting this record together to not have it be a reaction. Like, oh that was really kind of goth, and now I'm going to go escapist. I didn't want to be one or the other. I'd rather be both at the same time. It's something I think about a lot.

I read another interview where you said KiCK i addresses the fact that everyone has multiple personalities, and that you want to find peace in that versus panic. In order to write this album, did you have to sit down and confront your different personalities and self-states? How did you make sure they were represented?

I think the multiplicity of each of us tends to be scary to talk about, for very understandable reasons. There was a conscious element to wanting to give airtime to all of my self-states, but I didn't really know how to achieve that. Working with an analyst... I've seen therapists and shrinks and analysts since I was a teenager, for lots of different reasons. I've seen CBT therapists. I'm currently seeing a Jungian analyst. I've even come out of it having opinions. I don't think there's one best way of therapy style. But I do think that, for me, it has affected the way my music is shaped and how I go about my practice.

The best kind of lesson I learned is not that I needed to consciously let the spectrum of my self-states manifest, but actually, the opposite. It's not that I had to do more. It's not that one has to do more. It's that you have to stop resisting it. What I think tends to happen in myself, and I believe for many others, is when you reach a self-state that has a certain protective element, it's hard to convince your body that you can relax out of it. Or that there's enough space for the tenderness or doubt to set in. So actually it was about trying to be less in control. Also there were whole self-states that I was very uncomfortable with. I have names for some of them.

Give me some examples.

Electra Rex. I'm not saying that any of these things are fully conscious or unconscious. And I don't have any answers, but I have questions that I've asked myself over the course of lots of years. They tend to be the same questions. As I saw my answers changing to the same questions, I started to playfully articulate things, or name things. So, there's a self-state that I describe as Electra Rex. I've never heard anyone else mash up Oedipus Rex and the Electra Complex. I think that kind of tickled me. It's this idea that instead of in the Oedipus-sense—you know, having sex with your mother and killing your father—or in the Electra Complex-sense—having sex with your father and killing the mother—I started to think about those archetypal stories that have been with us for millennia, what would they look like if you went non-binary with them?

So, I envisioned this character that killed both of their parents and had sex with themselves. How would that character act? Both in a drama sense, like a Greek tragedy or tragicomedy sense, but also in a playful sense. A cathartic element. Electra Rex, for me, is the character or persona that I envision when I have a shiny exoskeleton that's impenetrable. That's really helpful for situations where you're navigating external pressure coming into you, because the exoskeleton's rock hard. But Electra Rex, at the same time, is so impenetrable that there's an inability to feel love. It's not saying Electra Rex shouldn't be there just because this persona is incapable of feeling love. Quite the opposite.

I almost like to see personas as technologies. We can risk over-identifying with them. I think that's when it gets tricky. If you feel like, OK, Electra Rex saved my life so I have to be in Electra Rex mode forever, that's kind of where over-identification with technology can be dangerous. But imagine if we were to see these self-states as technologies rather than essential building blocks of ourselves. That tends to be thinking with more air, and there's no wrong answer all of a sudden.

That's kind of what I love about philosophy as opposed to politics. The difference between identity-philosophy and identity-politics is that in politics you very easily come across discourse. Someone's always right. But with philosophy, no one needs to be right and the phenomenological aspect of not having to collapse things down and get an answer gets us closer to nuance than if you were to just say yes or no in the face of all these profound and mysterious questions.

How does this way of thinking translate into the way you make music?

It's not just intellectual, it's physiological. I literally use my voice differently. They have different voices and registers. Different self-states that I think of, they're literally different pitches and intonation styles. And then I start thinking about code switching. I start thinking about having an American accent in English and having a Venezuelan accent in Spanish, how neither of those are any less me. The language and the pronunciation are technologies.

When you start thinking of different constructs as technologies, you really take the pressure away from it having to be something that goes unquestioned or unacknowledged. There's softness and flexibility, it's not being rigid. A main hopeful message that I take away from thinking about the self as multiple—and yet retaining the dignity of a unified self—is that it allows for a shifting based on what your environment is. If you feel like you have to be the same person in every context, do you end up policing yourself? You start falling into the trap of thinking that there is an authentic self as opposed to a sensorial and experiential self.

It was very layered for me because I had so many tightly coiled-up beliefs about identity that for a long time what kept me from transitioning was thinking, "Well if I have these beliefs, does that mean this is performative?" Being afraid of following physical or bodily impulses because the intellect was getting in the way. You know what I mean?

Yes, I've been there.

I think role playing is beautiful. I also think that there's such a thing as the pleasure principle, and if something feels pleasurable, sometimes it can awaken different kinds of shame. Especially in women. There's so many layers to pleasure and shame and identity and all this. I find it important to talk about.

We have so many stories that we take for granted. We reproduce systems of thought without stopping to ask ourselves why we have certain impulses. At some point, I stopped trying to understand it and I started trying to accept it without understanding it. That was a pivoting point in my life. Not needing to understand in order to respect. Not just in the other. In one's self.

I want to talk about KiCK i. You seem to have an endless amount of sketches and edits that appear across your mixes and social media. How did you put this album together? Did you pull from years of collected material, or was it a more concentrated effort over a few months?

The album was about to come out last year, but it was really hard to find the timing. I think when your egg cracks, when you start transitioning, you go through a lot of mood swings. There's an exploratory element to that. I would say it's both. It's a result of years of sounds I had collected, but this was the longest I've actually spent on one album, which is weird. I never really planned that. But before that I was putting stuff out back-to-back.

