Madrid Modernity and Tradition in No-tec Music 05

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Imagining Modernity, Revising

Tradition: Nor-tec Music in Tijuana andOther Borders1

Alejandro L. Madrid

Based on extensive fieldwork in Tijuana, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Mexico City, thisarticle explores the intersections of identity, modernity, desire, and marginality in the

production, distribution, and transnational consumption of Nor-tec music. Tijuana

musicians developed Nor-tec by combining sounds sampled from traditional music of the

north of Mexico (conjunto norteno and banda) with compositional techniques

borrowed from techno music. The resulting style reflects the current re-elaboration of

tradition in relation to imaginary articulations of modernity that takes place in

Tijuanas youth border culture.

It is about 1.00 am. Roberto Mendoza (Panoptica), Ramon Amezcua (Bostich),

and Pepe Mogt from Fussible are standing on the clubs stage in front of their

laptops.2 Their bodies, transfigured by an array of images projected onto the screen

behind them, move with the cadenced beats produced by their gentle manipulation

of their computers keyboards. Two hours of careful programming have led the party

to this point: the dance floor, packed with bodies that refuse to stop moving, reacts to

every detail of the musicians performance with an approval that translates into

shakier hips, faster heeling, higher arms, and sweatier bodies. At this moment, theloudspeakers fill the club with the distinctly raw and powerful tuba, guiro, and tarola

(snare drum) sounds of Bostichs hit Polaris. The images on the screen follow the

frantic, syncopated pace of the music, spitting the fluorescent, transformed facsimiles

of a surreal, hypermodern city which seems to look back at the clubs audience. The

dancers immediately recognize the music and frenetically scream, throw their fists up

in the air, jump, spin, merge themselves with the sounds and images in a labyrinthine

game of mirrors where the observed becomes the observer, where the city becomes

the music, where the dancers become Tijuana. It is 16 September, we are at The Echo

in Los Angeles, California, and this is the climax of the 2003 La Leche tour. This is

Popular Music and SocietyVol. 28, No. 5, December 2005, pp. 595618

ISSN 0300-7766 (print)/ISSN 1740-1712 (online) # 2005 Taylor & Francis


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also Mexican Independence Day and this is the culmination of a Nor-tec

performance that proves to be more than just a musical event; this performance is

a true transforming experience, one that both provides a site for identification and

rearticulates discourses on tradition and modernity, center and periphery, the

Mexican and the American. These are indeed bad-ass border beats that

present a site for the intersection and negotiation of tradition and modernity.3

Figure 1 Pepe Mogt (Fussible), Panoptica, and Bostich performing at The Echo, Los

Angeles, California, 16 September 2003.

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Nor-tec as a musical style is the result of the tijuanenses negotiation of the

contradictory circumstances of living at the United States-Mexico border,4 the

boundary between the First and the Third World, the line that separates modernity

and the dreams about modernity. Nor-tec is a music that re-articulates the issues that

surround Tijuanas culture. The hyphenated term nor-tec (a fusion of the words

norteno and tecno [techno]) was coined by Panoptica in 1999, when Pepe Mogt and

Jorge Melo Ruiz from Fussible proposed the creation of a musical style that would

fuse the typical sounds of Mexican conjunto norteno (accordion, tarola, bajo sexto)

and banda (tuba, trumpet, clarinet, tarola) with the compositional principles of

electronic popular music (juxtaposition of sound blocks and loops, combination of

breaks, samplings and synthesizers, and computer manipulation). The hybrid

character of the term refers to the transcultural nature of Mogt and Ruizs idea, a

notion that attempts to reconcile the young tijuanenses desire for modernity with a

musical tradition often associated with rural people and many times neglected as

unsophisticated. However, it is in this conciliatory process that tradition is re-writtenaccording to the present and re-articulated in relation to the future. The idea of

sampling nortena music originates in a desire to authenticate current musical

practices in their relation to the past, and results in music that rewrites that past,

thereby reconstituting tradition in a performative way. The sampling creates a prism

that allows us to observe tradition and at the same time transforms our perception of

that tradition. The liminal character of Nor-tec gives it the strength to constitute itself

in a performative manifestation that articulates the processes of transculturation that

are collectively experienced by subjects at the border, thus making its production into

a clear example of performative composition (see Madrid, Writing Modernist and

Avant-Garde Music in Mexico 1619); Nor-tec is a musical articulation that at the

same time announces and negotiates the musicians place within a multi-ideological

context.

Among other things, young middle-class members of different Latino communities

in the United States (mostly Mexican Americans but also Puerto Ricans, Cubans,

Colombians, etc.) have appropriated Nor-tec because it resonates with their own

experience as border subjects. Like tijuanenses, many of these young Latinos are

individuals who must negotiate a multicultural world and engage contradictory class,

race, and gender discourses on a daily basis; and Nor-tec, as a manifestation that

engages a multiplicity of ideologies, articulates their desire to find new and alternativesites of identification beyond the stereotypes reinforced by family and community

traditions as well as American media. It is no coincidence that the organizers of La

Leche selected 5 May and 16 September, two of the most recognizable Mexican and

Mexican-American celebrations in the United States, as the beginning and ending

dates of their 2003 circuit nor that Nor-tec artists were the tours main attraction.

Jennifer Manon, a Mexican American who coordinates La Leche for the British label

Sonic 360, responded as follows when asked about the targeted audience of the tour:

Well, its really diverse. The parties have always been super mixed. But my friends

were the first to bring [La Leche] to the United States, in New York, and we were all

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Latina. It happened to be that wayLatina girls. We started doing it, so our circlestarted that way and its always been strong in that side especially playing Nor-tecmusic. And they thought it was really cool to introduce it to other Latinos becauseits so new and people were all listening to the same stuff, and we were so sick ofthat mentality, so we wanted to push it to show Latinos that theres other stuff tolisten to .Because [at Sonic 360] were always trying to do something that peopledont know about yet. Bring out the next fresh music. Not hold on to the samething forever and ever which is fun, too, I mean, we dont disregard traditionalmusic, but its good to get something different going and see peoples reactions tosomething new.A lot of Latinos seem stuck in their ways, and are stereotyped aswanting to keep their own ways; and radio stations are a number one way ofbrainwashing, saying stick with it, cus it keeps everyone together. (Man on)

Manons comments inform us of how the distribution of Nor-tec music among

different Latino communities responds to the desire of young Latinos to challenge

some of the stereotypes that associate them almost exclusively with Latin music.

