A composer of lush, uncompromising electronic music and an exhilarating live performer, Elysia Crampton addresses the progressive issues that preoccupy her with a combination of lyrical poetry and mesmerizing beats.
We caught up with Crampton before her Wooozy Offline shows in Beijing and Shanghai to learn about her commitment to her Aymara heritage (an indigenous people of South America), cosmic love stories and how words can get complicated.
Tell us a bit about the themes and ideas you’re exploring on your new album, Spots y Escupitajo.
The album as a whole is speaking to an encounter with this deity named ccoa or chuqui chinchay, who I call my god. Each song highlights different Aymara spiritual concepts as textures that make up the larger body of work, and loosely cover the month before my grandpa passed away.
You’ve spoken about one of the goals of your music being “a project of Aymara survival and resistance.” How has your incorporation of your Aymara culture into your music evolved over time?
For one, practicing writing and composing music has allowed me to deepen and articulate the language I use to attest my Aymara heritage and my Aymara ‘being-ness,’ which is to say Aymara ‘becoming-ness.’ Having the language to detail one’s position is a difficult thing that comes with trial and error. Utilizing music as a form of communication is helpful for me to go beyond the boundaries that are set with writing in a textual form.
We come from a history of people that did not rely on the written word – ‘the lettered city’ – but used our own flesh, our appearance, our textiles and our sound as a way to carry history.
Can you also tell us about your live show and the visuals you often use to accompany it?
The performance I’ve been touring with this year is based on Edgar Allen Poe’s short story 'Conversation of Eiros and Charmion' as well as [Peruvian writer] Churata’s Pez De Oro. The show’s story is loosely about a comet that falls in love with planet Earth. My brother helped me design the visuals that are projected behind me at some of the shows
How much has your life in rural Virginia influenced your music, especially considering how underground electronic music culture in the US has been centered only on cities like New York and LA? Are you still based there?
I’m no longer based in Virginia, but I still live a rural life. You make an interesting point regarding location and electronic music. People often have a set notion of what music should sound like, coming out of a rural area. It’s good to complicate those preconceived notions of spacial or land-body relations, especially as they define us as people, and define our so-called cultures. I think as Native Americans, we’re only validated if we look or sound a certain way, which relates to how the settler state has defined and policed us and our ways of life.
You put a lot of thought and care into communicating the themes that are present in your work — how do you think this allows your music to occupy both an intellectual space and a nightclub environment?
It’s true, as Native American, as Latinx, my references and history are woven together with what we call club culture, but I honestly don’t find my BPMs that danceable in a standard context. I’d like to work on that [laughs], but I’m a slow person.
Sometimes I think words complicate things and can keep others from acknowledging growth. If there’s any truth in what I say, it’s in the fractured inconsistencies or contradictions between the texts I produce, the growth between two fixed points.
I am someone who wasn’t formally educated, so my writing comes through trial and error — saying a lot of shit that I thought was the right thing to say at the time, but wasn't honestly speaking to my experience. The practice of elaborating on one’s experience is ongoing and not necessarily about an individuated standpoint. Rather, it attests to a relationality where I am also speaking to a legacy, where my ancestors are also speaking through me, where my community is speaking through me — however fractured or lost that sense of kin might feel at any given time.
What are you looking forward to about coming to play in Shanghai and Beijing? Have you heard anything about the music scene here? Your collaborators Rabit & Why Be have both performed here recently!
I’m very excited to perform for you all. I didn’t feel I was ready for Asia, but as you mentioned many of my friends like Tobias (Why Be), Ashland (Total Freedom), Eric (Rabit), and Chino Amobi have already come through this year, so the ground has been set up for me in a way.
Shanghai (with Bok Bok): Aug 5, 10pm, RMB100. ALL, see event listing.
Shanghai (workshop + talk): Aug 8, 10pm, no cover. ALL, see event listing.
Beijing: Aug 10, 10pm. Dada, see event listing.
Photos by Julia Grossi, Boychild and Elysia Crampton
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