A wild torrent of chippy viscera snaked out of the Dalston enclave that Cafe OTO sits in. Nestled there among companions like Wingstop and McDonalds, a blithering mess of MIDI was released from inside the wonderful venue, shaped by Sunik Kim’s steady hands. The noise musician stood almost completely still, as did most of the crowd, frozen in place by a tapestry of discordant notes. Each individual note sharp and almost impossibly out of tune with the preceding one. 

At certain points, what felt like a deep pillow of air began to rumble underneath each internal for what felt like the smallest amount of time possible. A rush of bass as the room struggled to hold itself together at its very foundations. This was before the chipped tune then clattered free from its fractal style and began to squeak with all the pained elasticity of air fleeing a puckered balloon knot. 

As bewildered gig-goers spilt out to sit and collect their nerves on the curb after the supporting set, Chuquimamani-Condori sat by the open door on a small table, ivory white cowboy hat on top of their head, in what were the remaining hours of their UK/EU tour.  

Condori’s album, DJ E – a debut under their traditional Aymaran name – landed at the end of last year. A tumultuous album that manages to bring together traditional Andean melodies, stumbling rhythms inspired by heavy-handed genres like cumbia, richly emotive synth chord progressions, and what sometimes sounds like alien warfare among other jumbled samples into a proudly chaotic masterpiece. Having played a solo show only once before in the UK since 2018, this one sold out quickly. People no doubt interested in how such a maximalist deluge of sound could be channelled through one enigmatic figure under a cowboy hat. 

The answer is: incredibly well, but the real interest was in the details. The blundering rhythms and general melodic ornamentation blared from a DJ wheel that Condori dutifully span back a number of times, resulting in a dizzying half-disc jockey experience. A launchpad provided the chittering vocal overlays, many of which came in the form of loud radio-esque idents and transitions. “Exclusivo!” rang out a number of times, along with other loud proclamations similar to those on hyperactive stations that blare from cars and trucks on sweltering freeways and city roads across Latin America. At times these feel like a bait and switch from the genuinely triumphant and emotional nucleus at the heart of many of Condori’s songs, vying for our attention, but, to those familiar with the artist’s work, these exclamations are integral to the temperamental constructions Condori creates. The artist’s intention is to make it sound like things constantly exploding and evolving, and this is achieved in the live space. People dance happily, others watch in awe.

Amid all this, Condori armed themselves with a synth, playing it as a static piano roll but wielding it as a keytar at certain points, moving to stand in front of the crowd. They push out the emotive chords that give their music its cluttered sense of longing and wistfulness with force when playing live. The striding chord progressions give the performer an air of a lone wanderer, stoic-faced as they walk through the palimpsestic noise of modern life, galvanised by the spirit of home and family. These chords power songs like opener Breathing, giving its pitched-down apocalyptic voices a twisted sense of triumph. And in the subsequent track, Eat My Cum, they provide an unsettling spine from which torturing laughter and stalagmite percussion spring. 

What’s more, this emotive centrepoint is miraculously audible through the swarm of noise, its defiance almost sidechaining the din with a prideful energy. Things are loud, but soft and well-spaced enough that – at a certain point – the universally recognisable notes of Bruce Hornsby’s The Way It Is pulse through in a wonderfully buoyant and slick sequence.

Condori smiles towards the end, taking in the last few breaths of the UK/EU tour as a soothing river of synth chord flows endlessly, trickles of rhythm and tributaries barely audible but there underneath shimmering tunefulness. It’s so markedly calm compared to the torrent that has come before, Condori bobbing along as opposed to a set of short rhythmic movements broken up by wheel spins and casual leans towards the sampleboard. The set, in all its unquenchable momentum and beautifully eruptive nature, comes to its close. The crowd loosens. Condori asks: “Did I find the beat?” before thanking the crowd at Cafe OTO for helping them to bring the tour to a close in style. 

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