A Mexico City rockero heads north to discover the new sound of Tijuana.

By Pacho

I'M IN THE heart of downtown Tijuana walking down Avenida Revolución, a street lined with stores for gringos, U.S.-style bars, tourist restaurants, and craft stands. Street photographers will snap your picture in front of fake cacti and volcanoes. You can also put on a sombrero and sit on top of a donkey that's been painted to look like a zebra. Never mind that there are no zebras in Mexico; the idea is to satisfy the exotic fantasies of the city's constant influx of northern visitors.

What is exotic about Tijuana, a city that neighbors San Diego and is only three hours from Los Angeles? Many tijuanenses either work or study on the other side of the border, creating an everyday life and culture that transcend the geopolitics that supposedly define them. Here the first world and the third world join. Maybe that's what the local anarchist ska band Tijuana No meant when they declared their city "the last corner of Latin America." In Tijuana geography and national stereotypes switch places every day, and the other side is everywhere. In the gambling dens of the red-light district you can hear rancheras, norteñas, tamboras sinaloenses, and narcocorridos, while in the tourist bars of Revolución you can hear Anglo rock, pop, and cheap dance music.

This is the mix that has produced Tijuana's newest sound. Nortec, a collective of DJs and engineers (Fussible, Bostich, Plankton Man, Terrestre, Panoptica, Clorofila, Hipoboreal, Monhitor) who make music at the electro-acoustic crossroads where norteño meets techno, has just released its first album as a collective, The Tijuana Sessions Vol. 1 (Palm). Nortec emerged from the local Tijuana electronic scene two years ago, and its music is based on digitally manipulated samples of acoustic norteño and banda sinaloense recordings. But Nortec doesn't re-create norteño music traditions; it uses them as the base for abstract fusions that produce their own new sounds. "Nortec is more than just techno-banda," explains Pepe Mogt of Fussible, one of Nortec's originators. "We use norteño music but we end up sounding like something more between minimalist techno, drum 'n' bass, and trip-hop – but with our own very distinct goals."

Take Bostich's "Polaris," perhaps the perfect Nortec song, which uses sinaloense snare drums processed through a vocoder. "The vocoder controls the tempo and timbre of the sound," Mogt says. " 'Polaris' begins with the sound of the norteño stand-up bass distorted, then you can hear keyboard chords based specifically on the processed snare drums." After a minute and 17 seconds, you hear a break generated by a tambora sinaloense tuba that unleashes the main groove. It sounds like jungle, but the rhythms come from the sinaloense snares themselves. "The banda musician who plays the snare drum only plays that drum, without cymbals, nothing else," Mogt says. "He reaches the same speed and can be just as elaborate as the drums you can find on a drum machine, but the texture is fresher."

The Tijuana electronic music scene that Nortec grew out of has always had more of an eye on the international techno scene than on what was happening closer to home. As a result, much of the music worked hard to sound like Kraftwerk and the Orb; there was no trace of the uniquely Mexican cultural mestizaje that generations of rockeros before them had been tapping into. "Before Nortec," Mogt says, "when I crossed the border and visited friends, I would play them my records and in a few minutes they would lose interest. Especially the gringos, who listened to the music for a few seconds and then put something else on. We weren't saying anything we could call our own. But then one day I got ahold of some recordings of norteño and banda sinaloense and decided to take their sounds and process them in my studio. The result was Nortec."

It's later that same day, but now I'm in a taco shop in Rosarito, a beach town just south of Tijuana where a Nortec party is about to begin. There's a jukebox that spits out songs by Juan Gabriel, Los Tigres del Norte, and Los Temerarios, while off in the distance I can hear the beats of the gringo discotheques. Suddenly I see Mogt pass by with a stack of vinyl under his arm, and I follow him to the party. "Three different parties in the same block, " I say to myself. "Not such a strange thing in this corner of the world."

Translated from the Spanish by Cecilia Bastida. Jose Luis "Pacho" Paredes plays drums for Mexico City rock en español band Maldita Vecindad and is a columnist for La Reforma newspaper. He can be reached at pachojose@hotmail.com.

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