In Elysia Crampton’s Bristol hotel room, we stare at the furniture on offer: a neat armchair and a chaise longue. “I’ll be the analyst,” she decides. It’s no wonder: the experimental Californian producer has had a tougher life than most. Her music often feels like a lifetime of violence and confusion being worked through in Afro-Latin rhythms and frictious digital overload.
Crampton identifies as Aymara, a native American tribe from Bolivia who were suppressed by the Inca and then the Spanish in the middle of the last millennium, but who survived to the present day. Her parents moved from La Paz, the Bolivian capital, to Barstow, California, in the 1960s, where she was later born into relative poverty; her education ended, she said, because of “disability” (she won’t elaborate on this or her age) and a lack of funds.
Even before puberty, she knew she was transgender. “What do you do with that?” she wonders anew. “I really thought I would be disowned and locked up. I had an internalised policing, a boundary that I had to cross. When you’re trans, there’s so much internalised violence, self-hatred, shame, and not knowing what to do. For so many of us, our kin ties are severed. We end up being homeless at very young ages, getting into different types of illegal work, whether that’s sex work or selling something contraband. It’s devastating.” Her parents are conservative Christians and didn’t initially accept Crampton’s identity. “Of course there was friction, but they grew. They grew with God. Their understanding of God changed, and they were willing to allow that to happen.”
Crampton was surrounded by music as a child – her parents tried to get her to learn to read music, and wouldn’t allow secular music in the house except for classical. Her grandfather would bring back traditional instruments from their tribal land in Bolivia: a charango, a guitar with the shell of a quirquincho, a hairy armadillo. “It was enchanted,” she says. “The hair kept growing on it. When we lived in Mexico, too, there was this witch my parents were friends with who would bring us gifts. One of my favourites were these deer legs – severed, but very cleanly, and we were obsessed with playing with them. They ended up rotting. I asked my mum about it recently and she said: ‘Oh, we had to low-key take them away from you.’” Music became her medium: “It was a very affordable language. I could do it on a keyboard and” – she drums the hotel furniture – “a tabletop.”
As well as the support from her parents, she drew strength from how Bolivia has been, unexpectedly, a champion of trans identity for centuries. “The Spanish were obsessed with documenting everything,” Crampton says, “and you see so much presence of trans femme and trans masculine people.” The Aymara venerated the oscollo, a speckled cat whose ability to be two things, both black and white, meant it became the symbolic guardian of hermaphrodites. “My grandfather had a stuffed one,” she remembers. The standout track on her album is named after one, and also features a pair of rhythms, one from African slaves, one from the indigenous people of the Yungas province – as if two oppressed people are finding a common ground out of the violence committed against them.
In the 1960s and 70s, it was the home of mariposas – trans and queer people who were celebrated and took part in folkloric dances and rituals. “They were representing possibility itself in terms of the body and where it can go,” she says. “One of the first times I went back to Bolivia as a young adult I remember my aunt pulling me in to dance in the festivities. At a time when my family in the US didn’t really have any place for me or understanding for me, in Bolivia I was welcome. My body was this beacon, this good omen.” Crampton has dedicated her new album to a mariposa called Ofelia, and the track Moscow (Mariposa Voladora) was inspired in part by footage of her dancing. “Anything can drive me to want to create music or make some sort of sound,” she says. “For Moscow, I had this image in my head. As a child I was obsessed with the anime Gundam Wing – I had an art book with all these androgynous characters and mechas. I pictured this really dark space, with the mechas in there, gleaming, and out of this space was this cloud that was holding this image of Ofelia dancing. The sonority of that image was that song.” She bursts out laughing at how specific it is. “That’s what it was!”
This folding of past and present, indigenous and American, is a feature across her work. “I grew up in a culture with lots of anime, and TRL on MTV”, she says. “I’m a California girl.” Her peers, producers including Chino Amobi and Total Freedom, have a similarly glutted, unstable digital aesthetic. “To see our own language develop is really incredible,” she says. “I won’t be in contact with them for months and I’ll hear some of their music, and it’s like we’ve been in the same place. We weren’t trading notes, we just happen to be responding to the world in a similar way. Screaming in a similar key.”
The sheer density of her work, though, does still stem from her Aymara heritage, a culture where spoken language is just one means of communication. Quipu, for example, is a method of weaving and knotting threads that was used as a kind of early databasing. She gets exasperated at how academics champion the written word over all of these other languages, and how it comes with its own baggage: “I really feel for bees and ants and other insects, these family units that get inscribed with this very feudalistic, colonial language of queens and workers.”
Aymara philosophy has the concept of taypi, “that place where so-called opposites or contrary things can be mediated – it’s like the shape of the S, the little bend is that taypi place between those two things”. She has the S tattoed on each temple. The idea is that anything possible and everything can happen at once, a little like Crampton’s nationality, gender and music. “But in reality, though, decisions also have to be made,” she admits. “When black fathers are being shot down in their front yards, I don’t want to be in a floating space – I make a stand.”
Later that evening I watch her, shrouded in dry ice and a headdress, play her songs through a laptop and keytar, objects she refers to as having “thingly agency” – beings with their own will. “A lot of things go awry on tour, but I have to allow the computer their right to say no, I’m not going to work tonight,” she says with the weary indulgence of a parent. “The other day I had an anxiety attack before I played because my computer was kinda broken and I realised I needed to hear something comforting, so I put my grandmother’s voice in the show. Kin isn’t just human, kin is thingly: my dog, but also my keyboard, and the computer that allows me to hear my grandmother’s voice even though she’s dead. She’s not vanquished.” After her still-evolving journey to work out who she is, you can’t imagine Crampton disappearing either.
- Elysia Crampton’s self-titled album is out now on Break World Records.