Critical text
Tech Mex
The Nortec Collective Gives 21st Century Border Culture a Digital Makeover. Tech Mex Stretched out on a narrow table onstage are countless Sony Vaio laptops and candy colored imacs, crammed between DJ mixing boards and woven together in a macramé mess of black serpentine cable. One group of DJs after another cranks out deafeningly fat beats punctuated with slivers of accordion, splurges of tuba, and sampled cowboy shrieks, in a nonstop mix that lasts nearly until sunrise. Hallucinatory video loops of cheesy Baja bars, charro space aliens wearing straw cowboy hats, and homemade UFOs floating over the nocturnal Tijuana skyline are all cast over a packed crowd of blissfully pulsating dancers. This is nortec. The Tijuana, Mexico-centered nortec collective -- that’s shorthand for “norteño techno” -- is a loosely organized group of eight multimedia musical projects: Bostich, Fussible, Terrestre, Clorofila, Plankton Man, Hiperboreal, Monnithor, and Panoptica. “We digitally recycle the popular folk norteño and banda sinaloense sounds of northern Mexico, and mix them up with electronica grooves,” says Pepe Mogt of Fussible, largely credited as the movement’s founder. “Each of the nortec collective members have their own projects, and there are other disciplines involved now, too.” Nortec encompasses graphic design, literature, film, architecture, apparel design, and there’s even a Mexican anime electronic war game in the works. Norteño and Tambora are the two most popular styles of music in the northwestern region of Mexico, and they form the Mexican pop culture roots of nortec. As Roberto Mendoza, founder of the webzine noarte.org and of the nortec music project Panoptica explains, “In cities like Tijuana, you can find Norteño trios performing in restaurants; they wear cowboy hats, boots and big belt buckles, and usually carry an accordion, a guitar and a huge bass called a Tololoche.” Norteño lyrics often glorify the exploits of wily drug lords and the federales who chase them, and according to pervasive urban myth in Baja, the “narcos” are even said to commission honorific ballads from musicians like oral history advertisements, a sort of folk media branding for modern-day antiheros. Tambora style, by contrast, has its roots in German Polka music transplanted to Sinaloa, Mexico. The tambora sound features heavy, fat brass band riffs and an explosive barrage of syncopated snare drum beats. “It’s the music of choice to get drunk by in northern Mexico,” explains Mendoza, “Nortec is an electronic rethinking of Tambora and Norteño that retains the soul of the original music.” As Fussible’s Mogt explains, nortec was both an inevitability and an accident, a sort of digital self-analysis by punk era teens from Tijuana who were weaned on Kraftwerk, Clash, and Human League in the ‘80s and wouldn’t be caught dead listening to anything as uncool as norteño back then. But now, they’re returning to those same roots years later, armed with laptops, digital video cameras, CD burners, and a reverential passion for border kitsch. “In 1999 I was hanging out at a friend’s wedding party listening to the norteño band…. Just sitting near the drummer, kind of zoning out on the snare drums,” Mogt says, “It just hit me, the idea of fusing those sounds with the digital music I was already producing with Fussible. The next day, I phoned an old music producer friend who records norteño bands, and asked him if he could hook me up with some snare drum samples. He agreed, so I went to his studio to grab some sound bites… and in the process of looking for snare samples, i stumbled on lots of other sound elements that sounded cool-- bass, accordions, tubas, congas -- and everything in that studio sounded sort of dirty, organic, a little off beat.” Mogt’s party epiphany led to a series of early electronic remixes by his project Fussible and by others, including the funky, de facto nortec anthem “Polaris,” cut by fellow collective member and wildly popular nortec performer Bostich (aka Ramon Amezcua). Soon, the group produced a small homemade CD sampler, and 1000 copies were swapped among friends and supporters. Legendary producer and Island Records and Palm Pictures founder Chris Blackwell stumbled across the nortec beats at a party in Miami, and liked them. A Palm Pictures recording deal for 3 compilation CDs and one album for each of the nortec members soon materialized, and buzz continues to grow exponentially. “Nortec is specific to Norteño culture and the sights and sounds of Tijuana,” says Panoptica’s Roberto Mendoza. “The little taqueria shops, the donkey painted like a zebra, the big pickup trucks, the narcos and the judiciales, the massive grupero pop concerts… all of that is what makes the city so special and so bizarre for outsiders. We’re recycling our environment electronically. We filter the rhythms with software plugins, we sample the tuba and create another kind of melody from it, we take pictures of the tianguis and distort them with Photoshop plugins, we deconstruct environmental video footage in Adobe Premiere.” Nortec member Plankton Man (aka Ignacio “Nacho” Chavez), who moved to Los Angeles from Ensenada last year in hopes of breaking his music out to new audiences, agrees. “It has a lot to do with third world stuff and bad economic conditions. It has to do with life on the border.” For many of the nortec collective artists, personal computers are an essential part of the creative process. “We use a lot of PC based plugins, virtual synths, and digital sound editing tools,” says Mogt, “they’re vital to creating the specific feel and aesthetic that is nortec.” Mendoza admits that most of his work exists solely in the digital realm, from start to finish. “My PC is the most important tool in my creative process, period. I’m using a laptop for the creation, editing and mastering of tracks, and the same is true for my live shows.” Internet fileswapping networks like Napster and Gnutella serve as a vital launching pad for the fledgling musical movement. While the rest of the world is debating how artists will be compensated, nortec collective members are furiously creating, remixing, collaborating, swapping, and promoting online by any means necessary. “P2P is the best thing a musician could ever ask for,” says Mogt, “It’s free promotion. When we released the nortec sampler, and the songs started appearing on Napster, we immediately started receiving e-mails from people that wanted to buy copies.” Panoptica’s Mendoza concurs. “Digital file swapping probably hurts the label more than it does the artist. People will always find new ways to do what napster is doing right now. Maybe it won’t be legal, or maybe it will be barely legal, but it will continue to be done for free.” But for now, with P2P-fueled excitement driving the nortec sound to an increasingly wide fan base, the artists who comprise the nortec collective have their hands full keeping up with demand for new material and international tour dates. While the response has been overwhelming both from overseas and from throughout urban Mexico and Latin America, it may take a while for some of the folks back home in Tijuana to become comfortable with nortec. “One time when I was out in the ‘hood capturing video clips for a project, we had a really rough encounter with this one banda music guy,” explains Chavez. “He was furious. He confronted us saying, ‘You’re making fun of our culture, cabron, you’re screwing it all up, this is who we are, dammit.’ And I said, ‘this is part of who I am, too. We’re proud of it like you are. We don’t want to mess with your culture, man. We’re just remixing it.”
SIDEBAR: Urls (1) Webzines: www.noarte.org and www.acamonchi.com (2) Mil Records: home of the nortec collective.
by Xeni Jardin
JARDIN, Xeni. "Tech Mex". Disponível em: