Artifacts, in most cases, are unintentional. If art is the finished product, artifacts come with the process. They’re left behind unless something exposes them. Through material transfers and exposure to time, art—especially sound—degrades. Each pop on a record is an artifact of a worn groove, each hiss beneath a recording an artifact of the equipment it was made on. The goal of making a studio record is usually to cover up all artifacts and accidents—errant notes, unwanted frequencies, bad takes. These sounds stand out, obtrude from the desired perfection and clarity, and link a sound to its place of origin. A good record, the logic goes, is devoid of artifacts. Without any traces, it is timeless.
Arcadia, Caroline Polachek’s debut as Ramona Lisa, doesn’t make any attempt to cover its artifacts. It is not a polished work, nor is its production “clean.” To expect either of those things, though, would be to miss the point entirely. On Arcadia, Polachek captures every sound involved in recording—wanted and unwanted, intentional and unintentional. Arcadia collapses the divide between art and artifact. It is both a studio record and a documentation of process. It is not timeless, it is time.
Polachek leaves these artifacts in her recordings like they’re small gifts to be found and unraveled. Clicks persist through the vocal take on “Avenues,” clouding the instrumentation below. They disappear with her voice. Where did they come from? As Polachek sings on “Backwards and Upwards,” her voice clips and distorts. Her loudest, most emotional notes are the hardest to listen to. When did she feel this way? Each piano hit on “Wings of the Parapets” comes alongside a loud tock of hammer against string. They echo around the original note. Where was the microphone? Asking these questions feels essential to understanding Arcadia. Where most studio records aim for clarity, Polachek works intentionally to obscure. Finding answers isn’t necessarily the point, but identifying the proper questions feels deeply satisfying.
The instrumentation Polachek opts for on Arcadia feels just as strange and wonderful as the unclarity of her vocal takes. If Polachek’s recordings leave artifacts, then the MIDI instruments on Arcadia are deliberately artificial—attempts to replicate, approach, or even subvert the natural. The title track shuffles its main motif between bell and oboe, neither one quite approaching the clarity offered when Polachek sings the motif herself. The bass tones on “Getaway Ride” and “Avenues” pass through a harsh reverb, simulating how these sounds decay in a real space.
Arcadia lives wherever you take it, but it works best set against a competing soundscape. I listened to the album in a loud coffee shop and let the errant conversations bleed over “Lady’s Got Gills.” I listened to it again while lying on a patch of grass, feeling the distractions float through “I Love Our World.” Polachek composed the album entirely on her laptop, and its playback thrives on small speakers or earbuds. It benefits from every other sound competing for your attention.
It’s really easy to yearn for a version of Arcadia that polishes off the rough edges. There is, though, a version of an Arcadia cut that’s been dressed up, artifacts removed. “No Angel,” from BEYONCÉ, was written by Polachek at the same time she was working on Arcadia. Beyoncé’s version features full gloss: the drums are larger and rounder than anything on Arcadia, the bass smoother and fuller, the vocal take far more pristine. The song works perfectly but achieves a completely different end.
Arcadia isn’t a straight pop record, and its audience isn’t the same. Beyoncé makes records for consumption ten, twenty, fifty years from now as much as she makes them for consumption right now. It’s an archive, not an artifact. It’s already a full object—it doesn’t need to be later uncovered. “Cut it out / At the seed / And the rip is a rotation,” Polachek cries on “Backwards and Upwards.” Arcadia doesn’t allow itself full bloom. It lives somewhere before that—plucked away and exposed as part of the process of eventual blooming.
Arcadia is out now via Terrible Records.