Workshop with Arca (March '26)

In March 2026, Arca led a four-week School of Song workshop on production, songwriting, and creative process. Across the four lectures, she frames music-making as a movement between two states: the trance-like state, where we encounter and experiment freely, and the intentional state, where we refine, arrange, and consider presentation. The lectures move between guided exercises, breakdowns of her own songs, and long stretches of live production in Ableton, all in service of quieting the critical voice and staying in motion.

Class 1: The Trancelike State focuses on the flow state at the center of Arca's process, a healthy kind of dissociating: the state where the language-bound, self-critical part of the mind quiets down enough for discovery to happen. Arca explores how to enter that state deliberately and how to protect it once you're there. She shares and reflects on one of her own songs, then improvising a brand-new track live in Ableton to show what it looks like to follow an idea without judging it.

Class 2: Widening the Range of the Self explores the full emotional and vocal range of the self as songwriting material. Arca introduces the idea of widening extremes: treating a song as a safe simulation of risk, where the moment you wonder if you're doing too much is often right before the discovery. She breaks down three of her own songs from across her catalog, showing how opposite modes can live inside one body of work, and offers students the stems of one of them to remix.

Class 3: The Intentional State turns to the other half of her process: refining, stylizing, and considering presentation. Arca lays out the arrangement pyramid, a simple framework for deciding what role each sound plays in a song, and explains why the element that sings doesn't have to be a voice at all, since what matters is not the instrument but where it's placed. A live Ableton remix of one of her own ballads puts the framework into practice, from pitching one-shots across registers to sculpting groove in milliseconds.

Class 4: Journeys turns outward toward collaboration, framed through the hero's journey: what we end up making is rarely what we set out to make, and that turns out to be the gift. Arca explores collaborating with yourself and then with others, describing production as emotional attunement and the producer as architecture around a musician's voice. She breaks down the deliberate pop construction of one of her own songs, written to be the sweetest, sugariest thing she could muster, then collaborates with the class in real time, building a brand-new track live from student-submitted samples she is hearing for the first time.

Here are a few words from Arca:

"making music has always been a lifesaving experience, and for as long as i can remember it has been a way to connect with others, find my tribe, resonate on shared aesthetic sensibilities all while bringing people together into communities based on an appreciation of the intentional, careful crafting of energy and sound, and music is always there, existing in so many ways: both as a shared rhythm to dance to with others in nightclubs, and in headphones in cathartic moments of solitude and introversion, and every space in between.

and even at my most experimental - perhaps in some ways particularly at my most experimental - i feel like making music is a kind of reaching out, even if the person for whom you make music for is yourself, an idea of a person or a blend of people in your mind, whoever you write for becomes the hypothetical recipient of a gesture of communicating and expressing- in this sense i see every song as a kind of love letter to the collective, to that which unites us through sound art

you could say each songwriter is a unique synthesis of all the influences that shape them throughout the course of their explorations so formats become a shorthand that conveys the archetypal, that which we recognize intuitively - and recurring patterns in music, models of how to structure songs, form aesthetics that morph and synthesize into amalgamations each day. fusions between styles/synthesis, alchemy, exploration, play and discipline are some of the technologies we have as artists to help us create those mysterious and magical representations of modes of relating and feeling: songs."

Testimonials from March 2026 Students:

Arca, your class has changed the way I think about music and creation forever. I really don't have the words to describe what this opportunity meant to me. To be in a space full of so many wonderful creatives all united by our passion for the same thing is incredible and I've made so many valuable connections in my time with this class. I am so sad it's over, but so excited to create with your wisdom behind me. I've been creating for years, but I'm very new to sharing my music unapologetically. I think this is possibly the best thing I could have done for myself and my music. This course changed my life, thank you.

Your ability to mix the deepest music theory, Ableton knowledge, social and psychological aspects of creation (and not only that), plus techniques for composing, creating, remixing and producing music is way beyond what I could expect. Your constant reminder to be gentle with ourselves really resonated a lot and made me find a level of trust in myself I probably never had (the courage to express). At the end of this class I feel like extremely liberated - life at 43 with kids and job and everything kinda feels inevitably "not-fab" sometimes, but you really show a path. So thanks for this, I'll never forget it.

Arca, during your workshop, my mindset underwent a massive change. Your unpretentious point of view is so refreshing to me, and hearing someone I respect as much as you basically say, “make the sounds you want to make and don’t worry about anything else,” gave me so much confidence, and now I feel more than ever that I have license to continue to do things wrong, and get better at it. Thank you so much, I will not forget the experience you have given me.