Joshua Chuquimia Crampton of Los Thuthanaka Breaks Down 6 Perfectly Produced Records

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. 

Nuevo Amor: "Fiesta de Rosario"

Joshua Chuquimia Crampton: I grew up with my family through my mom’s side, who are all from Bolivia, and Aymara-descendant. My grandfather always used to play a lot of Bolivian music of different types. It was always just in the background, at family parties and that kind of thing. There was a type of Bolivian music that a lot of people from that generation preferred, which you might consider a state patrimony kind of thing, with all of the different indigenous music homogenized into one kind of typical Bolivian sound, and I’m not as big of a fan of that. At the beginning I just thought of it as, this is just something that’s around, and it’s part of who I am. But as both me and Elly got to be more interested in the music, our grandfather went a lot deeper and showed us other styles, gave us cassette tapes and CD’s.

This is in a Charangueada style, because it features the charango as a prominent rhythm instrument, which is kind of like a mix between a mandolin and a ukulele. Many of these styles are put under the blanket of “Música Boliviana Popular.” There’s huyaño, which is often associated with Peruvian music, but there’s also Bolivian styles of huyaño, and those have their own names, like Salay. There’s Kullawada, which has more of a rolling beat, and this one has a little bit of that in it too. The melodies and the drums can change what it is, even though they kind of all end up under that blanket. They’re specific, because some of them come from actual ceremonial things, and they’re just put in a more contemporary context. Something like this would be considered more like a pop song rather than something that’s traditional, but the rhythms are all ceremonial in origin. 

This particular track is more recent, so it has elements that are more modern than the stuff I grew up with, but it still has that feeling that you can’t even put your finger on what it is, and those kinds of harmonies that have had an impact on me since I was very small. I’ve realized that’s where all my musical inspiration comes from. If something I make doesn’t give me that feeling, I don’t release it. And with Elly, when we work together, I think we feel the same way about that.

The layering of the different stringed instruments, the way they form this latticework where it’s more about how everyone is interacting rather than what one player is doing on their own—that also reminds me of your music, both in Los Thuthanaka and your solo guitar work. 

For sure. A lot of times when I’m writing, I’m not thinking about it, it’s just in me. But if something is straying from that feeling, or it’s taking me somewhere I don’t want to go, I always come back to those types of melodies, that type of layering.

When me and Elly were kids, our grandfather gave us charangos that were tuned at this spring, up where my family is from, in Pacajes. They say if you leave your instruments there, mermaids will tune and bless them and you’ll get what comes from that spring. But my family has this history of traditional and hard Christian religion—it’s like that a lot in Bolivia and South America, any places that had religious-related colonization. And with the Christianity thrown in, the story is, if you put your instrument there, the devil will tune your guitar for you. And they say my grandfather walked up there at night and put his guitar down and the devil tuned it for him. Which is a cool story, but I prefer the mermaids one. 

It’s cool to be somewhat mystified by the mixed version, because of the imagery, but it’s also important to go back, to see where it came from, completely removing the Christianity from it. It’s not always easy to do, because maybe even your grandparents, your great-grandparents, had that mixed version. And you want to honor it because they did that, and to dishonor it feels like it would be to dishonor them. But I still think it’s important to get rid of all that poison and get down to something different. When I work with Elly, they educate me a lot on these things, and we try to put a lot of that philosophy into our music. Over the last few years, we’ve been working on removing all those toxins, keeping it to that bare spiritual essence that was there before and will be there in the future as we carry it on our backs, if you dare to dream of a world such as that. 

I went to that spring with Elly during the pandemic, and we happened to have instruments with us. I had an acoustic guitar and Elly had a ronroco, which they play on a few important moments on Los Thuthanaka. It’s a more contemporary instrument, kind of like a baritone charango. And we wrote a song immediately afterwards we simply called “Mermaids Spring.” It just came together immediately in the living room of our grandfather’s old home. It was like, now I actually touched that connection in a more material way, now I see where our music, our creativity has always come from. It’s not just a story. I felt it materialize, and it’s hard to explain that. Ever since then, Elly and I have been writing in a freewheeling style together, and all the Los Thuthanaka stuff comes out of that. It’s from the spring. That’s why we have the song on there called “Phuju.” [The title translates to “Spring Fount.”] 

