- The artist formerly known as Elysia Crampton makes a gloriously chaotic and triumphant return.
- In March, the musician and poet Chuquimamani-Condori—known to many as Elysia Crampton—unveiled the mural they and their brother created for an exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York. The work, which they refer to as a "medicine piece," is a busy digital collage of esoteric symbols. It pays homage to the artists' great great-grandparents, indigenous Bolivians who helped lead a struggle for land and education. Various magical talismans surround a Transformer-style robot made of sound system components, with a black-and-white photo of the artist's progenitors positioned so they seem to be piloting it. The piece is like a star map of sacred, cosmic and historic images that mingle with pop culture and kitsch to form a portrait of the artist by way of their extraordinary personal mythology. Standing in front of it, I was struck by how they'd managed to arrange all this disparate material to produce an unlikely but resounding harmony.
Unlikely but harmonious is also how I'd describe Chuquimamani-Condori's self-released album from November, DJ E, which feels very much like a companion to the mural. The artist refers to it, lyrically as always, as "the sound of our water ceremonies, the 40 bands playing their melodies at once to create the cacophony of the first aurora and the call of the morning star Venus." Built from samples of chopped-and-screwed Andean folk, it's as intense as you'd expect from the description. I'd love to peek at the project files to see all the channels that comprise their euphoric wall of sound: flutes, synths, crunchy power chords, an entire soundboard worth of DJ drops and even, as credited in the Bandcamp liner notes, the din of an actual circular saw.
Chuquimamani-Condori has always balanced dissonance and unity in a way that few others can. With DJ E, they've come close to perfecting the formula. This might be why fans on the Internet recur to terms like "light-giving," "life-affirming" and "cathartic" to talk about it. Such a generous range of feelings and textures could only come from someone who's reconciled the many, often contradictory, sides of themselves. That feeling of wholeness is infectious.
The embrace of uplift as an operating principle distinguishes DJ E from almost anything else in the current experimental music landscape. Opener "Breathing" starts with a loop from "Un Vaso de Cerveza" ("A Glass of Beer") by Argentine cumbia singer Mario Pereyra, slowed to the point that a song about betrayal and heartbreak comes to sound almost spiritual because of the yawning, pitched-down vocals. It's a throwback to the approachable edit-based sound that characterized some of their early work under the name E+E (during the period leading up to and including their first official album, American Drift). But they've mastered the art of layering since then. The way they swaddle the sample in who knows how many interlocking melodies gives the song more gravitas than any simple edit. The presence of a real grand piano on songs like "Engine," where it's layered with chintzy digital instruments, makes for an unstable negotiation between the conventional and the atonal. And the needle tilts dramatically towards the latter on chaotic tracks like "Eat My Cum" and "Forastero Edit," with their thrilling explorations of sour notes.
Unlike on the dystopian-sounding Demon City or the relentlessly noisy self-titled record, DJ E lets beauty win in the end. The devastating album closer, "Until I Find You Again," pairs a folksy down-home fiddle line with drums that hit like a dump truck. I like to imagine how a DJ might use it to scramble the brains of an unsuspecting crowd. You rarely hear such rousing major harmonies in the world of highbrow experimental music, maybe because of a prevailing cynicism that would have us mistake earnest for corny. Here, Chuquimamani-Condori leans into the delightful mess of unbridled emotion. If you let yourself be led by the hand, it feels amazing to check your neuroses at the door.
Chuquimamani-Condori has only given a handful of interviews over the course of their career, but in the few things they've said about the new album, they've been sure to mention that it's unmastered. Mastering primarily involves the use of compressors, which reduce the dynamic range of each instrument—the contrast between their softest and loudest points—to make the track feel less crowded and more streamlined. But in music as in life, Chuquimamani-Condori is unwilling to quiet any aspect of themselves to create the illusion of cohesion. Instead, they leave it all out on the table, and inspire us listeners to do the same.
Tracklist01. Breathing
02. Eat My Cum
03. Engine
04. Forastero Edit
05. Return
06. Know
07. UntIl I Find You Again