Elysia Crampton is an Aymara trans woman artist, musician and poet based in northern California. She is unarguably one of the most important voices in contemporary electronic music.

Crampton released American Drift in 2015 and followed it up last year with her most recent work, Elysia Crampton presents: Demon City. Demon City is a concept album in the form of an epic poem featuring collaborators Chino Amobi, Why Be, Rabit and Lexxi. Its live version is accompanied by Dissolution of The Sovereign: A Time Slide Into The Future, an audiovisual play bridging the Aymara oral history tradition/theater legacy with Elysia's own trans-femme abolitionist grasp of futurity.

In this, Elysia's first ever Melbourne performance, she will present a new work combining music and text. Elysia will also present a separate talk titled "Abolitionist Legacies from the Andean Universe" (details TBC).

"Electronic music has long engaged with the concept of the future, and Crampton's depiction of it is highly politicised, repudiating both the whitewashed, Eurocentric version of America's history and the sanitised, exclusionary notion of the future that springs forth from it. "We should be careful to consider exactly what future we are defaulting to, and what ways we have been taught to engage this default-future," she says. "As someone who is brown, someone who is queer-struggling to exist as both-my relationship with the future has been precious because it's where my positivity can take flight, where the narratives I embody / live / create, jettison out and into being, full of hope and energy." Breaking through: Elysia Crampton by Maya Kalev, Resident Advisor

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liquidarchitecture.org.au/program/elysia-crampton / soundcloud.com/eande