Nortec Collectivo - Latino USA Episode 433

[Music] It's a musical hybrid.

Electrónica meets down-home Mexican music. [Music]

It's also Tijuana and the border.

Actually, it's its own world, a hybrid world where cultures clash and reinvent themselves.

This is Tijuana. Come in.

This musical fusion is called Nortec, Norteño and Techno.

Bostitch, Fusible, Panoptica, Hyperboreal, Chlorophylla are some of the names of the DJ crews sampled in a release called Nortec Collection, the Tijuana Sessions Volume 1.

Nortec is not only music, but a collective. And with us today on Latino USA is one of its founders, Pepe Mogt.

So how was Nortec created?

Actually, it was like more like an accident.

We were like making an experiment of using the traditional sounds of the border, which is the Norteño music, Tambora and all these original sounds. The sounds that you commonly hear on the border.

I went to local studios and grabbed some samples from people that used to play in bars in Tijuana and used to get jobs, you know, in restaurants and even on the streets.

They record demos in cheap studios in Tijuana.

So I went to these studios and record these samples from unknown musicians, you know, playing well-known popular music.

Then I come back to my studio and then I started experimenting with this track. And then I like the result of that.

Then I was thinking, you know, probably we can make a compilation of this.

You know, I'm going to call all my friends that I have that they are doing electronic music.

So I invite them just to create a compilation that doesn't have any name and nothing. It's just, you know, fusion these sounds.

So then like a month later, they have like not only one track, they have like two, three tracks. [Music]

You guys say that the Electronica comes from an inspiration, from a long way back like Kraftwerk and like the original techno-technos.

Yeah, the thing is like we live on the border and San Diego is next to Tijuana.

So there was a radio station and some DJs and some programs, for example, a program called Listen to This and we grew up influenced by those special programs on the night and they put electronic music. So we grew up mostly with that. [Music]

Now, for you, you say that it's much more than music. It's really an attitude, an atmosphere. What are you talking about?

Yeah, people is like when we put in the music, people were in Tijuana, they start recognizing the sounds, you know, the sounds of the border, the sound of the stuba, the sounds they hear on taxis, but now they're hearing on clubs with electronics.

So then people that were in other disciplines like graphic designers, painters, and then they say, you know, 'I'm working with the image from the border, an image from Tijuana, and I fusioned this in my works. Can I use your music?' Yeah, of course.

And then the word spreading out too fast because when the name came out of the compilation, the people start calling us the Nortec Collective or Collectivo Nortec, the Nortec guys, and then even clubs that invite us to play, they say, 'are you going to play your techno stuff or you're going to play Nortec?' You know, like they say, like if it is, you know, some kind of style or whatever. [Laughter] [Music]

Where do you see Nortec going next? I mean, if it's a movement, if it's a multidisciplinary atmosphere and attitude, what comes next then in terms of where Nortec goes?

I don't know. I mean, it's like there is too much to do. I mean, there is too much to experiment.

And even like what we were doing today, like with these people now as Nortec, with fusion, it's happened before with Santana, you know, Santana, which he was mixing the music of their age, you know, of the seventies with all the Mexican stuff that were there, you know.

And earlier than Santana was, you know, like Herb Alpert, you know, fusioning the jazz, the American jazz with all the sounds happening in that moment in Tijuana.

So I think it's always Tijuana has this vibe, you know, the border, the fusion of two cultures, the sounds that are flying around the radio waves and all these television channels, you know, back and forth from the border.

It's something that inspire people and people like us, you know, living in Tijuana, inspired by both sides, you know.

It's like kind of a, that's a way to broke the border, you know.

Well, good luck with everything.

We've been speaking with Pepe Mogt, who is part of the Nortec Collective, a CD with the Nortec compilation called The Tijuana Sessions Volume 1 is out on the Palm Pictures record label. [Music]