SURPRISE ‘SESSIONS’Another Nortec Collective team effort celebrates Tijuana culture and history~ By DENNIS ROMERO ~

 

NORTECHIES: (L-R) Roberto Mendoza (Panoptico),Pedro Beas (Hiperboreal), Pepe Mogt (Fussible), Ramon Amezcua (Bostich) ~ 

 

fter three years of spreading out and working on solo projects, members of the Nortec Collective are on the verge of a surprise return with a second collection of techno-meets-Mexican music it calls, oddly enough, Tijuana Sessions Vol. 3. It’s odd because Vol. 2 has yet to be released and may be a lost episode. The story of the crew’s latest offering is one of perseverance despite unexpected global attention and a record label that didn’t seem to know how to take the next step.

After the success of 2001’s Tijuana Sessions Vol. 1, the Collective was, perhaps involuntarily, used by the media to represent the emergence of its hometown as a major (two-million-plus) West Coast population center. The young middle-class musicians used synths and samplers to lay the Germanic oomph of Mexican norteno music over modern electronic beats. They allied themselves with graphic artists, fashionistas, filmmakers, and an emerging creative community in Tijuana that began adapting the bicultural Nortec ethos. That year, Time magazine celebrated the Collective as part of a cover package on “The New Frontier.” The magazine said the Nortec members shrug off “Tijuana’s reputation as a cultural void and address the contrary realities of a place that’s neither First World nor Third World; a culture that is neither Mexican nor American.” The first Tijuana Sessions – sampladelic, loopy, and lyric-less – sold a comparatively low 40,000 copies. But the attention it received put the Collective’s members in the money with gigs around the world.

As individual members cut their own singles in the ensuing years, the Nortec brand seemed to be expanding without leadership or approval. It seemed that every Mexican kid with an iBook was performing under the Collective’s banner, not to mention graphic artists, T-shirt makers, and writers. “Who are these people?,” says Jorge Verdin of Nortec member-act Clorofila. “I never knew there was Nortec poetry.”

At the same time, Nortec delivered the follow-up to its label, Palm Pictures, which sat on the still-unreleased Tijuana Sessions Vol. 2. With the Collective’s A&R person, Kim Buie, out of the Palm picture, the crew was left to float in a borderland of the music industry, without a label to truly call home. Their management company, Cookman International, approached them with a proposal: Release Vol. 3 on its own Nacional Records. They agreed, and the album hits stores July 26. “We had newer tracks here that we just wanted to get done at one point, and it felt stupid waiting for things to happen,” says Verdin.

For Vol. 3, the Collective has been pared down to five core acts; even popular members Terrestre and Plankton Man were left out. And this time, Collective acts decided to go live, using members of Tijuana’s Banda Agua Caliente to jam in the studio on tuba, accordion, and clarinet. Contributing artists laid out beats and wrote melodies on laptops, keyboards, and sequencers, but the melodic parts were replayed live in-studio by musicians from the band. Music was critiqued via e-mail and the group’s own FTP site. (Verdin, an art director for an advertising firm, has lived in Los Angeles since the early ’90s.) The results might leave the crew’s faithful “horrified,” but it’s a natural evolution from the mechanical romp of Vol. 1, Verdin says.

“After a while, you were trudging through all these samples looking for something to fit, and you say, ‘Why am I doing it like this, this is stupid,’” says the 40-year-old. “So instead of basing the melodies on samples we started writing our own melodies on the keyboards. We had the clarinet player and accordion player reproduce those tracks.”

The Vol. 3 sound is flowing, organic, and knee-slapping, with tracks that seem purposely rough-cut, to get that on-stage sound. At one point, a musician hums along, and it’s left in the mix. Bostich gives a nod to the city’s rich musical past – Carlos Santana, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and, of course, Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass all performed there – with “Tijuana Bass.” Vocals have a big presence, unlike the last Tijuana Sessions. Fussible gets all corny on “Tijuana Makes Me Happy,” a silly but heartfelt ode to the city that serves both as Mexico’s northern future and America’s historic steam-valve to the south.

“We’re really proud to be from Tijuana,” says Roberto Mendoza, the 36-year-old behind Nortec act Panoptica. “We’re not trying to change anything. We are prostitution and gay bars and Marine bars and a dump for San Diego. We are also one of the biggest drug centers in Mexico. But we’re artists. We’re all of that.”