Interviews

Fussible from Nortec Collective

Tijuana is a schizophrenic city. It’s a place with a reputation for cartel violence, cheap face-lifts and drunken escapades by American college students. But underneath the myths of this sprawling border metropolis exists a burgeoning art and music scene that thrives on these contradictions. It’s where the Nortec Collective’s Bostich + Fussible cultivate their hybridized dance beats, which keep one foot on each side of the border and create ass-shaking jams infused with norteño, the sabor of Northern Mexican folk music.

The Nortec sound is unmistakable. It harnesses tubas, accordions and all the other accoutrements of what many Americans lump together as “Mexican music.” But Bostich + Fussible’s bass-drum-thumping electronica, fist-pumping electro and vocoder vocals make them a crossover hit in the States and around the globe. With their cohorts in the Nortec Collective, they have found themselves the poster children of the postmodern Tijuana scene, even earning Latin Grammy nods in 2005 for the Collective’s “Tijuana Sessions, Vol. 3.”

For their offshoot album, “Tijuana Sound Machine,” Fussible (aka Pepe Mogt) says they gleaned their electronica influences from eavesdropping on American radio as kids. “We were so influenced by electronic music from outside Mexico, so we started playing techno, music house and industrial,” Mogt says. During their DJ years in the ’90s, however, they were overshadowed by the rock en Español scene that snuffed out local electronica at that time. It was only later that Mogt decided to go back to Tijuana’s musical roots. “Our sound was very electronic but very European,” he says, “so it didn’t have any Mexican style at all. Then I had an idea about how we could do something that people could recognize that we were from Tijuana. We then mixed in norteño just to see what would happen.”

By Drew Tewksbury

From Metromix.com April 30, 2008

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© 2008 Drew Tewksbury: Multimedia Journalist.