Arca: Arca review – ecclesiastical grandeur meets bleeding-edge dissonance

With its eerie silences, foreboding chords and hymnal chanting, Arca’s third record really does manage to erect a sonic cathedral around your ears. This ceaselessly pioneering producer – who has brought his bleeding-edge sensibility to the work of Björk, Kanye, FKA twigs, Frank Ocean and Dean Blunt – takes ecclesiastical tropes and ingests them into his warped, dissonant and giddily contemporary world. Using his own voice for the first time – a move encouraged by Björk – Arca improvises melodies and lyrics in Spanish, backed by a filleted version of the startling industrial noise found in his earlier work. Exquisite opener Piel captures the interplay between poise and prostration that has made Catholic ritual such a rich artistic seam, while arch humour is provided by Whip – hyper-real lashing accompanied by the sound of a powering-down robot – and Desafío, which takes disposable Eurotrash pop and makes it worthy of pious contemplation.