Nevertheless, the fact that the chosen music was Nor-tecitself a style that rewritestradition out of a desire for modernityand that the beginning and final dates

coincided with traditional Mexican and Mexican-American celebrations illustrates

the complex interrelation between modernity, tradition, and identity among

transnational communities.

The possibilities of empowerment through local articulations of modernity and

tradition, as observed in the distribution and consumption of Nor-tec in the Los

Angeles party, are also fundamental in understanding the ever-changing history of

the relation between Nor-tec and audiences in Mexico City. On 25 March 2000, I had

the opportunity to be at the final concert of the Festival Tecnogeist at Mexico Citys

Zocalo. I was interested in listening to the music of Bostich and Fussible, who

presented their Nor-tec project in Mexico City for the first time. Young chilangos

reacted to Nor-tecs performance by vocally rejecting their music due to their failure

to identify it and the musicians with their preconceived notions of the border and

modernity.5 Witnessing that situation made me aware of this musics power

performatively to re-evaluate dominant discourses about the marginal condition of

these Tijuana musicians.6 A few weeks after the Zocalo concert, the now defunct

cybermagazine Urbe 01 published a review of the Festival Tecnogeist that explained

the negative reception of Nor-tec in the following terms: this new sound has not

been entirely digested by the electronic community in the center of the country, theyare just beginning to know it and it is certainly not an obligation to please everyone

(apt.Centauro).7 Two years later, in April 2002, I returned to Mexico City to present

a paper on Nor-tec music at the International Association for the Study of Popular

Music (IASPM)-Latin America conference, and was surprised to see not only that my

presentation was advertised in one of Mexicos most influential newspapers as one of

the main attractions of the conference, but also to find out that several journalists,

music critics, and fans were eager to talk to me about the Tijuana musicians. It was

evident that the reception of Nor-tec music in Mexico City had drastically changed in

the two years since the Zocalo concert.

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Representations of Tijuana

For the center of Mexico, the northern border in its everyday relation with the United

States represents both the margins of Mexican nationality and an experience of

modernity that makes it an ambiguous depository of despicability and desire. It is

after this contradictory construction of the border that a series of myths anddiscourses about border cities and citizens have been constructed. Discourses

developed both in Mexico and the United States have written the border as a passing

zone, a mirage where impermanence and desire coexist, denying its citizens a culture

of their own. Like the loops of electronic music, the continuous repetition of these

discourses has performatively hypnotized those who receive them, creating a

symbolic reality that is shared, although not necessarily appropriated in the same

way, by border and non-border subjects.

As the furthest, most isolated corner of Mexico, Tijuana has historically developed

strong ties with the United States. In fact, it would be impossible to understand theidentity of the Tijuana-San Diego border area without considering the symbiotic

economic, social, and cultural interdependencewhether visible or invisible

between the two cities. The particular character of the culture nurtured by the

Tijuana-San Diego border responds to Homi Bhabhas notion of cultures in

between as the connecting tissue between larger hegemonic cultures (54). As a

society in the margins of American and Mexican mainstream cultures, Tijuana has

easily been constructed as the Other by both of them, a discourse usually

accompanied by a series of myths developed to validate it. For the young

Americans who yell, what happens in Mexico stays in Mexico, inside a bar on

Avenida Revolucion, Tijuana is the city where they can experience any excess

forbidden in their country. For Mexicans watching the news on the Televisa or

TVAzteca network channels, Tijuana is a city of barbarians who kill each other by

instruction of the Arellano Felix brothers or order their beers in English while a group

of norteno or banda musicians play narcocorridos loudly in the background.8 Amid

this collection of myths about Tijuana, Avenida Revolucion plays a central role. La

Revu, as locals call the street, is the embodiment of the myth that Tijuana is known

for: gambling, drugs, prostitutes, musicians. La Revu is the tourists entrance to

Tijuana, and it appears to validate Manu Chaus infamous song: Welcome to

Tijuana/tequila, sexo, marihuana.

Territorializing and Reterritorializing Spaces, Images, and Sounds

Nor-tec has appropriated the myths about Tijuana, turning them into consumption

goods, merchandise with exchange value which permits tijuanenses to question

alienating discourses from within, transforming these discourses into sites that allow

them to position tijuanenses individually and collectively. In this form, Nor-tec

culture works as an institution that challenges dominant discourses of national and

local identity, and, therefore, notions of center and periphery. Nor-tec music, based



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on the characteristic loops of electronic music, exemplifies a symbolic sonic

reterritorialization (see Garca Canclini, Culturas hbridas 30405); as such, it

becomes a strategy aimed at repossessing ideological discourses, an artistic tactic

symbolized in the reclamation of the physical and sonic sites of performance.

My interest in Nor-tec led me to Tijuana, where I made an appointment to meet

Pedro Gabriel Beas (Hiperboreal)and Pepe Mogt at El Dandy del Sur, one of their

favorite bars, just a block away from la Revu.9 My conversation with Hiperboreal

freely flows among beers and carnita (a beef snack I have seen nowhere in Mexico

besides Tijuana). We speak about everything but soccer, which he confesses to hate;

the topics of our conversation range from music to literature, from architecture to

the Internet, from food to Filipino women. Notwithstanding the variety of discussion

subjects, there appears to be a constant, recurring idea that permeates them:

Hiperboreal seems obsessed with preserving the past and registering it in history.

After complaining about the decision of the city government to erect an arch at the

entrance to la Revu, an arch that seems to stand as a witness to the presence oftourists along the infamous avenue, Hiperboreal explodes: this arch breaks with the

architectural harmony of the citybecause, in the middle of all this apparent chaos,

there is harmony (Beas, interview). Immediately, our conversation focuses on the

slow disappearance of the spaces that have witnessed the spurt of the Nor-tec

phenomenonbars and clubs like El Dandy del Sur and La Estrella occupy a

preponderant place. According to Hiperboreal, these meeting places, bars, clubs, and

concert venues, where the initial concept of Nor-tec was shaped, have been slowly

disappearing. In order to preserve their memory, in an attempt to prevent them from

being forgotten, he has embarked on a photographic project to celebrate theirexistence.

