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Though they certainly weren’t the first DJs to tap into regional traditions, Tijuana’s Nortec Collective have engineered some of the most convincing and satisfying collisions between electronic music and indigenous sounds–they mostly draw on Norteño (Nortec = Norteño + techno) and its sister genres, making novel use of pumping accordion, banda’s brass swells, and the drunken-sounding but unfailingly in-tempo drum pileups that distinguish so much Mexican border music. Last year two of the crew’s most enduring talents, Bostich and Fussible (pictured), released Tijuana Sound Machine (Nacional), the third collection under the Nortec banner since 2001.
Tijuana Sound Machine doesn’t rewrite the Nortec playbook, but the producers get way more life and vitality out of their approach than I ever would’ve expected. If you’re tickled by the electro-cumbia put down by Argentina’s Zizek Urban Beats Club, you might want to check out Nortec to hear some music that follows a similar but much earlier template.
