In Aymara oral history, the first sunrise cleaves the world. Before the sun appears, a dark and undifferentiated universe starts to pulse with activity. “These repetitions start happening. It’s like a humming and the song gets louder and louder and it generates heat and color and it generates so much heat that by accident the star is born,” Chuquimamani-Condori recently told Nashville public radio station WPLN. “And in that moment when the star’s born, we see each other for the first time. But it’s sad because we’re also separated for the first time. And so there’s that bittersweet moment right before everything’s burned up by the sun.”
Chuquimamani-Condori and their brother, Joshua Chiquimia Crampton, grew up hearing this story from other members of Aymara nations. For years, they worked to collate the narrative from direct retellings and archival transcriptions. They’ve now released a 14-page booklet of the text, translated into Aymara, alongside a new EP from their band Los Thuthanaka. “Our version is an assemblage of every version we could find,” Chuquimamani-Condori said. The three songs collected on Wak’a—a word Los Thuthanaka render in English as “split” or “parting”—trace the wrenching apart of the old, unified world and the birth of the new, delineated one: the mundo en policía, or policed world, where categories and taxonomies silo what was once interconnected and whole.
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These concepts have long wound their way through the siblings’ multidisciplinary work. The book, Qutax janïr Intix Yurkipänxa (“The Lake Before the Sun Was Born”), shares its title with both a sound installation and a series of lectures and conversations about Aymara abolitionist histories that accompanied the siblings’ 2021 film Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter. Chuquimamani-Condori’s recent collection of edits, Crampton’s latest solo album Anata, and Los Thuthanaka’s staggering debut LP all rioted against genre as a constraining principle, weaving supposedly discrepant sources of sound—radio drops, pop-country blockbusters, Andean music like huayno, salay, and caporales—into smoldering vortices. The tracks on Wak’a are so deeply entangled with Los Thuthanaka’s broader output that the EP feels less like a discrete release and more like a brief transmission from a source that’s always broadcasting somewhere. (You might notice, if you go back to Los Thuthanaka on Bandcamp, that the cover art has changed since the album first came out. There’s a background now, and two studio monitors glowering like eyes from the top corners of the frame. This is not a group whose projects ever seem to be fixed and done.)
Wak’a begins in a markedly languid flow with “Quta” (“Lake”). The sounds of insects perforate a steady drone; crickets chirp across a musical interval before a kullawada beat crashes in, interspersed with celebratory shouts. Before long, a second rhythm shivers beneath the first. Over both of them cracks a whip followed by what might be the sound of boots stirring up gravel. As in much of the siblings’ music, time does not unfurl continuously here, but bunches up, erupts, and dissolves.