A few days after our meeting, I found out that Hiperboreal himself had been the

owner of one of these clubs, the Don Loope. This was a place located in an annex of

the Jai Alai buildingthe place that hosted Nortec City, the event that launched Nor-

tec as an international phenomenon in March 2001that vigorously promoted

electronic music. Don Loope was open for a few months and then disappeared, but

not without having plugged Tijuana into the international music stream by hosting

Sonic 360s La Leche tour in 2002. After Don Loope closed, a new placeCentro

Baropened in the same location, another club devoted to electronic music that

quickly closed its doors after apparent financial disagreements with the managementof the Jai Alai building. Reterritorialization and tradition are the notions that

dominate both Hiperboreals discourse and the power struggles behind the

impermanence of the spaces that the electronic music scene seems to win over for

itself in Tijuana. In a city where the oldest historical buildings date from the 1950s,

impermanence accounts for a lifestyle in which the political exists in the intersection

between modernity and tradition, heritage and innovation, and agency and

hegemony.

Hiperboreals Tijuana for Dummies is a good example of Nor-tecs attempt to

reterritorialize the city and its physical and virtual spaces. This music is a

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hallucinating aural mirage, the result of a polyrhythm created by the superposition of

loops accentuating different parts of the measure, welcoming the listener into amusical landscape that seems familiar initially, but soon deceives the listeners

rhythmic expectations. The absence of a prominent downbeat during the first eight

measures of the piece forces the listener to interpret cognitively the rhythmic

sequence of the bongos and cowbell in order to find rhythmic stability during the

section. The presence of a prominently loud attack on the high bongo guides the

listener to take it as the downbeat and interpret the cowbell timeline as an off-the-

beat event (a rhythmic feature typical in most nortena music). The rhythmic

imprecision of the triplet in the melody of the synthesizer only adds an extra element

of uncertainty to the passage (Example 1).

However, the entrance of a clear cumbia rhythmic pattern played by the guiro, aswell as a new rhythmic emphasis provided by the congas in measure 9, reverses our

rhythmic interpretation of the introductory passage.10 In fact, the high bongo plays

on an offbeat while the cowbell simply marks the beat. These new elements would

force us to reinterpret completely the opening eight measures of the piece

(Example 2).

Therefore, the text at the beginning of the piece (This is Tijuanacoming) does

not intend anything but to point out that our expectations of Tijuana will not be

fulfilled because the city is not what we presume it to be; this city is not what we have

been told it is. It is more than the migrants waiting to evade the border patrol, more

Figure 2 Plate outside El Dandy del Sur, one of the Nor-tec Collectives favorite meetingplaces in Tijuana.



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than the killings orchestrated by the Arellano Felix brothers, more than what la Revu

offers American tourists.

The deceptive character of Tijuana, emphasized in the rhythmic ambiguities of

Hiperboreals music, is also apparent in Tijuana Bass, one of the most

representative tracks of Bostichs rough Nor-tec style. The title of Bostichs piece is

Example 1 Hiperboreal, Tijuana for Dummies, beginning section. First rhythmic

interpretation.

Example 2 Tijuana for Dummies, beginning section. Second rhythmic interpretation.

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in itself a local re-evaluation of the infamous Tijuana Brass, one of the most

influential bands in creating a musical stereotype of Tijuana for American audiences.

If Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass were fundamental in creating an association

between the name of Tijuana and the sound of the trumpet, Bostichs playful

paraphrase seems to announce Tijuana Bass as a musical re-interpretation that

confronts the stereotype by acknowledging it first and de-articulating it later.

Tijuana Bass is indeed brass music, but one of sharp and angular contours; it is a

piece that deceives the ear, the expectations, and thus the stereotypes of Tijuana at

every musical corner. Catchy trumpet melodies over driving hand clapping, snare

drumming, and conga rhythms lead the listener toward awkward moments of

harmonic travesty: our ears inform us we are in no mans land, a musical space that

can be identified neither harmonically nor melodically.

The music starts with a trumpet phrase repeating over an up-beat that is

accentuated by clapping hands. The melodic sequence is a three-note chromatic

motive that emphasizes A as a tonal center through duration, melodic stress anddirection, and surrounding context (the G# seems to play the role of a leading tone)

(Example 3).

However, the entrance of the tuba in measure 4, playing a G natural instead of the

expected A, forces us to re-evaluate the melodic context and our imaginary harmonic

framework. Indeed, it is the G natural that appears only briefly at the beginning of the

melodic gesture, what controls the harmonic structure of the composition

(Example 4).

Example 3 Bostich, Tijuana Bass, beginning melodic sequence.

Example 4 Tijuana Bass, beginning melodic sequence with added bass.



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Another loud tuba playing the typical accompaniment pattern of a cumbia on a G-

major triad emphasizes it as a harmonic center. At last, we seem to be certain of our

place in the music; however, the entrance of the main melodic motive in G minor a

few measures later proves that we should not take our sonic surroundings for

granted, especially at the climax of the piece, when Bostich combines the G major

tuba bass line with the G minor trumpet melody (Example 5).Tijuana, like the melodic, harmonic, and polymodal practices of Bostich and the

polyrhythms of Hiperboreal, betrays our eye and our ear. For this reason, in their

music we find synthesizers when we expect accordions and chirimas (a hornpipe or

whistle of indigenous origin sampled by Bostich in Tijuana Bass) when we

anticipate tubas; for that reason, the human voice is processed and manipulated to

the point of making words and texts, the elements that give it its human character,

impossible to recognize. This music works as a metaphor that shows that Tijuana

cannot be understood through the representations that stereotype it; Tijuana should

be understood through the mirage of modernity that it creates in those who try to

write it as marginal. There is no Tijuana; Tijuana is what is coming, a city that lives in

the imagination, where it establishes its modernity and its future. Nor-tec is a

virtuality that, paraphrasing Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, rewrites Tijuana and its

tradition according to current experiences in order to validate the present (369).

Hiperboreal and Bostichs musical reterritorializations, along with Hiperboreals

desire to preserve the memory of locales and spaces as historical archives that register

the dents Nor-tec gives to hegemonic culture in Tijuana, are also reflected in the work

of the visual artists who belong to the collective. The visual artists work is also an

attempt to re-signify the city spaces they frequent in their everyday life. Curiously, it

was at the Nortec City party, the event where the collective appropriated one of themost unequivocal symbols of the mythical, forbidden Tijuanathe Jai Alai

buildingthat the visuals of Sergio Brown (VJ CBrown), Jose Luis Martn (VJ

Mashaka), and Octavio Castellanos (Tavo) joined the sounds of Bostich,

Panoptica, Fussible, Hiperboreal, Fernando Corona (Terrestre), and Ignacio

Chavez Uranga (Plankton Man), and consciously reclaimed the city, its spaces, and

its images as the collectives own.

During my fieldwork in Tijuana I met VJ CBrown, VJ Mashaka, and Tavo many

times on both sides of the San Diego-Tijuana border. CBrown and Tavo have been

professors of graphic design and literature at the Universidad Iberoamericana and the

Example 5 Tijuana Bass, bimodal sequence.

