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. 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. 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. “That was it,” he recalls. “Silence in the car. 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. “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. “And I think placing myself squarely in the middle of those things is where I feel happiest. Allowing for some form of magic. We don’t completely understand everything in nature.”

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.”

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. 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. He called them Stretch 1 and Stretch 2. 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.

Soon after, in 2013, Kanye West took the music internet by surprise with the news that his sixth album, Yeezus, would enlist the then little-known Arca as a production consultant, alongside other left-field beatmakers, like sinister-sounding English producer Evian Christ and Glaswegian maximalist Hudson Mohawke. The album seemed the culmination of independent music’s co-optation by big-budget pop, previously hinted at with Rihanna’s adaptation of #seapunk aesthetics and Drake’s sampling of a Jamie xx remix on “Take Care.” If the early ’10s in music had been defined by a seeming collapse of the underground and mainstream, avant-garde and pop, then the especially challenging Yeezus appeared to usher the world into an era where such distinctions no longer meant much at all. One month later, Arca released &&&&&. Careening between punishing trap beats and detuned piano chords, rubbery arpeggios and drooping sighs, the 25-minute mixtape seemed to set the template for that strange new chapter in music, at once overflowing with hooks and jonesing to explode the very rhythmic and harmonic foundation that radio fare is built on. But as Ghersi’s inbox became inundated with interview requests, he withdrew from the spotlight, communicating to this magazine via his publicist that he would be refraining from talking with the press for an indeterminate amount of time. (He’d only done one sit-down interview before, which appeared in the pages of The FADER). Arca erupted into the public eye as the crafty upstart poised to rewire contemporary music from the inside out, and yet nobody seemed to know much about him.

Spend any amount of time with Ghersi, though, and there’s nothing about him that suggests any reclusiveness or contrived mystery. On the day of my arrival, his first call to me is via FaceTime, and when I’m unable to pick it up, he texts me a 22-second video of himself wearing the studded black stunt suit of a motion capture studio. “Hey Emilie, I’m sending a video because I can’t type very well,” he says, holding up a gloved hand by way of an explanation. Whenever we’re arranging to meet, he offers to come to me, but I usually ride the bus over to his house anyway. We sit at the table by the red flowers, him balancing my voice recorder upright on his knee so that keeping it from falling becomes a little game. In conversation, he jumps agilely from subject to subject—some recurring topics are Socrates, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s psychomagic and the dreadlocked California technology pundit Jaron Lanier—and speaks frequently of “short-circuiting his brain,” or willfully thrusting himself into a novel environment that will force him to see the world through different eyes.

Ghersi relocated from New York to London a little over a year ago, a move he says was motivated primarily by his desire to be closer to his boyfriend, the photographer and multimedia artist Daniel Sannwald. It was also a way of working more closely with Kanda, who, despite growing up in Canada, has been Ghersi’s best friend and closest artistic collaborator for a decade (Kanda himself moved to London seven years ago). Since they took up residence together, Ghersi has completed work as the sole co-producer of another very anticipated pop album: a new full-length from Björk, whose phantasmagoric, synth-pop power ballads from the early ’00s now feel eerily prescient of Ghersi’s rubbery approach to sonics. He’s also put the finishing touches on his own debut LP, concepted and named after a fictional alter ego of his called Xen. Portraits of her at various ages and in different quotidian scenarios—dancing, walking the dog, pleasuring herself—will appear in a booklet of images Kanda made to accompany the album, cobbled together from photographs of Ghersi’s own person in varying states of expressive disfigurement (Ghersi refers to Xen as “her,” but says she’s neither male nor female). From the way the two artists describe the process with which they brought Xen to life—Ghersi in his recording studio, Kanda in his second-floor bedroom—it’s clear that the line between work and play has become blurred.