We all agree that is was William S. Burroughs or maybe Miles Davis or maybe Thelonious Monk or maybe Charles Mingus or maybe Frank Zappa or maybe George Carlin or maybe Martin Mull or maybe Lester Bangs or maybe David Byrne or maybe Steve Martin or maybe Elvis Costello or maybe Laurie Anderson who first coined the phrase “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. I’d like to formally call that out today, and to officially deign William/Miles/Thelonious/Charles/Frank/George/Martin/David/Steve/Elvis/Laurie out as a grade A bullshit artist. You don’t dance ‘about’ anything, you utter cretin, you dance to things. What if I write about a holiday I had? Would that be like playing darts about synchronised swimming? Was that food review I wrote like building Lego about the Paris Climate Accord? When Pablo Picasso painted about the Spanish Civil War, might he as well have been trellising a fence about Celeste speedrunning?
You’re full of shit William/Miles/Thelonious/Charles/Frank/George/Martin/David/Steve/Elvis/Laurie!!!
Not you, Lester Bangs, you’re alright. He was probably making a similarly good point to the first paragraph of this post. Many consider Bangs to be very much the Alex Franchise-Palmer of his day.
This incredible album by siblings Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton though? It is actually near impossible to write about. You might have noticed if you’ve ever read someone attempt to. I’m not even sure that this record should be available to own so easily. I shouldn’t be able to just (digitally) walk into a (digital) shop and just (digitally) buy this album! Who the fuck am I?? I didn’t need to show any credentials to prove that I was capable of handling this!! That’s not just irresponsible, that’s arguably dangerous! Like, I understand that heroin is perfectly safe if properly purified and taken responsibly, but are you perfectly fine with it being stocked on supermarket shelves alongside the Haribo Fangtastics?? A child could have purchased this album!* Sure, not being on Spotify is a step in the right direction, as that will definitely weed out a lot of the troglodytes, but I just don’t feel comfortable with the fact that there are so few barriers to just listening to ‘Los Thuthanaka’ like it was just ‘Come On Over‘ or some shit. Gate keeping can be a good thing, you know? Are you concerned about the ‘gate keeping’ that’s stopping your eight year old daughter starting an OnlyFans? Exactly. Same thing.
(*hey, people with kids, are you never, like, tempted to just… do experiments on them? Like, what would a human grow into if the only music they’d ever listened to up to the age of 10 or whatever was ‘Los Thuthanaka’?? The only sound they’d ever heard?? Wouldn’t that be cool to find out?? No laboratory is ever going to get funding for that, so you really should be doing it yourself. It’s your property, do what you fucking want with it! You can just make another one, it’s not like breaking that 75″ flat screen TV that you saved up so much for. Maybe it’s best that I don’t have kids…)
‘Los Thuthanaka’ is – if you’ll pardon my Spanish – una gran experiencia de mierda!!
It’s not even something that you listen to in the same way that you would to other records on this list, or many other pieces of music you’ve ever heard. It’s not something you could do close readings of, or identify moments and structures that characterise the audio maps of each song. There is – to its eternal discredit – no choruses that hits quite the same way as BUTTERFLY or Copycats. ‘Los Thuthanaka’ is an experience around loops within loops, one that’s designed to have you constantly question if you’ve been listening to the album for five minutes, an hour, or since the beginning of time itself. Maybe you haven’t even started listening to it at all? Maybe all this is just a memory implanted in your brain from the last time you experienced the ‘Los Thuthanaka’ trip. Maybe this is a false memory, because you’ve never even heard it before. Because it’s not on Spotify, you absolute ignoramus. Maybe you’re not even reading this now. Maybe I’m not even writing it. Coooooooooooooooosmic, man. Fuck, I’ve been listening to this absolute ayahuasca trip of a record for too long.
An utterly unique record that’s absolutely the one record released in 2025 that seems to be forwarding the idea of a completely new way of composing music. Remember how a millisecond scratch of music sounds when you’re on Cake? That’s what this is. So, I dunno, Chris Morris was doing that in the late 90s, so maybe he deserves the credit?
I still think that there will emerge better ways of making this kind of incantational, rhythmic yet repetitive music, and Los Thuthanaka may be remembered as originators rather than true shining lights. There still is something oddly retro about the sound of the album, like if 90s Big Beat music were able to better modulate its own errors and play more with its own sonic subversion. But to not feel at least a little kinship to this record is to lose sight of the very indiscernible powers of music itself.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaw, what’s that? You’d never heard of this album before until it was named ‘Album of the Year’ by Pitchfork, and now you want to jump on the bandwagon and pretend you’d always liked Los Thuthanaka?? That’s sweet, join the queue to learn from us real ones who bought it on Bandcamp in March. I’ll have you know that I’m such a Real One that I bought it after somebody on Reddit said it sounded like Fuck Buttons, thank you very much.
So thank you u/Thelonious, I guess! Or was it u/Charles? Or u/Frank? u/George maybe…?
Based on – that’s right – one review. That one review coming from – that’s right – Pitchfork. The user score of 79 might actually be more legitimate.
Jesus, they’re just The Pitchfork Band.
Necessary Evil 
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