DJing isn’t just a side gig for Chuquimamani-Condori—it’s the ethos that guides their entire artistic practice. They look at the way music passes through them: where it comes from, where it goes, and the stories it picks up along the way. In their hands, everything is ripe to be remixed, whether a given track or the way it’s released, ways of listening to music or just ways of existing. Since the Nashville-based Bolivian American producer once known as Elysia Crampton has rebirthed their project under their Aymara name, their work has become even more celebratory of their place in a lineage of queer and Indigenous music, and defiant of the larger forces that might try to box them in. If 2023’s DJ E was mainly a reintroduction, presenting the sound they first honed on American Drift and The Light That You Gave Me to See You in a more smeared (yet sharpened) incarnation, this year’s Los Thuthanaka has blown the gates wide open, creating a sprawling form of half-CDJ’d/half-shredded Andean folk collage with their brother Joshua Chuquimia Crampton that calls into question what the hell the rest of the experimental music world is doing to catch up.
Edits, then, is a bit of a breather, even if its presentation is as demanding as ever. Compiling 100 minutes of remixes pulled from various live sets and DJ mixes over the last six years (including some new hard-drive loosies), this is the raw Play-Doh that Chuquimamani-Condori’s world is built from. Kullawada drum rolls crash against distended Goo Goo Dolls samples, while Clairo’s voice gets battered by caporales beats like a toy being fed through a trash compactor. Bro country, ’90s freestyle, tecnocumbia, cloud rap—it’s all fair game here, and the more bizarre Chuquimamani-Condori’s mashups get, the more they uncover a sense of wonder and vulnerability buried in unlikely places. It may be a laptop dump, but it speaks to the loose, fractured nature of their work that the results aren’t that far off from an “official” DJ E album (whatever that means).
Songs can’t make it out of Chuquimamani-Condori’s blender without being radically altered: A simple caporales rhythm can completely knock Bruce Hornsby and Beyoncé off their axes, somehow turning them both sillier and more sincere at the same time. Random non-hits like Gregory Dillon’s “Plastic Ferrari” bloom from passable CW Network-ready synth pop into swirling, epic confessions of queerness. Nowhere are DJ E’s juxtapositions starker or more fascinating than in their takes on mainstream country, which complicate their typically staunchly anti-colonialist perspective by bringing out the beauty in these tracks, as if in an attempt to negotiate with working-class whiteness itself, as a person of mixed race. When they stir up Faith Hill’s “Breathe” with their own “Breathing,” the road to the shimmering chorus is littered with so many slippery beats that when it all finally locks in, the whole thing explodes like fireworks. Their spin on Parker McCollum’s “Handle on You” takes the opposite route by stripping things way down, swapping out the drums for Joshua Chuquimia Crampton’s engulfing guitar fuzz and wiping the polished sheen away until its desperate emotional core is laid bare.