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Universidad Autonoma de Baja California (UABC), while VJ Mashaka is pursuing a

degree in communications. Our conversations points of departure were the

principles taken by these video artists to translate visually the musical aesthetic of

Nor-tec and the role of the visuals in the collectives live performance. Mashaka and

Tavo are interested in taking and resignifying images of everyday spaces through

computer manipulation. In these artists hands, images of those individuals who walk

the city on a daily basis are processed through filters and fragmentations into

unrecognizable subjects. Thus, street bandaor nortenamusicians are reduced to their

attire or their more symbolic characteristicsthe hat, the accordion, the tololoche

(bass), the boots, the tuba, the trumpetand these in turn are made into bright

objects of luminescent modernity through digital manipulation and their organiza-

tion into visual loops that move in sync with the music. In these sequences, the fragile

houses in the dells that surround Tijuana and the graffiti that embellish the edges

of the buildings roofs downtown are transformed into complex, hallucinating

buildings and hypermodern figures: Tijuanas desire of modernity embodied in Nor-tec.

But it is CBrown who gives the visual Nor-tec crusade a clearly avant-garde twist in

his unabashed attempt to place the margins of Tijuana at center stage in the Nor-tec

visual experience. CBrown and I met at El Tiburon, a bar located a few steps from la

Revu. There, with the musical background of Ricardo Arjona and Marco Antonio

Sols coming loudly out of a CD player, CBrown told me all about his collaboration

with the collective at the Nortec City party. CBrown tells me that the city is the true

star in the hypnotic visual loops of Nor-tec. He is conscious that most Nor-tec party

attendants belong to a social class that makes them foreigners to some of the poorestneighborhoods and areas of the city (places they do not visit in their everyday use of

the city), and therefore decided to use this opportunity to confront them with that

invisible Tijuana. To this end, CBrown projected an hour-long shot of la 5 y 10

(one of the most conflictive street intersections of Tijuana) on a giant screen behind

the Nor-tec musicians on stage (Brown).

The city is a space that is conditioned by those who live in it but also one that

conditions the subjectivities of those individuals who pass through it (de Certeau 93

96). Among other factors, class determines individuals paths, trajectories, and means

of transportation: therefore, different social classes experience and signify the city in a

different way. Social class transforms those spaces and, at the same time, onceculturally signified, those spaces help in the reproduction of the social, cultural, and

economic circumstances that made them meaningful. In Tijuana, going from the

residential area of Lomas de Aguacaliente to the executive offices in Pueblo Amigo

implies a middle- and high-class use of the city that is completely different from

sorting out urban buses and taxis at l a 5 y 1 0 . The different landscapes, the

individuals who move in them, and their ways of passing through them reinforce

class and even notions of ethnicity that give meaning to the city and its people. This is

why CBrowns images were a confrontation, because they put the marginal 5 y 10in

the international spotlight of the Nor-tec City party. This strategy forced those who,



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by their usage of Tijuana, have to, or choose to, avoid la 5 y 10 into contact with a

reality they refuse to see, into contact with the contradictions of their society, and,

thus, attempted to trigger a process that re-imagines Tijuana and the tijuanenses.

CBrowns interest in resignifying Tijuana, through a new representation of its

people, their practice of the city, and the city itself, is also evident in Angeles

Morenos video and graphic designs for Fussibles Odyssea. The conceptual

backbone for this productions musical and visual images is based on the typical

station-wagon taxis that inundate the streets of Tijuana, cars packed beyond their

capacity that follow predetermined routes and recklessly stop, without regard to the

safety of their passengers and other drivers. In Morenos work, these deteriorated

taxis become characters worthy of a sci-fi manga(Japanese comic), proposing a new

imaginary notion of Tijuanas public transportation, re-evaluating the experience of

traveling through the city, and metaphorically confirming Raul Cardenass statement

in Fjellestads Frontier Lifevideo: Tijuana has more to do with science fiction novels

than really with history books of Mexico. Reterritorialization of imaginary orsymbolic, virtual or actual spaces is a fundamental notion in the designing of the

images that accompany Nor-tec music both in actual live performances and as

marketing aids.

Fritz Torres and Jorge Verdn are the creative forces behind the musical project

Clorofila and the graphic venture Cha3, the latter being fundamental in the

development of the graphic aesthetic of the Nor-tec collective. Since Cha3s

pioneering graphic style illustrates the covers of the Nor-tec Sampler and Tijuana

Sessions, Vol. 1 albums, one of my fieldwork priorities was to meet and interview this

team of designers. After several telephonic misencounters, I was able to get hold ofFritz Torres, who gave me directions to the Varita de Nardo alley, where his office is

located in the first floor of the EQ Studios building, a space where a wide variety of

music (from Tucanes de Tijuana to Ricky Martin) is recorded and produced. During

our conversation I realize that Cha3 also addresses the issues tackled by CBrown,

Mashaka, Tavo, and Angeles Moreno, taking a rather playful and less intellectual

angle. In the images of Torres and Verdn, there is an amount of irony not found in

the work of the video artists of the collective: t-shirts that show the word Culero

(asshole) below the image of a Mexican policeman, cartoon characters that make fun

of and de-articulate discourses about norteno men and their occupation by

overemphasizing those stereotypical features (long moustaches, cowboy hats, andthe AK-47 guns preferred by drug lords hit-men).11 Torres clearly argues that Cha3s

work is based upon recovering the kitsch in Tijuanas everyday urban landscape;

according to him, it was their interest in the kitsch that led them to a re-evaluation of

the so-called narcochic aesthetic.12 Torres describes the process of creation used by

himself and Jorge Verdn in the following terms: what we did first was to take the

essence of drug dealing culturebecause when we tried to find the most identifiable

elements [from nortena culture], not so much in a local but in a global

contextwellthose were the more valuable ones: how they [drug lords]

dressVersace-imitation shirts, hats, boots (Torres).

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An early example of Cha3s interest in the kitsch and narcochic appeared in the

19992000 issue ofEl sueno de la gallina, an eclectic fanzine published by the team of

designers in collaboration with a group of local writers and intellectuals. In this

particular issue, an article on narcochicfollows a series of articles on electronic music

and Mexican popular culture. Indeed, this issue of the magazine foreshadowed some

of the ideas that gave birth to the Nor-tec collective later that year. Musica maestro,

the CD that accompanied this issue of El sueno de la gallina, juxtaposed electronic,rock, and norteno music by local artists with soap opera parodies in an attempt to

reconcile tradition, popular culture, and modernity in the fragmentary, collage-like,

postmodern aesthetic of a kitsch cultural artifact.13 Clearly, this pre-Nor-tec project,

as well as the Nor-tec visual work of Cha3, takes the discourses that identify Tijuana

with drug-trafficking culture and resignifies them through an aesthetic that

acknowledges the problem but also surpasses it by recognizing the experience of

local individuals who have to face and overcome those discourses on a daily basis.

