Last fall, I went to MoMA PS1 to see a preview of a film I'd heard that Arca was working on with London filmmaker Jesse Kanda. Arca was jamming on some choral vocal samples inside a giant dome in the museum's courtyard, and every once in a while, the improvising would give way to the film portion of the performance, combining sounds from Venezuelan producer's insanely off-grid-souding &&&&& beat-tape from last year with a giant projection of all these weird, embryonic-looking creatures, krumping and voguing like a tougher, more streetwise incarnation of the Ally Mcbeal baby. They also didn't look all that far off from the featherless bird that appears on the cover art for that mixtape, and with their veiny translucence and misshappen limbs, they seemed like something one might see in a futuristic stem-cell laboratory in the business of inventing new life. It felt like a metaphor for what Arca was doing with his high resolution mutations of instrumental hip-hop and club music on &&&&&, and I couldn't wait to see the rest. Turns out, the film is called TRAUMA, and it follows "a nonlinear narrative about the death of a salaryman, a drunk driving infant and takes place within a subconscious world." Here's scene one, set to the song "Knot" from &&&&&.
