In the opening moments of Elysia Crampton’s 2015 EP “American Drift,” her frequent collaborator Money Allah calmly says, “I’m nailed to the impossible.” Set to a shimmering, melancholic synthesizer melody, the line — penned by Crampton — introduces the evolving horizons contained within the trans Latina artist’s productions, where the limits of body and geography are warped through a corporeal queer futurity.Crampton’s output, indebted as much to the work of, say, queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz or trans activist Reina Gossett as it is to the musicians with whom she has shared bills, exists in the ever-expanding world of what has been stultifyingly termed by journalists “post-club” music. Perhaps more interesting than an attempt to pin down what she does by categorizing her work by genre is to note the network of collaborators, friends, and fellow travelers in which she operates. These include artists like Why Be, Chino Amobi, Rabit, and Lexxi — a group of artists spread throughout Europe and the Americas whose sets incorporate in equal measure reworked anthems by the likes of Rihanna and Nicki Minaj; nods to subcultures like ballroom; and abrasive, cathartic samples that twist in the direction of noise. Dance subcultures have historically run alongside struggles for queer liberation. But theirs is a new breed of queer sound and space, trading notions of the utopian safe space that’s sequestered from the violence to which non-normative bodies are subjected for one that acknowledges that violence and seeks anyway to encourage movement and communion. Her newest release, “Demon City,” out July 22 on Break World Records, is a collaborative document of this network.“I was taught at an early age that mobility is key to survival,” Crampton wrote me in an e-mail from northern California. She recently relocated there from Pacajes, Bolivia, to help care for her grandmother. She notes that such changes of place are influenced by a need to follow “work and/or stability” — while she has lived in the United States off and on, it presents, she says, a particular economic challenge. Indeed, “many are forced into migration because of state, family, and ecological violence.”To some, the club might represent a location for the displaced to seek refuge, or permanence. But Crampton’s music suggests an elsewhere that’s
very much colored by the traces of place one accumulates along these migratory routes. Her attentiveness to her surroundings is well illustrated in our e-mail exchange, in which she describes the Sierra Nevada–adjacent land from which she wrote as Cretaceous, replete with condors. An earthiness or sensitivity to ecology is present in her sound, but alongside this she’s also accrued fragments
of mass culture and digests the two simultaneously. The appearance of a sampled circa-2004 Lil Jon yelp or a cover of a Slowdive song on a mix isn’t ironic, or even really jarring — these moments speak to another kind of landscape that one encounters while moving in the world.Variegated textural qualities permeate “Demon City.” Opener “Irreducible horizon,” with Why Be, layers an anxious piano line over a shuffling, club-ready percussive backbone, but Crampton’s compositions don’t always offer such a stable floor. Rather, rhythms emerge and recede. In “After Woman,” for example, a swell of melody fades in the last 30 seconds to reveal a soft beat provided by a high hat that I could barely tell had been buried there all along. Such touches draw attention to the connective tissue between traceable moments, those unresolved pockets of sound. As a cycle of strings crescendos on the interlude “Esposas,” it's met with a disintegrative crumple and hiss, as well as bursts of computer-generated air horn and laser sounds.The album is written in the style of an epic poem, inspired in part by her recent theatrical production, "Dissolution of the Sovereign: A Timeslide into the Future," which Crampton describes as a “DJ production incorporating dialogue and playacting.” “Dissolution,” which premiered at Oberlin College in Ohio and toured in Europe this spring, is dedicated to Bartolina Sisa, an Aymara heroine who was executed by Spanish colonialists after leading an anticolonial uprising in La Paz in the late 18th century. The work, Crampton says, is rooted in the Aymara oral tradition and seeks to “stake a claim for futurity, specifically in relation to the anticolonial queer indigenous struggle.”To say that Crampton’s work is implicitly political might oversimplify how, or misstate to what end, it has absorbed the violent histories and struggles for sovereignty to which it alludes. "Demon City" is almost entirely instrumental; her tracks that do incorporate lyrics generally employ words poetically. On this album, Crampton acts as an abstract storyteller, the compositions’ often challenging sonic affect guiding listeners along an arc. Part of that affect is a darkness, even mournfulness. At the end of the dirgelike title track, which is streaked through with peripheral scraping and shattering sounds, a canned voice announces that we are in “the darkest hour.” In this group of songs, traumatic histories aren’t the only source of pain. We also feel the splintering that accompanies a project of becoming.But “Red Eyez,” the album’s closer, written by Lexxi, is marked by clarity, a set of insistent melodies interlocking across an assertive beat. It’s a sound emblematic of the kind of possibility embedded in Crampton's and her cohort’s work; such possibility is located squarely within the network of relationships (inter- and intrapersonal) that generate and emerge from these soundscapes. “It’s always been about solidarity,” Crampton says, “because solidarity is what allows the music to occur in the first place.” This platform, if you will, has a constant, generative flux written into its DNA: “We hope to inspire new forms of relating, ‘becoming-with’ or ‘being-with,’ that enable more inclusive, de-carceralized, radical forms of transnational, transgeographical, transcorporeal community and exchanges of knowledge, agency, and data.”Crampton will perform “Dissolution of the Sovereign” at Lincoln Center on June 16. “Demon City” will be released on Break World Records on July 22.
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