Here’s an Onion headline that is tattooed on the back of my brain, from a brief notice with the dateline September 12, 2001: “Bill Gates Finally Getting Into Kid A.” Of all the things in this mille feuille joke, I love the outmoded phrase of “getting into” records. It’s a beautiful practice to let your opinions sit on the shelf like jarred homunculi while struggling to describe how exactly music makes you feel. To say that Los Thuthanaka, the self-titled album from Chuquimamani-Condori and their brother, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, requires some time on the shelf might be an understatement. But get into it, and you’ll know this is a special record, so ahead of its time, and so worthy of your own.
Los Thuthanaka is an album about transience and permanence, the mutability of sound and its deep roots. It’s an instrumental record, a lo-fi psychedelic noise rock piece that broke the VU meters somewhere along the recording process (it was never mastered; it is not on streaming services). But there are so many voices that speak through—and on behalf of—the siblings: electric guitars, electric keytars, mid-century acoustic Andean folk instruments like the ronroco, buried samples of Música Boliviana Popular, Italaque drums from indigenous Aymara people. “Ipi Saxara” features a fried, elliptical riff over a traditional Andean huayño rhythm that is syncopated almost out of time while CDJ backspins and chintzy Yamaha sound effects rain down on the track. Surrender to the wormhole, to the sound of clipping and chaos, to the trans state where you can make out five centuries of music history dancing with each other.
And frankly, none of this would be half as good if this shit didn’t swing so hard. Chuquimamani-Condori’s career as a supersonic producer—whose imposing body of work speaks for voiceless and oppressed people around the world—culminates in this project. They and their brother Josh keep these songs off the grid by borrowing traditional Bolivian styles of huayño, like Salay and Kullawada, to introduce new and novel pockets of rhythm. The cascading drums of “Awila” and the breakneck (or break-your-neck) tempo of “Apnaqkaya Titi” feel like witnessing the birth of sound. The entire Western canon of dance music is rooted in the folk music of indigenous peoples, who brought the concept of syncopation to colonial ears and created the rhythms that moved people toward a higher power. And here it is, back from the past, like you’ve never heard it before.
Los Thuthanaka offer a new national motto for anyone who needs it: Out of one, many. It’s head music, body music, spiritual music, polemic party music, decolonized plunderphonics, or as the title of the angelic opening song is translated from the Aymara language: “The Queer People-Medicines Are Here.” In this new era where we sell the time it takes to think about things to tech companies and their large language models, here is an album that asks something from you: time, patience, reorganization, reframing, and reconnection. Maybe you’ll take an ideological read into what an “unmastered” album signifies, or maybe you’ll take a musicological read into the microtonal noise artifacts popping off in your earbuds as a new harmonic modality. None of this is told; all of this is shown through the ancestry of two siblings who made music to honor their family and their people’s history. Simply put, it’s a story about the journey home, one of the oldest stories in the world. –Jeremy D. Larson
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
