In a recent interview with the great Joshua Minsoo Kim, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton explained that, whether in his music, his sibling Chuquimamani-Condori’s, or theirs as Los Thuthanaka, being loud is a part of the physical experience. “You’re supposed to feel the sound,” he elaborated. “It’s not supposed to be painful, but it’s supposed to change you, it’s supposed to make you feel healed in some way.” When I hear Crampton’s work, I am reminded of Sonic Youth’s musicality—the euphoric final moments of “The Sprawl,” or the middle section in “Tom Violence,” specifically. Sonic Youth, of course, were no wave settlers first, mangling rock structures through discordant, atonal production. Inharmonic guitars unsettle through shifting, chaotic calculations of noise. As a listener, Sonic Youth’s abstract breakdowns and heretic, textural appulses offered me knowledge on volume used not as a sensation, but as a tool, as a storybook, as a harsh, disruptive power. Noise, from my perspective, is something to embody and extract. Something to learn from. You can move with and within it, or you can let it wash over you.
That disruptive power comes alive in Crampton’s universe, too—in the staggering, festering expanse of “Awila,” a 12-minute kullawada dance teeming with awakened guitars and wall-to-wall elementalism. It’s the building, confounding centerpiece to Crampton and his sibling’s 2025 masterpiece: the psychedelic, structureless Los Thuthanaka. Chuquimamani-Condori’s ability to chop up and interpolate pop and country music is a good AI counteractant—because you truly cannot replicate any of DJ E or Edits—and Joshua’s guitar drones are as transfixing and insistent as a deep house loop. Los Thuthanaka make music that commands user attention. Paste contributor Daniel Bromfield, in a great essay about Chuquimamani-Condori for Stereogum last year, wrote about how “each new release from the Crampton camp felt like Brian Wilson giving us a new SMiLE.”
For the uninitiated, comparing a weird, overstimulated spread of genre-agnostic feel, resistance, and ceaselessness made by two California-born, Aymara siblings to the pocket symphonies of the cleverest Beach Boy might feel unrealistic. But I implore you to at least give Chuquimamani-Condori’s recent Edits a try. “Breathe Kullawada Caporal E DJ edit” is a noisy pop racket that sounds like four or five radio stations at once, materializing in the chaos and pleasure of layering. That’s a hit song pulled apart and taped back together inside out. It’s music that, like the original cuts of “Surf’s Up” and “Heroes and Villains,” lives in the soul and blasts heavily out of it.
Crampton’s first full-length solo endeavor since 2024’s Estrella Por Estrella (a droning, Bolivian guitar tape with hues of Cheer-Accident) is great. Anata is a product of the Great Pakajaqi Nation and dedicated to the Andean ceremony of the same name, “where we celebrate the Pachamama (Mother Earth) before the rainy season, giving thanks for harvest with offerings & the principle of reciprocity (Anyi) between humans/nature,” according to the liner notes. The q’iwa/queer parts of the music are anti-colonial and anti-state, and the loud parts of this record are ceremonial—like noise clattering in the street, or the soundtrack of a passing parade. The ingredients of Crampton’s instrumental work aren’t parodied by the ego of singing. Anata, like Estrella Por Estrella before it, is a deconstruction. It’s spiritual, medicinal—Indigenous ceremonial music spun boundless by human activation. As Crampton said of the Great Pakajaqi Nation last month, “we’re all still connected no matter where we find ourselves in the world.”
Crampton opens a portal to his people by rewiring the compositional possibilities of guitar playing, and the elaborate “Ch’uwanchaña 〜El Golpe Final〜” is shredded noise captured in trance-y loops and crushing ascending lines. Surges of metal guitar couple with the acoustic backings of charango and ronroco, climbing into an overwhelming spate of texture. It’s blown apart and obscured, analogous to YouTube clips of Andean liturgies where the audio’s bottomed out. The energy of “Ch’uwanchaña 〜El Golpe Final〜” takes me to a different place. It’s an explosive, suspended tribute to Aymara music. Crampton layers his guitars and sometimes they sound like only one, and sometimes they sound like a thousand. “Jallu” is anchored by this static, chugging riff while Crampton noodles across piled instruments. “Mallku Diablón” opens with loose strums and glassy tones, before distending into a compressed, avalanching scorcher.
Much of Anata follows these paths. Raw, powerful physicality vibrates at every corner. This music gets blown to bits by hard EQ and reanimates through bass and bombo italaque set dressings, or through high and low lines woven into each other like dancing figures. There’s body and motion, even when Crampton’s guitars are stacking on top of each other. As the record’s sustain persists, it seems like the mix could erupt into anarchy at any point but never does—though it comes close in the disruptive, wall-banging rhythms of “Taqini (Juntxs).” Crampton’s vibrato is often immense, complicated: “Chakana Head-Bang!” bends into pressurized, decaying guitar blares; the thrashing, paint-splatter riff in “Convocación ‘Banger/Diffusion’” suffocates and dissipates into a loping stride of droning lights.
Anata surrenders to the trances that be. Crampton’s instrument soars in totality across the title track, which closes the record with an ecstatic spiral of angelic plunks and metallic scuffs that pang like metronomes. Once the song’s jackets of fuzz tear open the ambient swirls, it dissolves into a stillness hereafter. Anata sounds like an artifact that already existed, yet this music fluently negotiates in newness and capacity. Even when “Convocación ‘Banger/Diffusion’” and “Ch’uwanchaña 〜El Golpe Final〜” begin to crush and overwhelm, Crampton still finds space to drift. There’s this quote of his that’s stuck with me—he once told Andy Cush that he is always “remixing” music in his head when he hears it. “Not to like, make it better, not to be shady,” he clarified. “It’s more like, what gets me excited about music is when I can hear more from it.”
Anata is an abundant, truthful body of work that gives and gives. Though the music is indescribable, Crampton’s energy is anything but. This record, to my needful ears, is the sound of stars dying, galaxies getting sewn up, and people entering this world screaming. These songs are busy little palaces. One person even commented about “Ch’uwanchaña 〜El Golpe Final〜” on Bandcamp: “una madrugada, antes de ir a trabajar, me puse a llorar al ver unos helechos creciendo debajo de la ciudad, en una drenaje pluvial,” which translates to “one early morning, before going to work, I started crying when I saw some ferns growing beneath the city, in a storm drain.” There’s a mystery to how Joshua Chuquimia Crampton produced these sounds—how he made his guitar speak an emotional language like this. Anata merits repeated listens to find all the answers. [Self-Released]
Anata is out February 6.
Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.
