Joshua Chuquimia Crampton’s Anata is a ceremony of noise

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.”