Elysia Crampton Chuquimia (by and about, through)

“I have to find truth always where I couldn’t see, hear, smell it before, and I have to seek the strange event of truth’s newness, always elaborating itself, always ridding its excess with an illusive divine grace. I must go to the very bottom to see that there was no depth that wasn’t here — I must always journey through landscape to find that horizon was also always in this place, with this presence…for these histories coiled at event horizon, on the brink of new universe or total disintegration, braided with nothingness.”

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America drifts like tires squealing against asphalt — dark bituminous pitch sprinkled with sand or gravel marked up by the tread of pickup trucks. America drifts like mud and silt pouring down the mountains of Shenandoah, like the myth of the Chieftain who gave his daughter to a fur trapper, her sadness drifting on the breeze as a sea shanty. Oh, America drifts like floating, weathered pieces of wood tossed by Atlantic waves, like ships carrying pathogenic strands of foreign microbiology onto Virginian shores. “Virginia” itself was spoken in a foreign tongue unknown to the land’s primordial tectonics; an alien language gave the landscape its contemporary, “virginal” namesake.

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The album gives agency to the ancient flayed fish fertilizing the modern silvery chip bag that contains the Dorito, the corn chip, the calcified dust of deceased bodies, of forlorn history being eaten and consumed by the perpetual human demand for truth.

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Textile images are never imposed on the surface of the cloth: their patterns are always emergent from an active matrix, implicit in a web which makes them immanent to the processes from which they emerge.

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Crampton discusses the Aymaran space-time of taypi, where “for example, the world of outside and the world of inside are woven together, braided so as to appear as one colour, one thing, until you look closely to see they cohabit or speckle one another without ever fully dissolving into a whole, single object.” Compositionally, this ontological mode results in the elision of linear cause and effect in favor of the weaving together of sounds, each part of the sonic whole always implicated in its neighbor’s unfolding — threaded together, their colors and textures bound, entangled…Within the world of her sound, linear temporality is upended; her songs burst into life, drag and fall, sway and swell. Beginnings and endings are beside the point. Here, the past is not something to be unearthed, but persists and resonates into the future, guiding us away from the moribund certainty of our colonialized present, toward other modes of being, doing, knowing, feeling. An elsewhere approached through juxtaposition, assemblage, the manipulation of sensory states to communicate, not with words, but in and against them, through what Fred Moten calls an “anachoreography,” a “musicked speech” that falls, circles, and shakes, that constructs itself in real time, guided by the textures of the sounds, the weave of a history of resistance, fugitivity, imagination: a lively, wondrous noise.