Today it was announced that The Haxan Cloak has been beavering away in secret on the new Bjork LP, prompting the kind of feverish squee that hasn’t been seen in anticipation of a Bjork LP for a little while now.

But that fever isn’t purely down to one XXJFG fave getting the uber-gig in art-pop collaborations. Bjork fans already knew, for instance, that one of the main collaborators on her 2015 album is Arca.

Arca, of course, has previously shown his fire as soundmaker for Kanye’s Yeezus and FKA Twigs’ inescapable LP1. Even more fabulously, he starred in our totally brilliant and necessary best of 2014 thing!

A slightly irritating consensus is starting to form now that while Arca may be producer du jour, an excellent foil for sci-fi divas like Twigs and Kanye to project their carefully-sculpted personas on to, his own music is… shhh… missing something. Oh he can do beats sure, majestic atmospheres unheard to the ears no problem, but choons? Nah mate.

Fortunately consensus is a bleating fool and Arca’s 2014 album Xen was a masterpiece wasted on the ears of those who had hopped onto his music via the style mag and broadsheet worship of avant-megastars.

It says more about the traditional media’s craving for someone to slot into the pre-assembled paradigm of a new Timbaland or Neptunes then it does anything about art.

Arca’s music is never going to be slick ricochets of beats styled as a soundtrack for post-ironic twerking – he’s already up there with Autechre in terms of mastery over sound as a spatial construct.

(Our autocorrect just wrote that as spatula. Spatula construct. Heh.)

In conclusion, Xen is great, you should all listen to it and then check out this handful of outtake Arca goodies – bits of mixtapes and random non-album experiments – we’ve scooped together for you:

Arca – 2 Blunted
Arca – Meditation
Arca – DOEP
Arca – &&&&&
Arca – Sisters
Arca – Manners

For those who appreciate such things, Arca recently scored #4 on the Dazed Readers’ 100, putting him in the rather unexpected company of the XXJFG-associated Henry Plotnick, who snuck in at #26!