Boris: Akuma no Uta

I’m a big fan of Japanese rock and have been for a long time. This isn't my favorite Boris album, but it was the first one I ever heard, and the blown-out style of production always left an impression on me. At the time, I was playing in bands and stuff. I’d hear little things like punk bands that had some of that style. Or a band where the production kind of sounds like that, but the music didn’t suck me in as much. But then someone gave me a burned CD copy of this album, maybe a year or two after it came out. I remember playing it in a car—it was like, the whole thing was like that. It was a little bit louder than what I had heard, and it had these drone elements. It took it further than what I had heard.

Some of my favorite Boris albums have a little bit of a different sound, and this one—I don’t mean it in a negative way, but I feel like the songs are a little bit less memorable than on some other ones, but it was the sound that really captured me. I was trying to think of what is a standard for me in terms of what I enjoy about rock music, and it was this one.

Do you gravitate in a particular direction toward the slow, droney, atmospheric side versus the thrashing, in-your-face rock’n’roll side of that album?

I’m glad that they do both. But overall, I gravitated toward the droney side more, because it’s something that they do really well and not a lot of other people do really well. They’re obviously really inspired by the Melvins, who I also like a lot. But there’s something about the way they do it that’s a little more psychedelic, this more spiritual vibe, that I always appreciated. But I do like that they switch it to the faster stuff. I think it’s the mix of the two that made me really pay attention. 

I’ve seen them several times, and the loudest one and the one that affected me most was maybe in 2016 at the Casbah in San Diego. Because it was such a small room, I was just a few feet away, and it was loud, but I was like, this is totally normal. But I remember walking out, after that long of being in that close proximity to the speakers, and being totally disoriented, like, Which way is up? I was stumbling. 

The Velvet Underground: White Light/White Heat

I honestly don't give a shit about some of these songs, but I love the texture of the whole record so much. When I'm referencing any music pre-1988 in this list, I'm referring to the vinyl versions. A lot of what inspires me in terms of production is that I like records a lot. It sounds like a cliché, but it’s just my experience. I’m not a fancy person, but vinyl is where a lot of that older music really clicked for me the most. Because it’s just made for that format. 

Another contender would have been the U.S. version of Are You Experienced? There’s things on there that just sound really fat and effortless. It’s not just the song, it’s the way the bass sounds, or the way the guitar plays with the drums. Another one is The Kink Controversy. I love the way that sounds. It’s kind of quiet, sometimes the guitars sound almost ghostly, like it was recorded in a closet, and the drums are on one mic, and it’s kind of shitty. 

A lot of ’60s and ’70s music inspires me, but it’s more about the sonic potential than I want to sound like Tony Iommi or Jimi Hendrix. It’s more like how they got that sound. There’s a mystery and a richness and a darkness to it. An example of sonic potential is like, what if I took that whole album, mixed it together, hit it with a compressor, and blew out its back with a hard EQ? I imagine that, and I’m like oh, this is how this album could sound. And I’ll mix my mixer on my turntable to make it sound like that and that gets me really excited. 

And I picked White Light/White Heat because it already kind of sounds like that. I hadn’t listened to that one in a while, but it always inspires me when I hear it. Like I said, some of the songs aren’t even that great, but the sound is so purposeful and artful but also kind of nonchalant and nobody really gives a shit. You can see how it inspired whole genres. When I tell people that I’m listening to a bunch of old music and getting excited about it, they’re like, yeah this is a really good song. And I’m like, yeah, it’s a good song, but listen to the way the drums sound, the way they layered three guitars to sound like one. Or, this sounds like shit and it’s perfect. 

Milton Nascimento: Geraes

There’s something organic about this album, the way it feels and smells. I got that record in Brazil. Whenever I go visit my family over there I get records, because I love music from the ’60s and ’70s from there. Gal Costa’s first album is another important one, but that one’s a little more well-known now. I wanted to pick something that maybe people hadn’t heard. All that Tropicália stuff, that psychedelic music, is really inspiring to me. 

