Chuquimamani-Condori’s gloriously fractured music mashes the mundane with the divine, leaving each jagged seam lovingly uncovered. As Elysia Crampton, E+E, and now utilizing their Aymara title, the Bolivian American experimental producer has woven cumbia, tarqueada, huayño, and different Andean folks and dance types into splintered collages pierced by white-noise blasts, digital rhythms, and hyper-compressed digital bass. Past merely invoking these genres, they seize a way of their passage by means of the world—as if their muffled rhythms have been blasting out of an overdriven PA system within the park, or ripped from a web-based combine with the adverts nonetheless intact. Chuquimamani-Condori treats these sounds as a respiration social organism, an animated embodiment of conventional music because it lives immediately.
After a handful of releases like ORCORARA 2010 and Chosen Demos & DJ Edits [2007-2019] that offered the disparate constructing blocks of Chuquimamani-Condori’s music at their rawest, DJ E dazzlingly rejoins the items. Dropped onto Bandcamp with little fanfare towards the top of final yr, it seems like a full-circle second for Chuquimamani-Condori; like 2018’s self-titled album or their mesmerizing 2015 debut, American Drift, it might by no means be mistaken for the work of one other artist. It’s concurrently harrowing but heat, deathly pressing but defiantly playful. Although the whole lot from the album’s low-key launch to its proudly unmastered sound could appear to undercut its significance, Chuquimamani-Condori’s rejection of trade norms solely serves to spotlight the vitality of the music.
The very first thing it’s possible you’ll discover about DJ E is simply how busted it sounds. Chuquimamani-Condori stacks one ultra-compressed layer on high of one other, their claustrophobic mixing solely heightening the music’s depth. “The older I get, the uglier I need my music to really feel,” they instructed Tiny Combine Tapes in 2015, arguing that clear, self-consciously futuristic sound design is rooted in a colonialist “mode of educated whiteness.” By that metric, DJ E is Chuquimamani-Condori’s most violent revolt but: “Forastero Edit” skitters with sword-drawing inventory results and stop-start guitar from their brother Joshua Chuquimia Crampton (whose personal extremely–minimal music has paralleled Chuquimamani-Condori’s over the previous few years). “Return” buries its pleading siku panpipes in a blown-out fog of throbbing bass and crunched-up distortion, in what seems like attempting to glimpse daylight by means of a sandstorm. It’s not that far off from the disorientation brought on by the weirder finish of Brazilian funk, a sort of hypnosis solely made potential by the sound of plug-in bass presets clipping uncontrolled.
