Nortec en L.A. Weekly


AUGUST 12 - 18, 2005

Factory of Dreams
Nortec Collective's new Tijuana is beautiful & funky & funny
by JOHN PAYNE


With The Tijuana Sessions, Vol. 3,
the Nortec Collective continue to
invent new music for a new
Tijuana, and a new world:

TIJUANA, Mexico - I recently found myself on the road to TJ: The
sun was hotter'n a bulldog's bumhole, and the traffic was even more
infernal, but no worries - this is what it's like when you receive The Call.
My goal: to meet and hang with the five members of Tijuana's Nortec
Collective, a group of musicians, artists and textual provocateurs based in
Baja's notorious playground for American frat boys. Nortec have a new disc
out, called Tijuana Sessions, Vol. 3 (Nacional), wherein their streamlined
Technicolor techno - with the oompahing tubas, tootling trumpets, gurgling
clarinets and shuffle-stomping drums of northern Mexico's ranchera, norteño
and banda styles - gets mashed into a most exquisitely funky and funny and
beautiful riot of sound that could only come from a city with a lot of pride
of place and not a whole lot to lose.

Crossing the border into Mexico, I quickly sensed that palpable
energy shift that follows the landscape's devolution out of San Diego - all
whitewashed bungalows, shiny high rises and sailboats - into what feels like
a deeper, far more complex corollary to the human condition. Here, the
streets and shops and cars and even the dogs look well used because they're
so full of life, rather than empty of it. Vitality, you might say.


On our meeting, the five members of Nortec are all shy smiles
and a rather courtly friendliness. Over water, Cokes and beers, we proceed
to probe the whys and wherefores of their sound/vision collaborations, and
how Nortec's mere existence probably owes to fate or divine providence or
sheer good luck, if one happens to believe in those sorts of things.

Formed in 1999, the group today consists of the "godfather" of
the T.J. electronic scene, Ramón Amezcua, a.k.a. Bostich; DJ-graphic
designer Jorge Verdin, a.k.a. Clorofila; Pepe Mogt, a.k.a Fussible; P.G.
Beas, a.k.a. Hiperboreal; and Roberto A. Mendoza, a.k.a. Panoptica.

"The idea," says Mendoza, "was to get out of the ideas that we
had gotten from all the European bands. I wanted to just stop what we were
doing and just think of places where we were coming from. Like drum & bass,
for example - you know it's coming from England, and U.S. techno, you know
that it's from Detroit. The same thing with minimalist techno - you know
when you hear it, it's from Germany. At one point we said, 'We have to do
something so that can identify ourselves with the music. We can say we are
from Mexico, and from the North.'

"Pepe was the one who came up with the idea of putting this
music together, techno music and banda music. But when we did that, a lot of
DJs here were not interested in the whole Nortec concept, so we fused all
these other elements, regional musical traditions, with more high-tech
things."

Why is a Northern identity so important to these guys? "The
culture in Tijuana is very different from that of Mexico City, Guadalajara
and in fact from the whole country," observes Verdin. "We are between these
two places - the biggest city in the country, to the south, and the reality
of the Mexicans across the border in the U.S., and that whole different
culture from us. Our particular reality is only possible in this part of the
country."

In contrast to the almost stereotypical view that
Mexican-Americans must by definition have a severe identity crisis, says
Verdin, "We don't feel like Mexican-Americans, who feel they don't really
belong to either culture. We feel that we belong - this is our land, our
country, our people, our place. We wanted to expose what is sort of a
little-known culture, the Tijuana culture. We have our roots basically in a
new thing, and it's, like, under construction."

The members of Nortec are perhaps the first generation of
Tijuana's people to recognize their essential separateness from both the
North and South. "We are the first generation to face that reality," says
Verdin, "of something new being needed - music and art and literature,
everything."

The reality for young people in Tijuana in the '80s, when the
Nortec crew were at that special age of sensitivity to new music and art,
was that Tijuana was basically isolated from the rest of Mexico. The
installation of a massive radio transmitter in northern Mexico made all the
difference. "That affected us in a good way," says Pepe Mogt. "A lot of
radio stations had special shows, playing nothing but electronic music, so
that was the main influence for us." This, and the subsequent opening of the
Iguana Club - where San Diego promoters brought in big-name touring acts
from the States and Europe - literally changed the face of music in Tijuana.