The production is really amazing on all the ’70s Milton Nascimento records, especially this one. There's a unique mix of raw and polish that always drew me in, especially in how the texture of the guitars and percussion are produced. It reminds me of carving into wood or stone until cool healing water is drawn, along with all of the smells, sounds and physical effort from the process. 

That imagery that I feel when I hear this music is what inspires me. It’s not like I sit down, like I’m trying to chase this guitar sound. I usually just start making something. Let’s say I pick up an acoustic guitar and I start playing and writing and recording. I’ll suddenly get that feeling, like, I can smell the smell of the guitar, I see the dust on the guitar, and it brings me back to the same feeling that I have from an album like this. Then I’m like, OK, I’m going to go back to that, I’m going to draw that water out of it, I’m going to smell that wood and burning stone. 

When I buy old records, there’s something about the smell that adds to it. And it always matches the feeling somehow, it’s never separated. If I got a record that was in somebody’s house where they were smoking, it somehow just matches the vibe of the record. That’s part of why vinyl is so important to me, the physical aspect of it and the associations. That’s why I reach for the record even though a lot of times I might have a digital version ready to go in my car or a playlist. But a lot of times my actual connection to something involves how I touched it and put it on and how I can play a whole side and it made me feel a certain way. 

Nascimento is rooted in traditional Brazilian music while also having an expansive view of what that music can be: doing things that you might call progressive or psychedelic, but also remaining very true to this deep well that he’s drawing from. I couldn’t help but think of the way that the Los Thuthanaka record treats the traditional music that it’s drawing from while also being so exploratory and fearless in the places that it takes it. So I wondered if that side of Nascimento’s personality as a musician has been an inspiration to you. 

I wouldn’t say that I sit and listen to the record and go, I want to achieve this. It’s more like someone I’m acknowledging from across the room, like, you did that first, you did that too, and I want to continue a legacy of that. It’s what makes the music special. 

On this record, you’ve got Mercedes Sosa from Argentina, and Grupo Agua who are an Andean group, and Chico Buarque who is Brazilian, but he’s a white Brazilian. And Nascimento mixes all those things together, but not in a clichéd way. He does a lot of things from an indigenous perspective, and I noticed in a lot of the imagery from his last tour, that’s very present. It doesn’t even have to be spoken about and everyone respects it. It gives it this element that’s a little more eternal. And with the Los Thuthanaka thing, we’re approaching it from that same perspective. Not that we got inspired by Milton to do that, but we’re coming from the same place. And I feel honored to be part of that legacy. 

Weather Report: Weather Report

I’ve dabbled with the early Weather Report records, but my main association with them is the later Jaco Pastorius era, where they’re really slick and more rock-oriented and selling millions of albums. This is a lot more amorphous and mysterious. 

A lot of people haven’t heard this side of Weather Report. There’s a lot of those textures on it that are just in the back of my head all the time. It stays in a more sensual domain than other fusion albums of this time, which I really appreciate. Ambient, but crusty. Dreamy, but fried. The first two Weather Report albums are like that and they’re my favorites. 

I also really love Miles Davis’s ’70s electric music and this definitely has a residue from that, and some of the same players on it, but it doesn’t have that Miles Davis darkness to it, that really challenging medicine quality. 

The way the bass sits in the drum pattern on this record and those Miles records is so distinct, where it’s just a little to the side of where you expect it to be. They’re clearly drawing from funk, but it’s like this watery, blurry version of funk. 

This has that same kind of feeling, but it’s a little more stripped back. The Miles stuff is more maximal, more drumming, more going on. But this has the same quality of, people were playing the same song, but they were playing it in different places at different times, and you just mixed them all together.

Band-Maid: World Domination

So far, the other rock-oriented records that we’ve talked about have a certain lo-fi, blown out, scuzzy quality. This one, even though it’s heavy and rocking, is presented in a different way, where the sounds are cleaner and more precise. I’m curious what your relationship to that sort of slick modern rock production is. 

Music now, especially rock music, is louder. I like a lot of rock music from the CD era, the ’90s and stuff. But if you listen to stuff outside of that context, in streaming or whatever, it can be a really good song, but when you put it next to a pop song it just sounds like a flat soda, or something. It’s kind of sad. 

