![]() ![]() The accompanying art from Jesse Kanda seemed to nod just as forcefully to that plastic, post-apocalyptic aesthetic: the cover for the second included a pretzel-twisted leg sprouting an eyeball-like growth, like some uncanny new life-form that science has yet to uncover. Just a few years ago, when Ghersi was still living in New York, he unveiled his project to the world with two EPs of beguilingly off-kilter hip-hop compositions, populated by dozens of chipmunked and Frankensteined samples of his own voice. It’s the first week of August, and something about the setting-a renovated pig farm hidden behind a black storefront, owned by Ghersi’s manager, Milo Cordell-feels strangely in keeping with the music that he makes as Arca, germinal and teeming. Today, she’s back to her usual mischief, which the 24-year-old Ghersi-small-framed and boy-faced in a torn T-shirt and glittering rhinestone choker-describes with the improvisatory fictions of a child: ”At night, her eyes turn red, and she just starts jumping around like crazy, like, doing flips.” Just a few days ago, when I flew in from New York to conduct the first interview Ghersi has given in almost two years, the cat had greeted me at his doorstep, meowing from a bellyache brought on by eating some bad herbs. A tiny Bengal cat named True, owned by Ghersi’s housemate and longtime collaborator Jesse Kanda, jumps on the table, knocks my recorder on the ground and disappears behind a row of terra cotta pots filled with basil, cilantro and mint. A bee buzzes past my head, and I notice that the flowers printed on the porcelain dessert plate look just like the blood-red, bell-shaped blooms cascading down the wall. ![]() We’re sitting in the cobblestoned back garden of Ghersi’s current home in Dalston, London, drinking marjoram tea and picking at a small slice of white chocolate raspberry cheesecake with two forks. We don’t completely understand everything in nature.” “And I think placing myself squarely in the middle of those things is where I feel happiest. “It’s kind of an old-school thing, but I loved the idea I could let myself operate in openness to both science and superstition,” he says. My grandpa had been dead for 10, 13 years, and no one in the car was smiling or laughing.” Ask the hard-to-categorize electronic producer about his Latin American upbringing, and it’s the mysterious, half-explainable occurrences that are painted in the boldest colors. The next day, while driving around the subtropical archipelago, Ghersi inquired as to the source of her distress, to which the 70-year-old widow straightforwardly replied that she’d been arguing with his deceased grandfather. While lying awake in the guest bedroom one night, he was startled by the sound of his grandmother’s voice, sparring with someone in the bedroom upstairs. ![]() When he was 19, the Venezuelan-born musician Alejandro Ghersi took a trip to his grandmother’s retirement home on The Canary Islands, an old Spanish colony located off the northwest coast of Africa. From the magazine: ISSUE 94, on stands October 21st. ![]()
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