Anata by Joshua Chuquimia Crampton

For fans of Los Thuthanaka, Asleep Country, Huremic, noise rock, and that first moment of hitting your couch after a long day’s work, Anata by Joshua Chuquimia Crampton celebrates the harvest festival of a nation indigenous to the Andes Mountains through an album of entirely abstract, noisy psychedelia. From Thanksgiving to Oktoberfest to Tsukimi to Pongal, regional traditions all converge on similar themes of indebtedness to nature, relief at a successful year, and rest after a strenuous season. The Aymara people of the Andes region follow this expectation in their Anata festival, a practice which predates colonization and still retains much of that earthly reverence which set the festival in motion untold generations ago. Instead of directly capturing the festival to tape, Crampton fastens together traditionally-inspired guitar tracks, shimmery synth pads, noisy field recordings, and a bundle of other sonic inputs with a thick glue of analogue distortion. As distant observers, we reconstruct the core motivations of the festival in our own minds, giving thanks to our environment and the spirits which dwell within.