The work of Cha3 empowers local border subjects; it acknowledges the eclectic

culture that originates when border subjects confront discourses that attempt to

define their border subjectivity from the outside.

The imagination of Nor-tec thrives in the aural and visual mirages of a modernity

that is both contestant and kitsch. The Imaginary is a fundamental step between the

Real and the Symbolic, and, as such, it plays a crucial role in representing the desire

between an unattainable reality and its articulation in specific cultural contexts. This

characteristic of the Imaginary makes it an unavoidable presence in processes of

consumption (see Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology; Lacan). Indeed, these

processes of consumption are acts that reflect imaginary practices: through an active

participation in these processes, individuals attempt to fulfill their desires and

imagine their identities. The consumption of Nor-tec by fans at the actual United

Figure 3 Fritz Torres and Jorge Verdns Nortec Bandido, as it was called by TimeMagazine, is a caricature based upon stereotypes of norteno culture. Image courtesy of

Cha3.



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StatesMexico border, by individuals constituted as epistemological borders, or by

people sorting out the boundaries between center and periphery, reveals imaginary

constructions of selfbody, representation, identification, and identityin relation

to modernitytechnology, cosmopolitanism, globalization.

Imagining Modernity, Consuming Nor-tec

In the case of Nor-tec, the production of music and images proposes a unique

Imaginary that mediates among discourses on tradition and modernity; however,

those who consume these products have the last word in imagining themselves and

their world and, therefore, in defining Nor-tec culture. In his house in Playas de

Tijuana, responding to my insistence on finding out who he thinks defines Nor-tec,

Pepe Mogt answers emphatically that Nor-tec is nothing but the combination of

nortena music sounds and electronic music compositional techniques (Morales,

interview). This and several other answers I got from Nor-tec musicians and visualartists show me that, for them, the unique character of Nor-tec comes from the

music, the graphic art, and the videosin other words, its production. Such

discourse disregards the importance of consumption and therefore overlooks the

close relationship between Nor-tec and electronic music genres like Techno, Dub,

House, or Trance, ignoring Nor-tecs close relationship to the American

Underground Dance Music and Disco scenes. In this world, consumption plays a

fundamental role, with the dance floor being as important as the turntables or the

computers in negotiating the identity of the scene. As Kai Fikentscher suggests,

Underground Dance Music is defined by a dynamic interaction between [the DJ] incharge of the DJ booth and the dancers who, as a collective body, are in charge of the

dance floor (8). Such characterization is indeed true for the diverse, translocal Nor-

tec scenes.

The close aesthetic relation between Disco, Dance, and Nor-tec is clear in Fussibles

Casino Soul, a piece that recreates the typical groove of mid-70s disco music

through a bass line that reminds us of the sound of Thelma Houstons Dont Leave

Me This Way, and a synthesizer that recreates and mixes the instrumental timbre of

the best arrangements of musical projects as different as Vicki Sue Robinson (Turn

the Beat Around) and Donna Summer (I Feel Love). Still, the Nor-tecDisco

relationship is more evident in the production of two former Nor-tec members,Terrestre and Plankton Man. The relaxed, almost post-lounge character of the

Ensenada sound in pieces like Terrestres Norteno de Janeiro and Plankton Mans

No liazi jaz certainly evokes the groove of Disco music.14 Curiously, it was at a

party that featured Terrestre and Plankton Man at Tijuanas Centro Bar that I

realized the importance of dancing as a process of reterritorializing the body and as a

mediator that helps to embody imaginaries of modernity.

If performance is where musicians and dancers negotiate the Imaginary and

construct the Symbolic, then there is nothing better than my experience at Centro Bar

to corroborate it. The event is the second fund-raiser for the benefit of a project titled

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Que suene la calle (Let the Street Sound), a video documentary about the life of

Tijuanas street children. DJ Mr Ejival opens the dance floor by mixing some of his

favorite European and American electronic music projects. The partygoers, although

carefully observing Mr Ejivals turntablism and juggling of vinyls, do not seem eager

to take over the dance floor. This early in the evening, the preferred meeting spot is

outside the club, in front of the Jai-Alai building, where you can hear nortena music

coming out of the loudspeakers from Las Pulgas, across Avenida Revolucion, better

than the music mixed by Mr Ejival inside the Centro Bar. A few minutes later,

Plankton Man takes over the booth and shifts from the turntables and the German,

American, and English vinyls of Mr Ejival to his computer and samplings of

accordion, drums, guitars, and even street musicians voices. This is an exceptional

moment that clearly articulates the borders that middle-class tijuanenses cross and

negotiate in their everyday city life, in their musical searches, and in their relation to

Nor-tec: Avenida Revolucion, la Revu, the symbol of American tourism, becomes a

border between the Tijuana that holds on to tradition (represented by the nortenamusic coming out of Las Pulgas) and the Tijuana of the desire of modernity

(represented by the music offered at Centro Bar). In the meantime, the inside of the

club is itself divided into imaginary borders between modernity and tradition. The

voice of Teodoro Pacheco, a norteno musician sampled in Plankton Mans Recinto

Portuario compels people to take the dance floor. Yo me llamo Teodoro Pacheco/Yo

me dedico a la musica desde hace cuarenta anos (My name is Teodoro Pacheco/I have

dedicated myself to music for forty years) is the repeated sentence, the loop that, as

the sounds of trumpets, synthesizers, drums, and vinyl scratches are incorporated,

becomes more and more distorted. On the overcrowded dance floor the movementsof Ana are particularly appealing: she heels the floor while slowly moving her body

forward, making ample gestures with her arms, first the right shoulder, then the left

shoulder.15 In front of her is David, who, in a concealed posture, marches down the

dance floor accompanying his steps with sudden, jerky movements of arms and head.

Both Ana and David combine steps typical of ravers in the United States or Europe

with movements that seem extracted from choreographies of traditional nortena

dances: polka, schottisch, redowa.

