ELYSIA CRAMPTON - Los Thuthanaka

Los Thuthanaka are a US duo made up of siblings Elysia and Joshua Crampton, half Irish and half Aymara (an indigenous Bolivian people) by descent, though born and raised in California and fully immersed in that context. The former is a celebrated name in electronic music and avant-garde sound collage dating back to 2008, while the latter has been on the scene since the same period, though he prefers the guitar, albeit wielded with a noisy, experimental bent.

This shared project of theirs has been hailed by Pitchfork as album of the year.

The record mixes avant-rock, fragments of sampled sound, blankets of white noise and borrowings from Andean folk music, particularly Bolivian. The tracks all unfold in the same way, riding hypnotic rhythms over which increasingly chaotic soundscapes pile up. Nothing that hasn't already been heard countless times at the more extreme fringes of rock music over the decades: this time around, some of the sources are fairly specific (music from the Aymara people, precisely), but the underlying mechanism is the same as ever.

There wouldn't be much else to say if the record hadn't been hailed as an event, and that's where the whole thing starts to creak: the work has in fact been held up by Pitchfork as an anti-colonial manifesto and praised for its reclamation of traditional Bolivian musical forms such as huayño, caporal and kullawada, and similar reasoning was offered by Stereogum and The Quietus.

It's unfortunately hard not to notice that this acclaim is led by American and British outlets: so it's the English-language press, itself part of the colonizing apparatus, that insists on treating this as a symbol of decolonization — in the most textbook example of epistemic colonialism imaginable.

Equally curious is the praise for its excavations of Bolivian indigenous culture: when, before now, had these same outlets ever celebrated the rhythms of huayño, caporal and kullawada? And why do they suddenly feel the need to do so now? One suspects that, had the album been made by a Bolivian duo working in Bolivia, we would likely still be waiting to hear anyone mention huayño, caporal and kullawada at all. The proof? Before this record, those same outlets had shown precious little interest in these styles and their long, layered history.

If Bolivian music only becomes relevant when it's played in the United States by Americans, there's clearly a problem somewhere: the Crampton siblings aren't to blame for it, to be clear, but while they're not the cause, they're certainly a symptom of it. This is quite apart from the content itself, which does offer a few points of interest, even if, as already noted, it comes across as fairly conventional within its own cultural undergrowth.

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14/12/2025