Chuquimamani-Condori’s music is so radically, so honestly of its time – yet equally, is completely unmoored from any dominant, Western notion of time itself.
Their newest album, Edits, is a collection of music previously shared across mixes, radio shows and live sets over the past six years. It draws and builds upon motifs and artistic techniques common across Chuquimamani-Condori’s various musical projects. Pitch-corrected pop music over huyano, kullawada, caporales and other Andean & Indigenous Bolivian music; often original compositions, or with added keytar, guitar or drone from Chuquimamani-Condori or their brother and close collaborator, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton.
And too, almost most importantly – bolstered by the power of the CDJ, the supreme instrument of today. Constant backspins, DJ tags, Jeezy-esque adlibs and thumping digital white noise, all usually used for punctuation, here give added rhythm. Deliriously overstimulating, but hardly brainrot – this is a delicate and passionate construction. The work of a human hand, the seams deliberately on show; DIY electronica wielding unmastered sonics proudly and cleverly as texture.
It feels like a complete rebellion: against the popular dance and electronic music of today, a series of photocopies and repackages from the past that inevitably lose not only their original grit, but their context, their humanity. Edits is also a rejection of the idea of societal progress through technological advancement – yeah bro Dolby Atmos sounds great I’m sure, but have you ever experienced the joy of a sesh while listening to music from someone’s busted as hell phone speaker. Have you ever hurtled down Parramatta Road listening to Skitzmix 35 in your cousin’s Lancer, you can literally only hear the bass because of the 20kg sub in the boot. Have you ever listened to the greatest radio station on earth, which has the sketchiest reception on 94.5fm, thanks a lot to the Big Radio Cartel, but that’s ok we love it anyway.
Edits intensely captures the overpowering feeling of being alive in 2025. But it also understands music’s possibility as a bridge across time itself. It considers the cathartic and transportive potential of the dancefloor edit (forever an important part of dance music history, but renewed now with both zeal and lazy bad faith, in electronic music’s hyper-digital and hyper-commercialised present). That headrush of recognition of hearing something unexpectedly outside its context: most beautifully realised when it is re-interpreted into something else entirely. On ‘Red Road w/ Dolls E Dj edit’, alongside charging drums, quivering, synths and electricity stock sound effects, a C-tier Goo Goo Dolls song somehow becomes a sonic mandate sent straight from heaven; how did I never before realise the angelic character of John Rzeznik’s voice?
Chuquimamani-Condori finds beauty in the most unlikely of places. Like a country pop cover of Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘drivers license’, written from the perspective of the breaker-upper who just inherited his “Daddy's” truck. Country pop in particular is a common fascination for Chuquimamani-Condori; not ironically, but with a judgement-free respect. Stripped away from its glossy, post-Bush-era production meta, there’s a shocking emotional sincerity to a lot of this music. Rubbed clean and entered into the spectral stream of Chuquimamani-Condori’s production, it shines like a gem. Faith Hill’s chorus on ‘Breathe Kullawada Caporal E DJ edit’ is such an acutely ecstatic experience that it’s hard to imagine the original song was created for any other reason than to, one day, be incorporated into this edit. And maybe it was. Each CDJ backspin and slamming drum, clipping to the max, is though the song is destroying and re-creating itself constantly, both charging onwards and sitting in this elated, unmoored, heightened position, present throughout all time at once.
On an (unofficial) YouTube upload of Chuquimamani-Condori’s 2024 NTS mix Find Me (of which a bulk of the second half of Edits is taken), there’s a comment, the top comment actually, from user @hhyperbaIIad:
“i think i'll start a new life”
With a reply by @abrahimonyt:
“godspeed to us”
Our world is overwhelming; hopeful and hopeless, wistful and desperate. But Edits captures that potential, every day, every moment to start anew. Rebirth: not tied to a linear sense of time, but as an idea that can be lived out in practice, a latent power in us always to decide, to do. It’s a queer understanding of time and of one's place amongst it. Queerness not only as an escape, but as a map in the stars. A life of endless possibility.
Words by Lindsay Riley