While the former appear in the general cadence of the bodies and the sharp

movements a la break dance, the latter tend to be reflected in the footwork

sometimes similar to the stylized steps of schottischeand, in the case of Ana, in thearms and shoulders. Nor-tec dancing embodies and mixes an impossible

combination, the modern and the traditional, and resignifies both in the

performative act of dancing.

Dancing is a cultural manifestation that shapes and reproduces but also contests

identity roles of gender, class, ethnicity, and geographic belonging. We learn to dance

in social contexts that are reproduced by our own dancing: first in the sheltered

environment of our immediate family and later as part of different social crowds,

dancing allows us to codify our bodies into these groups of identification. We

embody family hierarchies, social relations, and ethnic and gender roles through the



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movement and dances allowed by our cultural context; dancing charges our bodies

with the ideologies that surround us while the repetition of those movements

reproduces those ideological settings. Dancing is an ideology in as much as it acts as a

point that articulates signifiers; dancing creates a moment that gives social,

economical, and ethnic meaning to the body, incorporating it as part of particular

symbolic systems. If, as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek suggests (The Sublime

Figure 4 Ana and David dancing to the beat of Plankton Mans Recinto portuario.

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Object of Ideology1121), the meaning of ideology and commodification is concealed

in the form, then the heterogeneous dance forms of Nor-tec are manifestations of the

complex reterritorialization of the body that border and multi-ideological subjects

need to perform as they come into multicultural contacts. Thus, Nor-tec dance is the

result of a process that re-evaluates the ideologies about tradition and modernity that

write cultural significance into the body, much in the same way that the music of

Plankton Man re-articulates ideas about modernity and tradition (Yo me dedico a la

musica desde hace cuarenta anos) and validates one with the other. Nor-tec dance

and music embody imaginaries of modernity while they performatively reconfigure

tradition in relation to an imaginary present and future. To dance Nor-tec music is to

re-imagine tradition and modernity through the body.

During the time I spent in Tijuana, I interviewed many of the musicians and visual

artists who have produced and developed the Nor-tec aesthetic. Through these

interviews I identified a constant notion regarding the place and social role of the

collective: from Pepe Mogt and Bostich to Tavo and CBrown, each artist affirmedcategorically that the Nor-tec project had no political implications. Nor-tecs

apparent lack of concern for political issues (understanding the term political in its

relation with militant political practice) led some border activist groups to react

against the collective. The most notable manifestation of this reaction is the so-called

Antinortec Manifesto, in which a number of border youngsters from Mexicali, a

city located a few miles east of Tijuana, repudiate Nor-tec. According to this group,

by neglecting to engage some of the more problematic border issuesthe bordo, the

maquiladoras, etc.Nor-tec becomes an instrument of globalization (Valenzuela,

interview).

16

Curiously, while in Tijuana I discovered a message posted by Jockey TJon the Internet site of the Tijuana Bloguita Front.17 The text was short but powerful

and thought-provoking: To imagine and to make others imagine is a directly

political activity (Tijuana Bloguita Front).18 Exploring the idea of the Imaginary as a

product and as productive appropriation in consumptionas productive consump-

tion that enables Nor-tec partygoers to participate in the production of imaginaries

that represent them as modern subjects while re-imagining the role of tradition in

that identification with modernityallows us to realize the value of Nor-tec as

political mediation. If, as I have proposed, performance is the site where producers

and consumers negotiate the Imaginary, then it is also through performance that

Nor-tec consumers negotiate the power relations that attempt to write them asliminal subjects, as marginal individuals. Jockey TJs cybergraffiti suggest that it is in

this intersection of production and consumption, in this confluence of imaginaries,

that Nor-tec functions as an eminently political project. Nor-tec is, then, an endeavor

that transcends politics to intervene in the sphere of the political, thereby informing

us of the power relations and agencies that allow individuals to interpellate the

ideological web that surrounds them.

One afternoon, walking through the halls of a mall in Tijuanas Zona Ro, I entered

a record store. After checking the shelves for a few minutes I decided to ask for

assistance: Do you have any Nor-tec CDs? I asked the manager. What kind? he



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timidly answered me, to which I, confused, responded: wellNor-tec. He

directed me towards a section at the back of the store and told me: There are many

over there. I went to that area and discovered a great variety of nortena CDs by

Tigres del Norte, Cadetes de Linares, and Piporro. This experience led me to ask

myself how I could find Nor-tec music at New Yorks Tower Records and meet Nor-

tec fans in places like Columbus, Ohio, and Xalapa, Veracruz, but could not find

Nor-tec CDs in a record store aimed at middle-class kids from Tijuana. I also

pondered the fact that the record store manager had no idea about the kind of music

to which I was referring.

Besides the processes of production and consumption, the process of distribution

is fundamental in shaping the identity of any cultural project. The dynamic

interaction between these three processes defines them continuously and reciprocally.

In the case of Nor-tec, my apparently contradictory experience with the record-store

manager is indeed an index of the unusual process of distribution that has made the

Nor-tec subculture into a transnational phenomenon of glocal character wherelocal issues are reflected and negotiated in a global context (see Garca Canclini,

Consumers and Citizens 5860). Pepe Mogt explains that one of the aspects that he

finds more interesting about the Nor-tec phenomenon is that there are musicians in

Italy and France doing this kind of music. This statement seems to contradict his own

discourse about the necessity of living and experiencing Tijuana and the border in

order to understand the essence of Nor-tec (Morales, interview). This slip in Mogts

discourse is intimately related to the contradictions that I witnessed regarding the

local and global reception of Nor-tec during my fieldwork. The unusual distribution

campaign of Nor-tec, in which elements of self-promotion typical of independentand underground scenes (such as the free distribution of music over the Internet

through personal websites as well as Kazaa or MP3 programs) combine with

mainstream marketing strategies (MTV, Tower, or Virgin Records, and magazines

like Newsweekand Time), generates a scene that lacks a well-defined space because it

extends beyond any local context. The Nor-tec scene is articulated through

information networks that are at once global, alternative, and, in many ways,

marginal in nature. This transnational, translocal, and virtual characteristic of Nor-

tec communities is reflected in an identification that takes place through the

consumption of cultural artifacts, products, and ideas instead of specific places and

sites. In this case, both the city of Tijuana and the places reterritorialized by Nor-tecare understood as ideas and spaces that exist in the Imaginary and that provide the

site for a discursive reterritorialization. It is through this creation of the Imaginary

and the Symbolic reconstitution of virtual collectivities that a new Tijuana is

createda Tijuana that has a place in London, Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo, as well as in

the ideas of modernity of Mexico City youngsters.

