Nortec Collective: Tijuana For Dummies

When I first heard about Nortec Collective, I was puzzled but intrigued. They're an aggregate of seven groups and/or lone DJs: there's Fussible (Pepe Mogt and Melo Ruíz), Bostich (Ramón Amezcua), Terrestre (Fernando Corona), Plankton Man (Ignacio Chavez), Panóptica (Robert Mendoza), Clorofila (Jorge Verdín and Fritz Torres) and Hiperboreal (Pedro Gabriel Beas and Claudia Algara). England's music paper the New Musical Express described them as traditional Northwestern Mexican music turned into electronica. I couldn't imagine what this would sound like; bassoons and accordions to a four-four beat?

When I heard their album The Tijuana Sessions, Volume 1, it was exactly what I thought it would be. Samples of cowbells, low brass, and the trademark polka/ska accordion I'd heard so many times on the Spanish music radio stations of Los Angeles. The beats were intricate and Latin-flavored, but the overall package was definitely fit to be called electronic music. I loved it.

Nortec Collective hail from Tijuana and Ensenada, two hot tourist spots just over the border from Southern California. In these two places, American and Mexican culture meet. The collective chose the name Nortec as an abbreviation of Norteño-Techno: the electronica of Northwestern Mexico. The music Web site Sputnik7 describes the melding of styles this way: it's "the convergence...of all things techno-- the sequenced breakbeats and sound patterns, the raves, the recombinant technology, sample cut-ups-- with all things norteño, all the things that are a part of the rural and urban, cowboy hat and tasseled-sleeve world of Northwestern Mexico."

The Mexican side of Nortec comes from popular traditional Mexican musical forms. Pure Norteño music is accordion-heavy. Top artists include Flaco Jimenez, Los Tigres del Norte, and Steve Jordan. Ranchera music, also filled with accordions, claims Vicente Fernandez as its king. Banda sinaloense, or Sinaloan banda music, is another style of Northern Mexican music that Nortec incorporates. We'll look to Sputnik7 again for a description of these styles' specific sound, because their article has already done it better than I ever could: they're "all Mexicanized hybrids of polka and waltz music brought to Mexico by German farmers [and] best known for their button accordions, acoustic bass, brassy trumpets and trombones, big honking tubas, big bass drum booms, and firecracker snare rolls."

The electronic side of Nortec comes from Tijuana's prominence as a city of industry for electronic equipment. The city's teeming with electronic-parts factories. It's easy for fans of techno music to drive over to California and pick up new music.

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