Epic collage began as one Fader column in 2014. Eleven years later it had Pitchfork's album of the year

In May 2014, the critic Adam Harper wrote a column for The Fader about a few producers most readers had never heard of: E+E, Total Freedom and Chino Amobi, who was then recording under an alias. He called what they made "epic collage," borrowing the phrase from the painting style of Amobi and his friend Seychelles Allah. Harper's own summary was blunter: "The framework is avant-garde sample collage."

Eleven years later, Pitchfork named Los Thuthanaka its album of the year for 2025. Los Thuthanaka is E+E, now going by the Aymara name Chuquimamani-Condori, playing with their brother. Somewhere in between, RateYourMusic turned Harper's phrase into a genre page, filed it under sound collage, and let close to two thousand releases pile up beneath it.

So what is it? My answer: epic collage is what you get when somebody tells a big story, usually about a place and who got pushed out of it, using the cheapest sounds the culture has to offer. Stock explosions, a Lil Jon ad-lib. The cheapness is deliberate. That's the sound of the world these producers actually grew up in, and they use it to talk about history.

The column and the network

Harper's piece wasn't describing a scene with a postcode. It was describing a group of people trading files: Total Freedom (Ashland Mines), whose 2012 compilation Blasting Voice gets cited as an early example; E+E's self-released The Light That You Gave Me to See You (2013); and Amobi's 2013 cassette Father, Protect Me. The music grew up next to club nights like GHE20G0TH1K in New York, and you can hear that. Bits of club tracks keep breaking through, then getting swallowed.

Not everyone liked the label. The producer Lotic objected that throwing unrelated sounds together was just what you'd do if you grew up with a laptop, and that it didn't need a theory. Fair, up to a point. But "people with laptops" covers everyone from Girl Talk to a teenager's Soundcloud, and Harper was pointing at something narrower: collage with a story arc.

American Drift and Demon City

The record that made the case was Elysia Crampton's first album under that name.

American Drift came out on Blueberry Records in August 2015: four tracks, half an hour. It is full of Hollywood stock effects (gunshots, explosions, evil laughs) laid over cumbia and baile funk rhythms and played on what sound like cheap Kurzweil and Yamaha keyboards. Lil Jon turns up on "Axacan." That track is named for the Ajacán Mission, a Spanish settlement in 16th-century Virginia whose story is one of violence. Crampton wrote parts of the album in Roanoke and Richmond and produced it in La Paz. Shenandoah Mountain, colonial Virginia, Aymara Bolivia and crunk in one half hour, and somehow it never feels like a lecture. It sounds like a fever dream about a road trip.

A year later Crampton called Demon City (Break World, 2016) an epic poem, and meant it. It's seven tracks and 25 minutes, made with Rabit, Why Be, Lexxi and Amobi. Track two is "After Woman (For Bartolina Sisa)," for the Aymara rebel leader the Spanish executed in 1782. Pitchfork put it on its list of the best experimental albums of 2016. If you want to hear why people kept reaching for the word "epic," start here, because almost nothing on it lasts long enough to become a groove. It keeps moving on to the next scene.

Amobi and the NON years

Amobi co-founded NON Worldwide with Angel-Ho and Nkisi, a label and collective of African-diaspora artists that is now defunct. His own Paradiso came out on NON in 2017, billed as "a musical epic set in a distorted Americana," with an identity card for a fictional country on the cover.

It is the harshest record in this piece and the one that ages best. Twenty pieces in 65 minutes, most of them under four, and the samples never let you settle. Amobi kept going after NON closed. Eroica (2024) grew out of a novel he published in 2020, which opens with a police report on his own fictional murder, and The Fader called the album "an epic collage masterpiece." Eroica II: Christian Nihilism followed a year later.

From DJ E to the moths

In 2019 Crampton began recording as Chuquimamani-Condori. DJ E (2023) was self-released and came in at number nine on Pitchfork's 2024 list of the best albums of the decade so far. Then, on 22 March 2025, Bandcamp got a surprise drop from Los Thuthanaka, "the moths," the duo they formed with their brother Joshua Chuquimia Crampton.

It sounds nothing like American Drift, because this is a band record. Joshua plays electric guitar and bass, Chuquimamani-Condori plays keyboards, sampler, CDJ, ronroco and bombo drums, and the eight tracks rework Andean forms like huayno, caporal and kullawada into an hour of clipping, unmastered noise that runs like one long DJ set. Pitchfork gave it 9.3, its highest score for a new album since Fiona Apple in 2020. I'd argue it belongs under the epic collage tag anyway. The method is the same. It's a big story about where the family comes from, told with whatever was within reach, and in 2025 what was within reach was a guitar.

The kid in Houston

The newest name people keep attaching to the tag is heavensouls, the alias of Chidi Obialo, a 19-year-old producer born in Nigeria and based in Houston. Paste filed his March album squarely in "the expanding Epic Collage genre" and called it more coherent than Los Thuthanaka.

westside trapped is built around Fela Kuti and Nigerian jazz, with sampled R&B used for rhythm rather than melody, a Gambian kora on "creek ala" and West African guitar parts sliding under it. JPEGMAFIA is the obvious influence, and you can hear the digicore he came out of. What makes it epic collage rather than just a busy beat tape is the same thing as in 2015: it is about somewhere, and about being from two places at once.

cantu of the sower came out on 7 October, licensed to NTS: six long tracks across 43 minutes, with saxophone from Alyssa Mandel, guitars from Sterling Bidler and Big Head, and Atlanta's stickerbush singing on "shipping times and quiet streets." Bandcamp tags it ambient pop and glitch, and the tracks average more than seven minutes, so it moves slower and longer than westside trapped ever does. I'm not sure Harper's column would recognise it. I'm not sure that matters.

Where the tag goes from here

Here is the risk. A genre named after a method can drift into meaning "dense," and dense is easy. Anyone can stack 40 samples. What the good records share is a subject: Virginia, the Aymara, a Nigerian kid's two hometowns. If you know the long line of imagined-place music, our fourth world guide is the elder cousin, and the vaporwave field guide is the other branch that grew out of cheap, found sound around the same time.

Rate the records above, then make the case in the comments: is heavensouls the genre's future, or is "epic collage" already becoming the word RYM uses for anything with too many tabs open?