Newer rock music doesn’t have that, but the loudness also makes it kind of fatiguing. I normally don’t care for that production unless it’s something I really enjoy. A country song or a pop song with that production it’s just like, that’s just how it’s supposed to be. But for rock music, I don’t really care if it’s like that. Band-Maid’s stuff made me actually like that quality of the production. It’s very clean compared to something like Boris. It’s more technical and more relentless. There’s something the way they do it, especially on later albums, where that kind of production really adds to it, and I’m glad that they keep it that way. It’s very loud, and cleaner than a lot of the stuff I like, but also raw in its own way. 

Also, at the time when this came out, the time in my life when I heard it, it really landed with me. The songwriting is really good. And learning how they made it—it was between touring a lot, with really hard deadlines, which sounds like such a miserable experience, even though it’s also inspiring. You can really hear that—it’s like they’re trying to get the record done as fast as they can and they’re getting really high off of it, but everybody’s crying after. It had to be done, and this is what we’re gonna do. It’s hopeful, but kind of not. I never listen to it without that feeling, so when I found out that those were the conditions it was made under, I was like, That makes so much sense. That was how I felt at the time when I heard it.

Smashing Pumpkins: Machina/The Machines of God and Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music

When I was a teenager, they were one of the top bands for me. My first show was either Smashing Pumpkins in ’98 or something, or it was Los Kjarkas, who were kind of like the Beatles of Bolivia in the ’70s. I went to see them both around the same time but I can’t remember which was first.

The important ones like Mellon Collie and Siamese Dream—that’s the stuff that everybody likes. But these Machina ones, I had a special relationship to it. To people who really liked them at that time, it was a bittersweet thing. They were breaking up. I remember meeting a girlfriend of mine at the time at one of their shows in high school and she was a really hardcore fan, crying at the show. And there were a lot of people like that. I enjoyed the music, it was new Smashing Pumpkins, I was excited about it, but that part of it made me have this deeper appreciation of what was important about it. Less like, this isn’t as good as their other stuff. Those are my hazy memories around it. 

I was trying to think about, not just my favorite albums, but when I produce things, what’s kind of cooked into my head and I don’t even realize it but it’s there. And I looked through my CDs and I had Machina and a burned copy of Machina II. I had to chuckle when I said the titles out loud, but then it dawned on me that the duality of both halves of this epic—one being overly polished and layered, the other being immediate and raw—had a deep impact on my young psyche. When I was listening to it, I was like, there’s tiny things in the production, the riffs, the melodies, that are baked into my head. Even though, when I was younger, it would have been the more seminal albums. But it’s these ones that, for some reason, continued to resonate and inspire me still. 

After their previous couple of albums didn’t sell well, their label essentially refused to release Machina II, so the band sent copies out to hardcore fans and encouraged them to bootleg it and distribute it for free online. That reminds me a little of the way you and your sibling release records, where you’re not making a huge deal about it with a big press campaign, but you’re also trusting that it will reach its audience. It’s a cool mix of humility and confidence.

The first one feels a little bit bloated when I listen back to it now. It could be trimmed back a bit and it would be appreciated even more now. There’s a certain fatigue I get when I listen to it as it gets toward the end, even though I really like some of those songs. And II, I really liked the way it was this bootleg thing that was meant to be shared and put on burned CDs. At the time, a lot of fans just didn’t listen to it. And I’d play it for them and they’d be like, “This is even better than the first part.”

That always had an impact on me, the really polished half and then the half that sounds kind of like demos. Because at the time, I was starting to draw away from epic, produced music like that. I used to think that was so cool, and so unattainable. But then later on I started being more into stuff that was simpler, and less produced, and how powerful that could be. Something that related more to how I played and how I thought rather than trying to look up to something. I could be completely original on my own. 

So I associate that period with them, going from wanting to be the person who has 20 guitars onstage, and that being really epic and cool, to just using one guitar the whole show, and using what I got, and my own creativity, rather than chasing this really ambitious ideal. Or being ambitious in simplicity rather than that epic rock opera shit. The first one is fully in that super epic sincerity, big rock star mode, and then the second part takes that back. And that really inspired me. They were doing both of these things and it was natural. That was a turning point in my musical life as a teenager.