Some thoughts on Elysia Crampton’s ORCORARA 2010
The music of Elysia Crampton Chuquimia has always been quite maximalist and arguably chaotic as well, even dating back to the E+E days. Her work existed in the same world as artists like Chino Amobi (formerly known as Diamond Black Hearted Boy) and DJs like Total Freedom, but in addition to the abrasiveness or the sound effects typical of “deconstructed club music”, she incorporated music that was informed by her background, as a California-born trans woman of Aymara heritage who spent a large portion of her life between Bolivia, Mexico and Virginia, United States. Her first record as Elysia Crampton, — as well as my introduction her music, —2015's American Drift, featured tracks that laid Lil Jon samples over cumbia sonidera, trap beats over tarqueadas and laser-like noises and was based around a concept that connected brownness with geology.
To me, Crampton’s music represented something that I had been exposed to for my whole life — my dad being Argentinian of Indigenous descent and an Andean folk musician — but presented in a context that completely blew me away. Not that the crossover between cumbia and club music never existed, or even the combination of traditional folk music from the Andes and electronic music as a whole. There is even an album Bolivian group Los Kjarkas — known globally for “Llorando se fue”, which was the basis for Kaoba’s “Lambada”, later sampled by Jennifer Lopez’s “On the Floor” and many other tracks — put out in the 90s called Tecno Kjarkas, which was more or less that, with sounds and instrumentation that felt extremely 90s yet weirdly ahead of its time. However, I found most other combinations of cumbia, Andean music and electronic music to be forced, especially since it tended to be made by people with little no cultural connection to that. That wasn’t the case with Elysia, who always centered Native history on her work, and made even the craziest combinations one can think of flow seamlessly.
Her focus on Brown and Indigenous history was extended into her mixes and later albums. Elysia Crampton Presents: Demon City, made in collaboration with Rabit, Chino Amobi, Felix Lee (formerly known as Lexxi) and Why Be as well as the DJ mix/performance Dissolution of the Sovereign: A Timeslide into the Future, both released in 2016, were intended as homages to Aymara revolutionary Bartolina Sisa, who along with her husband Tupac Amaru II led an Indigenous insurrection in present-day Bolivia and was brutally murdered and dismembered by the Spanish, and the music surely reflected that brutal, tragic, complicated history, as did her self-titled album from 2018 which was dedicated to the “mariposas”, trans and gender-non conforming people in Bolivia who took part of traditional dances and celebrations in the 60s and 70s.
So, by contrast, ORCORARA 2010 might seem like a huge chance of pace at first glance. This record has more in common with the ambient works of her contemporaries such as Tim Hecker, Kelly Moran, Kara-lis Coverdale, the early works of Oneohtrix Point Never, or even modern classical music and minimalist composers such as Meredith Monk or Julius Eastman than it does with any of the “post-club” artists her music tends to be lumped into. It definitely sounds different from any other of Elysia’s projects, not only in terms of style but also compositionally and especially length wise, with pieces such as “Morning Star-Red Glare-Sequoia Bridge” stretching way beyond the ten-minute mark. It has more in common with the music she’s put out as Chuquimamani-Condori since 2019, which had a stronger focus on minimalism and acoustic instrumentation from pianos to charangos.
ORCORARA 2010, part of a piece originally commissioned by the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement of Geneva, Switzerland in 2018 and released by Berlin-based experimental music label PAN in May 2020, has a stronger focus on the presence of vocalists in comparison to most of her material as well. While she has collaborated with vocalists on her 2013 album The Light That You Gave Me To See You which she released as E+E, with Money Allah reciting poetry on the title track of American Drift and on its highlight “Wing” and even with Kelela on the one-off single “Final Exam”, most of the vocals on her music tends to come from edits, manipulated samples or snippets that sound like or reference radio transmissions from Central and South American countries. Here, they are constantly pushed front and center.
Throughout ORCORARA 2010 there are multiple readings of poets such as Bolivian writer Jaime Sáenz, Spanish writer Juan Ramón Jimenez — known for his book Platero and I –, Paul Claudel and Charles Wright, done mostly by Jeremy Rojas, with the exception of the track “Crest” in which a reading of Sáenz’s Someone Must Be Called Twilight is done by Fanny Pankara Chuquimia. But the most notable vocal presences on the record are perhaps found on the tracks “Grove”, made with NAAFI and NON affiliate Embaci and “Crucifixion”, a collaboration with Shannon Funchess, main vocalist of modern goth-pop staple Light Asylum, the latter of which helps re-contextualize the album’s topics of Christian violence historically imposed onto Indigenous people across the Americas.
The name “orcorara” is borrowed from the Quechua term “urqurara”, meaning the Andean constellation of Orion, or Orion’s Belt, and it is inspired by a representation of the Andean cosmovision done by Indigenous-Peruvian author Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua, done in the 17th century and published near the end of the 19th century, which is shown in the album cover. That image presents the formation of stars on the top, above the sun and the Gods, as a bridge between both heavens. It is one of the ways in which Elysia continues to explore the topics of Incan and Aymara mythologies, Indigenous and Brown resistance all across the continent, placing and reclaiming them in a modern context.
This feels particularly relevant as seen in the dedications of the album, including one to Paul Sousa, an inmate who worked years as a firefighter while incarcerated in California or Native American herbalist Sage LaPena, but in general, to people who work for the well-being of their communities, yet their contributions are erased or not appropriately acknowledged or remunerated. This also could also tie in with the situation of the disproportionate impact COVID-19 has had in Indigenous people of the Americas due to, among other reasons, the lack of proper health infrastructure available to them, as well as the anti-Indigenous sentiments and the active erasure of Indigenous culture and beliefs that arose during the coup d’état in Bolivia in 2019.
Despite the notable differences present in ORCORARA 2010 in comparison with the rest of Elysia’s discography, it still feels very much like an Elysia Crampton album, not only in concept or background, but in execution too. You can hear experimentations with contemporary and traditional South American music genres in “Amaru-Otorongo (Dried Pine)”, which sounds like someone trying to do a baile funk beat exclusively with a heavily distorted guitar, or “Spring of Wound”, a collaboration with Argentinian batucada percussion group Siete Octavos, which is easily the most frenetic and fun moment in the whole album. Even though there is a — seemingly — more atmospheric feeling of the album overall, it still has the same energy of the “epic collages” that Elysia is known for, only present on a slightly different circumstance.
Although you could describe ORCORARA 2010 as “Elysia’s ambient album”, it is not the kind of record one would generally put in the background to study, read a book or just relax to. On the contrary, it is incredibly busy, a record that commands your attention just as much as any of her other music. It may not be an easy listen, if anything because of how dense and impressive lengthwise it is, but it is still one that feels incredibly rewarding, feeling like an extension of everything she’s been capable of, incorporating noise music, ambient, modern classical, Berlin School-type synths and more into her already genre-bending sound. It is, in my opinion, one of her most beautiful releases on an already spectacular and unique discography.
Piece originally published on Reddit’s r/indieheads Best of 2020 Write-up Series
