Chuquimamani-Condori makes ecstatic, intensely joyous experimental club music, by combining the traditional drum and ceremonial music from their Pakajaqueño family, with cumbia, tarqueada, kullawada, caporales, huayño, DJ tags, hyper-compressed digital bass and stargazing synth. They describe their music as “the sound of our water ceremonies…40 bands playing their melodies at once to recreate the cacophony of the first aurora and the call of the morning star Venus”. The whole sound has a blasted, blown out, overdriven intensity, with everything in the red.

Approaching body music and rhythm from outside of a European perspective: a “mode of educated whiteness” and good taste, in which contradictions are resolved, and anything jarring is smoothed over. Instead in Chuquimamani-Condori’s music we can hear a specifically Aymara praxis, within the space of taypi, the Aymara “space-time” in which paradox thrives and objects brought together or looked at through each other—like seemingly clashing rhythms—no longer remain distinct, but instead create superpositions where they meet, where touch doesn’t collapse into or imply a whole object, but composes a contentious, fractured comingling.

Thinking about taypi helps me touch and build upon the project of abolition as becoming-with or our becoming-together in the multiverse.

Chuquimamani-Condori

The music programme at Episode 11 has emerged as a collaboration with the UK’s best experimental music festival, Counterflows.