The migration of Nor-tec music has provoked different responses from the

communities that have adopted it. While young middle-class, first- and second-

generation Latino audiences in the United States appropriate this music to challenge

dominant essentialist discourses about Latino identity, French and Japanese DJs

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(such as Mewimewi or Matsuoka) have taken it as source material for the

construction of their own imaginary Tijuana. First- and second-generation Latinos in

the United States are individuals whose biculturalism represents a sort of

epistemological border. They are the contact zone between their familial heritage

and mainstream American culture, and, as such, their appropriation of Nor-tecand

its negotiation of cultural border conflictsresponds to their need to find a site in

which to negotiate their place within family traditions and American modernity. For

Europeans, the consumption of Nor-tec provides a site for a discursive reconstitution

of the Other and an assertion of difference. In both cases, consumption proves to be a

fundamental aspect in the dual process through which one identifies the self via an

imaginary creation of the Other. Nevertheless, the journey from imaginary

constructions to symbolic representations, a symbiotic process that takes place in

the DJ booth and on the dance floor during the performances of Nor-tec, reverses the

process of territorialization since the Other becomes the self and the self becomes the

Other.Giant Swarm is the name given by the French DJ Tampopo to his remix of

Fussibles Odyssea. This remix exemplifies the performative quality of a process

that rewrites the city and its physical and virtual spaces. Estamos en Tijuana (We

are in Tijuana) is the opening sentence of Giant Swarm Remix, which, in

Tampopos own voice, situates the listener in an aural construction of the city that

borrows sounds from its everyday lifeTijuanas station-wagon taxis and even the

helicopters that continuously patrol the borderto look beyond its stereotypes, and

to reconfigure it into an unexpected modernistic sonic landscape. A remix is a

simulacrum, and, as such, it proclaims the impossibility of an original. BothTampopos yearning for Tijuana in Giant Swarm Remix and Fussibles longing for

modernity in Odyssea are particular lenses through which we see that an

observation of the city is always permeated by desire. Thus, the musical meaning of

the remix exists in its present, in its reconfiguration of the musical desire pertaining

to a current situation and an imagined future. About this remix, Tampopo posts on

his website: We made this Odyssea 2000 Giant Swarm Remix for the love of

making music and have funand it was a hit among the Hip-Hop DJs of Tijuana

who used our Tampopo special vocal sample Estamos en Tijuana a lot.Turntablists,

we love U! Tampopos words illustrate clearly the dual process by which, in the

experience of Nor-tec, the observed becomes the observer. The words of the Frenchmanreconstitute Tijuana when they areadopted bytijuanensesin their own remixes; this is an

articulation of a larger process of transculturation where Tampopo, Fussible, Tijuana

DJs, and clubbers in Paris, Tokyo, Chicago, Tijuana, or Mexico City are all transformed

by the experience of Nor-tecs transnational character.

Issues of identity, desire, modernity, and marginality also play an important role in

the consumption of Nor-tec music in Mexico City. The change in the reception of

this music in the capital of the country relates to a typical globalization

phenomenonthe replacement of a political economy with what Slavoj Z izek calls

a libidinal economy (Mirando al sesgo 20). This shift of economic concern from the



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production of goods to the production of desires or necessities generates a new

understanding of identity; in a society that privileges the creation of fantasies-to-be-

fulfilled over the creation of the products that fulfill those fantasies, identity must be

articulated in consumption, in an attempt to possess the object of desire. It is in the

complex intersection of desire, consumption, identity, and modernity as defined by

globalization that the changes in the reception of Nor-tec music can be fully grasped.

For decades, modernization has been described as the goal of Mexicos political

and economic policies. Such insistence has made modernity into a prime object of

desire for Mexican consumers, a desire often symbolized by Mexico City itself, the

central site of political and economic power, and the most modern and urbanized

city in the country. According to this rhetoric, the center was the source of

modernization, nationality, and cohesion, while the periphery remained the area of

the country to be civilized. However, the failure of nationalistic economic policies

to fulfill their promises created a large gap between the object of desire and the

citizens ability to procure at least part of it. This failure marked an increasedquestioning of the viability of Mexico City and centralized power to embody a source

of modernity and nationality (or modern nationality) for the rest of the country. This

was especially true for the northern border, where daily economic and cultural

exchanges with the United States implied a continuous relationship with an

industrialized, modern society and symbolized an access to the object of desire the

center failed to provide.

After the 2000 concert at Mexico Citys Zocalo, the Nor-tec collective began to

achieve notoriety in the international electronic music scene. The success of Nor-tec

at the First Conference of Latin American Alternative Music in New York led to aseries of invitations to perform in Japan, Germany, and Spain and, eventually, to the

recording of their commercial hit, The Tijuana Sessions, Vol. 1, a self-produced CD

distributed by Palm Pictures. The growing international recognition finally validated

Nor-tec as a true modern object of consumption for Mexico City audiences. This was

a group of Mexican musicians that shared the stage with some of the most influential

European and American DJs, a true representation of the object of desire that had so

often escaped them: modernity, cosmopolitanism, and success through technology.

The migration of Nor-tec and the representational transformations that resulted

from this migration forced Mexico City audiences to re-evaluate their perception of

both nortena culture and Nor-tec music. For Mexico City youngsters, theconsumption of Nor-tec music allowed them to be part of a subculture that enabled

them to satisfy the desire of modernity created by a libidinal economy that did not

offer any means to fulfill that desire. This attitude also contested traditional readings

of center/periphery in the relations between Mexico City and Tijuanas cultural life.

As I have mentioned before, the strategic position of Tijuana as a border town and its

immediate access to American cultural products reverses the traditional center/

periphery discourse, while the consumption of Nor-tec music (as the result of an

exercise in performative composition developed under those multi-ideological

circumstances) performs tijuanenses as non-marginal subjects.

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the hiperbori, those living far beyond the north, the land where Apollo spent his childhood(Beas, interview). More pragmatically, Pepe Mogts adopted last name is the first part of hisRegistro Federal de Causantes (Mexican identification number). Mogts practical character isalso reflected in the spelling of his bands name (Fussible), with double s in order to avoidthe presence of unnecessary records when doing Internet searches (Morales, interview).

[10] Cumbia is an Afro-Colombian genre of music and dance that gained enormous popularity in

Mexico in the 1970s, when bands such as Rigo Tovar y su Costa Azul adopted it after thesuccess of musicians like Mike Laure. Accordion-driven nortenabands quickly adopted it aspart of their usual repertoire, paving the path for its inclusion in the banda and conjuntotejano repertoire.

