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.
Internally, we have so many different parts, both positive and negative. And if you force them together, a spark comes out.
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 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.
Theatricality - that's where you get catharsis. The Greeks went to see drama because they felt like this wasn't happening to them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've learned to use things like softness and vulnerability as weapons against the things you feel ashamed of in yourself.
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.
I like contradictions, and I like exceptions. I don't like rules and dogma.
'Xen,' to me, was a necessary excursion inward, into myself. 'Mutant' is a response to it and is more extroverted.
Compulsion is a behaviour that short-circuits you out of feeling ashamed, and then you feel triple-ashamed afterwards.
With 'Lonely Thug,' I constructed a fantasy character who was very masculine and strong and almost threatening, but his demeanor belied some complication.
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.
I exist in agreement with all the weird chaos, destruction, and agony that is undoubtedly part of the texture of being alive.
If I gravitate toward someone, I bridge the gap between us somehow, and I accidentally maybe start seeing the world through their eyes.
I feel like every record I've ever made, on some level, is urgent.
The first CD I bought was Brandy and Monica's 'The Boy Is Mine.'
I kind of roll my eyes when people say they make music for themselves or they make art just for themselves, because, maybe in their head, what that means is that they're making it for someone who they don't think is real. Their audience isn't real. But it's still a communicative act. It's still an outward manifestation of longing.
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.
Arca was a project born immediately after I came out of the closet in New York.
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.
Hip-hop, at its best, is disruptive.
I feel like, a lot of times, you make music, and you don't really understand why until with hindsight.
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.
Making music is an inward and outward gesture at once. I make it because I'm communing with a side of myself that might help me look people in the eye. But at the same time, I'm reaching out, in a way.
It's impossible to exorcise the darkness out of you. We can pretend it's not there until something bursts.
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.
It's not about living my life as a boy or a girl - but I'm also not trans - it's just that one day, you wake up feeling masculine, and one day, you wake up feeling feminine. The flickering in between those two states is what's most fertile for me.
With song titles, I try to keep a healthy sense of humor while saying something at the same time.
It's a really deep and layered psychological situation - making music with someone - if they're trying to make something real and personal. It's almost like dating: you allow yourself to be consumed by the other - not in a bad way, but in a way that happens in nature.
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.
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 think for the longest time I used to be kind of embarrassed that if I hung out with someone that had a really, really strong personality, I would end up accidentally catching myself talking like them.
When you're uncomfortable, that's when you learn something new about yourself.
I want to make music until I die.
The only thing that mattered to me with 'Xen' was setting things up against each other in an uncomfortable way. If there's a really soft piece of music, and then you're hit by a painful explosive sound, your brain does this funny somersault trying to make sense of why this happened. And at that very moment, your brain is malleable.
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.
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 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.
When I was about 13, and I would write in my journal, I'd be like, 'I just watched 'Spice World,' the Spice Girls movie, and I loved it.' Sometimes I would sign them with the name Xen.
I knew that I would have to leave Venezuela in order to figure out who I was.
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.
A mother isn't someone who does it on purpose; mothers are who they are, and just by existing, they affect the way other people negotiate with the environment and with themselves.
I think there's a certain poetry to having your body reflect what you feel inside of you. Perhaps you have a feeling that's so pure, or overwhelming inside of you that your body disfigures to it - contortions match your confusion.
Someone can only be vampiric if you allow it.
