Joshua Chuquimia Crampton’s Anata proudly wears the disclaimer “Un-Mastered” on its sleeve, and is it ever. After a few tentative low-end thumps on the bombo italaque drum to introduce “Chakana Head-Bang!,” Crampton’s guitar rends the sky, the motion of his hand across the fretboard finding a visual synchronicity with a meteor sweeping overhead, or a crack opening in the earth. This is some of the most elemental, in-the-red music ever recorded.
Crampton’s indifference to mastering is inspiring on two levels. Firstly—as on Los Thuthanaka, last year’s epochal culmination of his longtime recording partnership with sibling Chuquimamani-Condori—it’s refreshingly indifferent to the streaming-era business model, where music is a lifestyle accoutrement meant to dissolve into an unobtrusive blur in the background. One cannot simply slot the songs on Anata into a playlist, not least because they’ll probably be so much louder than anything else. The only way to experience Anata is to let it crash over you.
Secondly, it aims to capture the way the ceremonies of the Great Pakajaqi Nation of Aymara people—of which Crampton is a member—might be heard through a “phone camera,” flattened and crushed down to a few harsh bytes. This curious approach at first feels like an extension of a trend among underground guitar heroes like ML Buch (for whom Crampton has opened) and Klein, who find spiritual truth in the flat sounds of the post-analog era. But for Crampton, it’s just as much about expressing the inexpressible, of acknowledging that some things are too alive and spontaneous to be done justice by a mere recording. And though this music might sound more scouring than celebratory to Western ears at first, Crampton, speaking to Tone Glow, proudly cites a review from a Bolivian critic who argued his music “wouldn’t be out of place in an urban ceremony because it is a representation of ‘activated ceremonial music.’”
As far as newly coined genres go, that’s not too bad. Electricity gives Crampton’s music life, and it’s hard to think of another guitarist working right now for whom the live current feels like such a fluid language. His music feels like it’s guided by what Crampton is feeling more than by any audible compositional principle, alternating righteous heavy-metal riffage and harsh-noise shrieks (“Chakana Head Bang!”) with lustrous, stripped-down ambient pieces (“Jallu,” the second half of “Convocación ‘Banger/Diffusion’”). Crampton has been performing more regularly of late, and more than his previous four solo albums, Anata feels guided by the spontaneity and communal spirit of live performance.
At 25 minutes, Anata is Crampton’s shortest solo album under his own name, but his most musically expansive. Though mostly focused on solo guitar and featuring none of the DJ-tag spam and baroque keyboard washes of Los Thuthanaka, Anata nonetheless finds room for Bolivian instrumentation, including the aforementioned bombo italaque as well as charango and ronroco lutes. The rhythms of Andean styles like salay and huayno have always been an undercurrent in Crampton’s music, often played through palm-muted guitar riffs. On lead single and standout “Ch’uwanchaña El Golpe Final,” the sweetness of the charango and ronroco provide the dominant sounds. It’s like one of the huayno opuses of Los Thuthanaka shrunk down, well, to phone-screen size.
Crampton’s tone has a lustrous quality, as if it’s been filtered through sheets of gold leaf before finding its way to record. Jimi Hendrix is the primordial godfather of this stuff, as with any other music where the daisy-chain of effects feels like a tenacious and raging entity coexisting with the guitarist, even as Crampton’s musical vocabulary largely bypasses the blues in favor of his Andean influences. There’s DNA from any number of metal and J-rock riffers, and anyone who recognizes names like Flying Saucer Attack, Roy Montgomery and Sunroof! might find themselves swept up in a Terrastock flashback.
Yet listening to Anata, musical history falls to the wayside in favor of pure expression. In all of Crampton’s work, there’s the sense that the artist is grabbing you by the shoulder and demanding you feel what he feels; this time around the spirit of celebratory ecstasy is so strong that you might find yourself jumping to your feet when the huayno rhythm returns on “Mallku Diablón,” just as you might during a well-timed beat switch in a DJ set. This is the anti-colonial, anti-complacency guitar album of the very young year so far.