I feel like the day I handed in the self-titled record, the new era began for me. When it reaches audiences is almost like a parallel story. One that shapes the way I see the private story as well. You want to feel like the message you're trying to convey is understood, or at least recognized in terms of the gesture. How I feel about this album is ongoing, but the process is hard to pinpoint in where it began. The oldest song—I can't even remember. But there's moments of breakthrough. "Riquiqui" was one. Because that was explicitly me trying to have multiple self-states on one song. There's like the [sings in a low voice: "Te lo pongo la mayonesa"] and [sings in a high voice: "A la niña le sale el show"]. I could envision the different characters and they had different body languages. I think that may have been the earliest song.

I read KiCK is a four-part series. The second is almost finished and you loosely know what three and four are, too.

Yeah, I already have enough songs to fill all four of them. But I try to stay in a quantum state—an uncollapsed, uncommitted state—until the last day. Because sometimes if you make space for your instinct to get one last word in, it might end up being one that is very lucid, or has internalized all the stuff you've been thinking about. The second one's done. Also the fourth one is kind of done. The third one is the most mysterious to me. But yeah, the idea was to extend the idea of self-states into different albums as well.

Why four? Could you talk about the project in general?

In my practice as a musician, I've been in places where I was speaking a lot about technique and aesthetic. In other points of my practice as a musician, I was unconcerned with technique and I was very much into DIY and lo-fi as an aesthetic that flies in the face of technique. Because I wanted to double down on storytelling. Storytelling doesn't just mean that the story is linear. I also include stories that are non-linear and multiple and, you know, contradict themselves. I think story really moves us and informs a part of our psyche and how we see ourselves and how we see the world.

So, when I think of structuring anything, 99 percent of the time I'll start with three acts. Just because of Shakespeare, probably. It's digestible. You can imagine there being an introduction and a presentation. A world building act would be the first one. Then the second one, you might have enough of an attachment with the characters that there's a conflict. And then the third one, an outcome of some sort. The fourth part tends to be a kind of an epilogue, for me to make sense of it too. Mutant;Faith was four days as well.

The way I employ three act parts is to also make space for an epilogue, just because I love that in books. If you end a story too explicitly, sometimes I think it's dissatisfying. But if you leave it open and let people project and hope and dream to an open end, I think that can be very beautiful. So, the fourth album is wordless and has no vocals. It's just trying to linger in that space of not over-defining what came before it, but still giving a space to process.

Stuff comes out very spontaneously when I make music, but I didn't want to do a quadruple album. I really wanted to be able to see how the first one was received before I sealed the second one. It's important to me to have that kind of dialogue and conversation with an audience. I wouldn't want to just do it in a vacuum. I give space between each one to check the pulse and kind of feel where you're at.

Do you learn about your subconscious self by the way people analyze and respond to your work?

Definitely. In fact, sometimes, people will mishear a lyric and I have sometimes liked that more than the original lyric. Do you know what I mean? I don't think there's a right or wrong way to pronounce the names of my albums or even mixtape releases. A lot of people will check, "Is that how you say it?" There's literally no wrong answer. It makes me happy to be surprised by responses to different things I've shared. It's a communicative act.

I think making music, making art, even if you don't show anyone, even if that stuff lies on your hard drive forever, there's still a reaching out. It might be to someone that doesn't exist, but you're kind of envisioning a recipient, even if it's another part of yourself that you don't have access to except through creativity. I think there's a reaching out there that I find inherently hopeful. Because to take that libidinal energy and put it into making something, whether it be cooking or anything that requires creative thought, combining different elements and thinking about process and result, it's an expression that's the opposite of depression. There's faith in the creative act.

Talking about connecting and communicating, music as a means of reaching out, has transitioning in the public eye made you feel closer to your audience?

I was scared. I was more scared than anything. Because there's this element, when you begin transitioning, of this very tender phase of "nobody will believe me." Believe it or not, that's very common for a lot of trans individuals. This element of, like, if you weren't so dysphoric, like when you were a kid, then maybe it's not that real. It's a very dangerous thought because it suggests an alienation with oneself.

I'm still transitioning, and I will continue to transition until I die. It's not really a process that has an end. But having come out of a weird sense of there being a checkpoint of being able to look back and see the differences between how I looked before I started transitioning and now, I feel so much relief. I feel more comfortable. To see how a lot of people who liked my music are still kind of with me is very moving. I don't think that's something that anyone who begins transitioning takes for granted. Even within their social circles or within their families.

So I do feel closer to—and I say fans, but it's to my fellow Mutants. I just happen to have this platform and I'd like to use it intelligently and spread a message of inclusion and diversity and love. I didn't expect some people to be like, "I liked you before you started transitioning, now I don't know." There's stuff that you're never really prepared for until you read the comments.

But taking all the good with the bad, I feel closer to my creative practice as a whole. Probably because I'm more integrated with myself. I like to think that if you want to make art that's meaningful to you, it's good to step away from the studio and actually live your life and get to know yourself. I think that's why there was such a long hiatus between albums. It's going to almost be four years. That's a long time.

I was taken aback by your question because I haven't thought about it like that. But for sure, I do feel closer. Also, maybe I wouldn't have started the Discord. I hang out there. I talk to everyone on the server pretty often and I do the Twitch streams. Maybe I'm ready for that degree of intimacy and conversation because I made space to meet myself.

Listen to the mix /
Arca's mix for RA on Radio 1

Other episodes /
Deena Abdelwahed
AceMoMA
Skee Mask