“Although it’s possible to contextualise Crampton’s work among that of her contemporaries, hers is a truly singular style…she’s able to synthesize numerous musical forms, crashing timbres, dense percussion, mauled samples, pretty synth lines, club music structures dismantled from within, and much more, into bold music rich with purpose and feeling.” – THE WIRE

Elysia Crampton’s eclectic and unrestrained electronic music is the flashpoint of a myriad influences opening upon the complexity and multifacetedness of Aymara becoming. Underscored by radical and queer politics, Crampton’s experimental work gives sonorous form to contemporary expressions of Aymara resistance and survival: a project of “becoming-with,” in the shades given this term by Donna Haraway via prison abolitionist Che Gossett.

Her album Demon City, composed in honour of the revolutionary Bartolina Sisa and her yungueña grandmother, was deemed a “masterwork” by Rolling Stone and was one of Pitchfork’s 20 best experimental albums of 2016. Her latest release, Spots y Escupitajo, leads the listener into “a dizzying, hyper-conceptual collection of miniatures.

“With her oblique and politically-charged productions, this Virginia-based artist is striking a new prescence in electronic music.” – RESIDENT ADVISOR

FEELING ABOLITION THROUGH NON-LINEAR TRAJECTORIES (ECHOES OF ABOLITION IN ANDEAN ART) - A LECTURE BY ELYSIA CRAMPTON

Discussing a cumulative array of Andean objects & imagery, including works from colonial chroniclers such as Guaman Poma, Juan de Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui, & Melchor Maria Mercado, Elysia traces a history of abolitionist feeling in the Andes (& beyond) from an Aymara cosmopraxis. Here abolition is understood as not only a desire to end bondage (beyond that which is merited as human &/or living), but, following that notion, the positing of an end to imperialism & coloniality, as systems that sustain such conditions of oppression.