[11] The work of Gerardo Yepiz Acamonchi, another graphic designer associated with the Nor-tec collective shares Cha3s satirical and ironic character. Acamonchis version of LuisDonaldo Colosio (the PRI presidential candidate who was assassinated in Lomas Taurinas, aTijuana neighborhood) dressed as a cosmonaut above the word Volvere (Ill be back),ridicules centralized official PRI speeches that have made him into a sort of lost savior ofMexicos political life.

[12] According to Fritz Torres, American auctioning houses coined the term narcochicto identifyobjects and belongings recovered from captured drug lords (statues of themselves and their

relatives, chains, earrings, and even toilet seats made of gold, etc.). The materials used inthese objects (gold, diamonds, emeralds, silver, and exotic animals fur) give them a veryhigh exchange value.

[13] Among the electronic musicians who included tracks in Musica maestro were Nor-teccollective members-to-be Bostich, Clorofila, Hiperboreal, Mambo 2000 (Jorge Verdn), andMonnithor (Ramon Amezcua, Roberto Mendoza, and Pepe Mogt).

[14] Terrestre and Plankton Man, now working independently from the Nor-tec collective, arethe only founding members of the group who are not from Tijuana. They are fromEnsenada, a city located on the Pacific coast a few miles south of Tijuana.

[15] I use pseudonyms in order to keep the anonymity of the dancers.[16] In his book, Paso del nortec, Jose Manuel Valenzuela registered the birth of the Nor-tec

movement from a sociological perspective.

[17] The Tijuana Bloguita Front is an Internet project (http://tijuanabloguitafront.blogspot.com)created by a dozen young tijuanense artists and intellectuals who freely express their ideas,experiences, and opinions on a wide variety of topics in electronic journals open to publicaccess. Several members of the Nor-tec collective, as well as persons close to the movements,participate in this project: Hiperboreal, Tavo, Mashaka, CBrown, Mr Ejival, and ClaudiaAlgara (whose voice is featured in Hiperboreals Tijuana for Dummies).

[18] Imaginar y hacer imaginar a otros es una actividad directamente poltica.

Works Cited

Bhabha, Homi. Cultures in Between. Questions of Cultural Identity. Ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du

Gay. London and New Delhi: Sage, 1996. 5160.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. S. Rendall. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA:U of California P, 1984.

Fikentscher, Kai. You Better Work! Underground Dance Music in New York City. Hanover, NH,and London: Wesleyan UP, 2000.

Garca Canclini, Nestor. Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts. Trans.George Yudice. Minneapolis, MN, and London: U of Minnesota P, 2001.

. Culturas hbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad. Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1989.Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. Theorizing Heritage. Ethnomusicology 39.3 (1995): 36780.Lacan, Jacques. Sign, Symbol, Imaginary. On Signs. Ed. M. Blonsky. Baltimore, MD: Johns

Hopkins UP, 1985. 20309.Madrid, Alejandro L. Navigating Ideologies in In-Between Cultures: Signifying Practices in Nor-

Tec Music. Latin American Music Review 24.2 (2003): 27086.

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. Writing Modernist and Avant-Garde Music in Mexico: Performativity, Transculturationand Identity after the Revolution, 192030. Diss. Ohio State U, 2003.

Valenzuela Arce, Jose Manuel. Paso del nortec. Mexico City: Trilce, forthcoming.Zizek, Slavoj. Mirando al sesgo: Una introduccion a Jaques Lacan a traves de la cultura popular.

Buenos Aires, Barcelona and Mexico City: Paidos, 1991.. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York: Verso, 1989.

Interviews

Amezcua, Ramon. Bostich. Electronic communication. 6 Nov. 2001.. Interview. 17 May 2003.Beas, Pedro Gabriel. Hiperboreal. Electronic communication. 25 October 2001.. Interview. 11 May 2003.Brown, Sergio. VJ CBrown. Interview. 23 May 2003.Castellanos, Octavio. Tavo. Interview. 17 May 2003.Corona, Fernando. Terrestre. Electronic communication. 25 Oct. 2001.. Interview. Tijuana, Mexico. 14 May 2003.

Chavez Uranga, Ignacio. Plankton Man. Interview. 10 May 2003.Manon, Jennifer. Interview. 18 Sept. 2003.Martn, Jose Luis. VJ Mashaka. Interview. 15 May 2003.Mendoza, Roberto. Panoptica. Interview. 13 May 2003.. Interview. 6 Dec. 2003.Morales, Jose Trinidad. Pepe Mogt. Electronic communication. 4 November 2001.. Interview. 12 May 2003.Torres, Fritz. Interview. 16 May 2003.Valenzuela Arce, Jose Manuel. Interview. 13 May 2003.Verdn, Jorge. Interview. 17 May 2003.

Internet Sitesapt.Centauro. Home page. 29 July 2002 Tampopo. Home page. 25 Oct. 2003 Tijuana Bloguita Front. Home page. 3 May 2003

Selected Discography

Bostich and Fussible. Bostich+Fussible, Nortec Remixes. Mil Records, OPCCD 137, 2000.Fussible. Odyssea. Sonic 360, 0 6700 36326 2 1, 2002.Nor-tec Collective. Nortec experimental. At/syber, without number, 2001.. Nor-tec Sampler. Mil Records, without number, 1999.

. The Tijuana Sessions, Vol. 1. Palm Pictures, 2045-2, 2001.Panoptica. Panoptica. Certificate 18 Records, Cert18CD011, 2001.. The Tijuana Remixes. Certificate 18 Records, Cert18CD018, 2002.Plankton Man, Terrestre, and Mexicomp (n.e.a). Plankton Man vs. Terrestre. Provider Recordings,

PVR 33711, 2002.Terrestre and Plankton Man. Terrestre vs. Plankton Man. Nimboestatic, NIM 010, 2004.Various artists. Musica maestro. Cha3, without number, 1999.

Videography

Bostich (El padrino de nortec). Dir. Omar Foglio, Galatea Productions for Bulbo TV, 2003.

Colores. Dir. Sebastian Daz, Galatea Productions for BulboTV, 2003.



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DJ Tolo: Cultivando un sonido. Dir. Carla Pataky, Galatea Productions for Bulbo TV, 2002.Frontier Life. Dir. Hans Fjellestad, Zucasa Productions, 2002.Memorias del Don Loope (y el Galaxy). Dir. Omar Foglio, Galatea Productions for Bulbo TV, 2002.Tijuana Remix. Dir. Annika Seiffert, A.M.I. Universitat Hildesheim, 2002.

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Documents

Madrid Modernity and Tradition in No-tec Music 05