Joshua Chuquimia Crampton of Los Thuthanaka Breaks Down 6 Perfectly Produced Records
From Bolivian charangueada to Japanese heavy metal, these are the productions that inspire the visionary guitarist.
The Producers is an interview series where our favorite producers discuss their favorite music production.
Good luck finding another album that sounds like Los Thuthanaka. The self-titled debut from the sibling duo of Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton landed like a meteorite earlier this year, with a mixture of traditional Andean dance rhythms, blown-out electronic production, and heavy electric guitar that is singular even among both musicians’ rich solo catalogs. It’s also, by my lights, the best album of the year so far by a comfortable margin. I put on a track like “Phuju,” and its combination of raw power and deep sensuality comes on like a physical sensation other than hearing, something akin to bodily relief.
When I wrote about Los Thuthanaka for Five Albums just after its release in late March, I situated it chiefly in terms of the discography of Chuquimamani-Condori, who contributes keys, electronics, and Bolivian stringed and percussion instruments to Los Thuthanaka, and whose work I was more familiar with at the time. I’ve since gone deep into the discography of Chuquimia Crampton, the duo’s guitarist and bassist. His gorgeous 2024 album Estrella Por Estrella, in particular, feels like a clear forebear to Los Thuthanaka, even without the electronic beats that are so prominent in the duo’s work: in its layering of ecstatically repetitious rhythms with softly droning textures, and its production that feels finely considered and rambunctiously lo-fi at once. There’s even one guitar riff that emerges from the dreamlike distortion of Estrella Por Estrella’s “Eternero” and comes up again in slightly altered form as the melodic anchor of Los Thuthanaka’s rollicking “Apnaqkaya Titi.”
Chuquimia Crampton’s sensibility as a musician is heavily informed by his lifelong curiosity as a listener and devotion to collecting records, CDs, and digital music. He speaks frequently about the inspiration he gets from the “sonic potential” of his favorite recordings: that is, the qualities of particular sounds and their associations of sense and memory. These qualities, for him, can live almost separately from the songs to which they are attached, and can be bent or otherwise channeled into his own work. What if that cool bass tone were just a little crunchier? What if you stripped out all the instruments from that section and left only the ghostly backing vocals? He has this mode of listening in common with his sibling and partner in Los Thuthanaka, whom he refers to as Elly. “I’m always remixing things in my head,” he says. “Not to like, make it better, not to be shady. It’s more like, what gets me excited about music is when I can hear more from it. I explain that to people and they don’t always understand, but Elly does, because they think about music that way too.”
Below, Chuquimia Crampton discusses six albums that have influenced him as a producer, from traditional and contemporary Bolivian music to a pair of underappreciated late-period Smashing Pumpkins gems. When possible, he kindly provided photos of his own personal copies of the albums, which include both vibey old records with handwritten notes from their previous owners and burned and Sharpie-scrawled CD-Rs.
