(2 of 3)
Seeking something more rhythmic to play with, Mogt went to a studio near Revolucion Avenue where norteno musicians make their audition tapes for gigs at local bars. Mogt had always thought norteno, with its rolling accordions, intentionally off-beat rhythms and accompanying culture of macho cowboys in hats and vests, was naco, cheesy. It was his parents' music, and he was embarrassed by what he perceived as its lack of sophistication. But he was looking for something new and something that said Tijuana. Norteno fit both bills. After Mogt explained what he wanted, the studio engineer gave him a disc with accordion, drum and tuba outtakes. It was like getting a shoebox full of gold.
Immediately, Mogt made copies for his friends. Sorting through the samples, Ramon Amezcua, 38, a shy orthodontist and father of four, latched on to a honking tuba that pealed like a queasy elephant, and a thunderous, polyrhythmic drumbeat. Two weeks later, after processing the samples through various analog and digital synthesizers, Amezcua premiered a track called Polaris that earned him the unlikely title of Godfather of Nortec. Loud, sometimes dissonant but full of complicated rhythm and humor, Polaris is a dance-floor hit that sounds like nothing so much as a strange circus arriving in an even stranger town. It captured Tijuana perfectly. "Pepe and I played the track at a party to test it, and people stopped dancing," says Amezcua. "Then they started dancing again but with more energy. Everyone was looking around, whooping, wanting to know what the song was."
As tracks from other friends trickled in by e-mail, Amezcua, Mogt and Ruiz decided to press 1,000 copies of a compilation called the Nor-tec Sampler, combining "norte," as in northern Mexico--not norteno--and "techno." (Tech-Mex, another possibility, was considered too gringo.) The sampler was an immediate hit with Tijuana's student population, and soon there were nortec parties, where the seven members of the freshly named Nortec Collective would play to dozens, then hundreds and even thousands of people. The music spread quickly to other parts of Mexico and beyond, to New York City, Los Angeles and London. Kim Buie, an executive at Island Records' founder Chris Blackwell's boutique label, Palm Pictures, knew all this when she was given a copy of the Nor-tec Sampler. She signed the collective to a distribution deal and released Tijuana Sessions, Vol. 1 in the U.S. last February because she loved the collective's story, and, as she says, "their music is really original."
It is also, for the most part, lyric-less. That's the nature of electronica, but it's also telling--in a city where explicit conversations about drugs and poverty have an aura of danger--that Nortec hasn't been put to words. Pedro Beas, who performs under the stage name Hiporboreal, says that's indigenous too. "Almost all the big cities in Mexico gave birth to an original form of music," he booms in a lecture-hall baritone. "Ranchero in Guadalajara, tambora in Mazatlan, norteno in Monterrey. I'm not saying that nortec is the original music of Tijuana, but what's interesting is that in a hybrid culture like Tijuana, the most natural thing is a hybrid music."