The Nortec Collective Gives 21st Century Border
Culture a Digital Makeover.
Xeni
Jardin
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.”
(1) Webzines: www.noarte.org
and www.acamonchi.com
(2) Mil Records: home of the nortec collective. For information and tour dates
on each of the nortec members featured in this article, and for free streaming
clips of the Palm Pictures nortec compilation “Nor-Tec
Collective: The Tijuana Sessions Vol.1,” visit www.milrecords.com.