Too much talk, though - rather collectively, the group and I
decide to take a little tour of their favorite watering holes, places that
served as inspirational hot spots during their conceptual development. In
other words, we go bar-hopping.

In the fantastic Dandy del Sur - a moodily dim and narrow room
stuffed with curios, candles and a crude mural of a pimp wearing huaraches -
we discuss the group's widespread influences, and why the group isn't bound
by them. (By the way, Dandy del Sur's also graced by the continuous sound of
"New York, New York" from the jukebox, pumped out about six times an hour.
One of the regulars there plays it pretty much all day, every day of the
week. If you don't care for Sinatra's "New York, New York," better stay away
from the Dandy del Sur.)

We talk about old faves like Chrome, MX-80 Sound, the Residents,
Cluster and Krautrock in general, and this guy Steven Brown, the
ex-Tuxedomoon guy who's been resident in Mexico for a number of years,
making his peculiar brand of art music with locals. All of the group's
members are deeply knowledgeable about electronic music, especially from the
late '70s through mid-'80s: Kraftwerk, Ultravox, Depeche Mode, Aviador Dro
from Spain. In the early '90s, their tastes hardened with the arrival of
heavy industrial shit like Ministry and Pigface and the rest of the Chicago
weirdos. Apparently there were electronic bands from Mexico City, and even
in Tamaulipas, but they were superunderground. Then came rave music in the
mid-'90s, which really catapulted the electronic scene in Tijuana, and
inspired what was to become an original electronic sound from Mexico.

At the famous La Estrella, a legendary club where you pays your
money and a nice woman will dance with you (or, if you come accompanied,
someone else will steal your partner), the DJ has been in his little booth
for 30 years; he doesn't read, picks all his stuff by memory from the
covers. The Nortec guys are telling me that places like this, ?in fact, have
come back strong in Tijuana, and that as a result there aren't as many
places for DJs and electronic types to ?play. Recently, however, they did
good business at the massive Las Pulgas, the ?most impressive of the large
trad-Mex music halls. A vast complex of four huge rooms, it can and does
hold 6,000 people who come every weekend to stomp and swirl to ranchera and
norteño, and imbibe very cheaply priced booze.

Las Pulgas' supremely atmospheric vibe of high ceilings and
walls painted black, oceans of tables, huge sound systems and stages and
bars were perfect for the group's hypnotic barrage of electro-banda and
?technoteño. While the owner of the place insisted that they do the show on
a weeknight, because he didn't think it would draw, it did in fact pull in
the masses, via radio spots and a massive flier campaign around town.

Tijuana is about 117 years old, and that's still relatively
young. The population has grown from 250,000 two decades ago to more than 2
million residents today. That, the Nortec fellas tell me, is because of a
particularly nasty myth that still circulates in poorer areas in southern
Mexico, that the border is easiest to cross in Tijuana. In fact, it's the
most difficult. The most frequently crossed border in the world, it's
doubled-walled for miles in this region, with numerous patrols occupying and
defending the ground between the two walls. The result is that the migrants
end up stranded here, and stay; they end up working at one of TJ's over 700
maquiladoras, foreign-owned factories that employ more than 150,000 workers
here, most all of them cheaply paid and non-union-organized.

A few other tidbits strewn in the maze: Someone once referred to
the "emergency architecture" of Tijuana. That's rich. Nortec emphasizes that
Tijuana is accurately seen as "on the edge of the Latin American world;
outsider by nature, a city of mixture and opportunities." Though it's often
viewed as "the world's longest bar," a dark pit of drug traffic and
prostitution, some locals here say that the real Tijuana is off-limits to
tourists - the real Tijuana is where regular people carry on their business
in a non-scandalous way.

Meanwhile, Nortec is touring the world - the U.S., Australia,
Japan, Europe, including prestigious gigs at the Barbican Center in London
and the Hollywood Bowl. They currently sit atop iTunes' Latin Albums Chart,
alongside Thalia, Shakira and Juanes.

And they say: "Know that Nortec is the border, and the border is
our future."

They also say that Tijuana is apparently ugly but at the same
time very marvelous.


Nortec Collective co-headlines a free show at the Santa Monica
Pier Thursday, August 11, as part of the Latin Alternative Music Conference.
rtec en L.A. Weekly