I always make a point to make my records different. Let's say I have a record that's influenced by hip-hop in an abstract way; for the next record, I'd try not to do that. They are all connected in a personal way but it's important not to repeat myself, because then I can always learn something about myself through my work.

Arca

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.

Arca

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.

Arca

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

Arca

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.

Arca

When I was younger, I used to say, 'I'm not making music. I am getting catharsis for emotion.' For me, vulnerability is an act of uncovering. It's a revealing: the idea of putting aside your armour and allowing pain to enter.

Arca

Theatricality - that's where you get catharsis. The Greeks went to see drama because they felt like this wasn't happening to them.

Arca

We try and banish whole inner realms. Sometimes, you have to touch the thing inside you're most afraid of and see what happens when you touch it rather than look away from it all the time.

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.

Arca

I hoped that being attracted to men might go away, but what I never ever hoped would go away were the feelings of femininity, and of softness and fragility, that could live inside of a boy. They were private, but they were mine.

Arca

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.

Arca

I've learned to use things like softness and vulnerability as weapons against the things you feel ashamed of in yourself.

Arca

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.

Arca

I like contradictions, and I like exceptions. I don't like rules and dogma.

Arca

'Xen,' to me, was a necessary excursion inward, into myself. 'Mutant' is a response to it and is more extroverted.

Arca

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

Arca

With 'Lonely Thug,' I constructed a fantasy character who was very masculine and strong and almost threatening, but his demeanor belied some complication.

Arca

Arthur Russell is very important to me on many levels, and when I read Tim Lawrence's biography on him, 'Hold on to Your Dreams,' one of the things I took away was: first thought, best thought. I live by that when I make my own music.

Arca

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

Arca

If I gravitate toward someone, I bridge the gap between us somehow, and I accidentally maybe start seeing the world through their eyes.

Arca

I feel like every record I've ever made, on some level, is urgent.

Arca