{"id":266233,"date":"2026-02-03T23:10:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-03T23:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/266233\/"},"modified":"2026-02-03T23:10:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T23:10:08","slug":"joshua-chuquimia-crampton-anata-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/266233\/","title":{"rendered":"Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, ‘Anata’ Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a recent interview<\/a> with the great Joshua Minsoo Kim, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton explained that, whether in his music, his sibling Chuquimamani-Condori\u2019s, or theirs as Los Thuthanaka, being loud is a part of the physical experience. \u201cYou\u2019re supposed to feel the sound,\u201d he elaborated. \u201cIt\u2019s not supposed to be painful, but it\u2019s supposed to change you, it\u2019s supposed to make you feel healed in some way.\u201d When I hear Crampton\u2019s work, I am reminded of Sonic Youth\u2019s musicality\u2014the euphoric final moments of \u201cThe Sprawl,\u201d or the middle section in \u201cTom Violence,\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

That disruptive power comes alive in Crampton\u2019s universe, too\u2014in the staggering, festering expanse of \u201cAwila,\u201d a 12-minute kullawada dance teeming with awakened guitars and wall-to-wall elementalism. It\u2019s the building, confounding centerpiece to Crampton and his sibling\u2019s 2025 masterpiece: the psychedelic, structureless Los Thuthanaka. Chuquimamani-Condori\u2019s ability to chop up and interpolate pop and country music is a good AI counteractant\u2014because you truly cannot replicate any of DJ E or Edits\u2014and Joshua\u2019s 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<\/a> about Chuquimamani-Condori for Stereogum last year, wrote about how \u201ceach new release from the Crampton camp felt like Brian Wilson giving us a new SMiLE.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s recent Edits a try. \u201cBreathe Kullawada Caporal E DJ edit\u201d is a noisy pop racket that sounds like four or five radio stations at once, materializing in the chaos and pleasure of layering. That\u2019s a hit song pulled apart and taped back together inside out. It\u2019s music that, like the original cuts of \u201cSurf\u2019s Up\u201d and \u201cHeroes and Villains,\u201d lives in the soul and blasts heavily out of it.<\/p>\n

Crampton\u2019s first full-length solo endeavor since 2024\u2019s 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, \u201cwhere we celebrate the Pachamama (Mother Earth) before the rainy season, giving thanks for harvest with offerings & the principle of reciprocity (Anyi) between humans\/nature,\u201d according to the liner notes. The q\u2019iwa\/queer parts of the music are anti-colonial and anti-state, and the loud parts of this record are ceremonial\u2014like noise clattering in the street, or the soundtrack of a passing parade. The ingredients of Crampton\u2019s instrumental work aren\u2019t parodied by the ego of singing. Anata, like Estrella Por Estrella before it, is a deconstruction. It\u2019s spiritual, medicinal\u2014Indigenous ceremonial music spun boundless by human activation. As Crampton said of the Great Pakajaqi Nation last month, \u201cwe\u2019re all still connected no matter where we find ourselves in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Crampton opens a portal to his people by rewiring the compositional possibilities of guitar playing, and the elaborate \u201cCh\u2019uwancha\u00f1a \u301cEl Golpe Final\u301c\u201d 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\u2019s blown apart and obscured, analogous to YouTube clips of Andean liturgies where the audio\u2019s bottomed out. The energy of \u201cCh\u2019uwancha\u00f1a \u301cEl Golpe Final\u301c\u201d takes me to a different place. It\u2019s 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. \u201cJallu\u201d is anchored by this static, chugging riff while Crampton noodles across piled instruments. \u201cMallku Diabl\u00f3n\u201d opens with loose strums and glassy tones, before distending into a compressed, avalanching scorcher.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s body and motion, even when Crampton\u2019s guitars are stacking on top of each other. As the record\u2019s sustain persists, it seems like the mix could erupt into anarchy at any point but never does\u2014though it comes close in the disruptive, wall-banging rhythms of \u201cTaqini (Juntxs).\u201d Crampton\u2019s vibrato is often immense, complicated: \u201cChakana Head-Bang!\u201d bends into pressurized, decaying guitar blares; the thrashing, paint-splatter riff in \u201cConvocaci\u00f3n \u2018Banger\/Diffusion\u2019\u201d suffocates and dissipates into a loping stride of droning lights.<\/p>\n

Anata surrenders to the trances that be. Crampton\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cConvocaci\u00f3n \u2018Banger\/Diffusion\u2019\u201d and \u201cCh\u2019uwancha\u00f1a \u301cEl Golpe Final\u301c\u201d begin to crush and overwhelm, Crampton still finds space to drift. There\u2019s this quote of his that\u2019s stuck with me\u2014he once told Andy Cush<\/a> that he is always \u201cremixing\u201d music in his head when he hears it. \u201cNot to like, make it better, not to be shady,\u201d he clarified. \u201cIt\u2019s more like, what gets me excited about music is when I can hear more from it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anata is an abundant, truthful body of work that gives and gives. Though the music is indescribable, Crampton\u2019s 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 \u201cCh\u2019uwancha\u00f1a \u301cEl Golpe Final\u301c\u201d on Bandcamp: \u201cuna madrugada, antes de ir a trabajar, me puse a llorar al ver unos helechos creciendo debajo de la ciudad, en una drenaje pluvial,\u201d which translates to \u201cone early morning, before going to work, I started crying when I saw some ferns growing beneath the city, in a storm drain.\u201d There\u2019s a mystery to how Joshua Chuquimia Crampton produced these sounds\u2014how he made his guitar speak an emotional language like this. Anata merits repeated listens to find all the answers. [Self-Released]<\/p>\n

Anata<\/a> is out February 6.<\/p>\n

Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a recent interview with the great Joshua Minsoo Kim, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton explained that, whether in his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266234,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-266233","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}