The sonic journey of Los Thuthanaka between the Andes and queer mythology.

The fluidity of time, sonic archaeology, and traditions that are reborn in new and different ways. Last year, the Bolivian-American sibling duo Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton set out on a journey to the ridges of the Andes Mountains and back with their project Los Thuthanaka. The eponymous album is a mix of hypnotic trance, digital noise, psychedelia, cumbia, and the Andean genre and dance huayño. The album was met with enthusiasm across the music criticism spectrum last year, with Pitchfork rating it as the best new album since the release of Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters in 2020. Los Thuthanaka will arrive at Ankali on November 5 in collaboration with the Heartnoize collective.

“The future does not lie ahead of us, but behind us… to move forward means to return,” commented Chuquimamani-Condori (formerly known as Elysia Crampton) on their relationship to their own roots and the culture of the Aymara, the indigenous people of Peru and Bolivia. This return to the future is precisely what the album Los Thuthanaka is about, among other things, as the sibling duo symbolically dedicated it to the Aymara deity who protects queer people. Psychedelic guitar riffs, noise from local radio broadcasts, and relentless rhythms regularly reaching new musical heights—last year’s recording is full of techniques that transcend the rigid colonial order of the world. The unexplored terrain that Los Thuthanaka ventures into consistently reshapes old rules and does not firmly define new ones.

ffo: Elysia Crampton, Liturgy, Nyege Nyege