The New Tijuana Brass

By Josh Tyrangiel/Tijuana

On a typical Saturday night, thousands of American teenagers flood Tijuana's Revolucion Avenue in search of the kind of fun they can't find at home. The legal drinking age here is 18, not that anyone bothers to check. There are hookers. And drugs. And there's a rumor that if you know the right people, a particularly exotic combination of both can be arranged without too much of a hassle. When the sun goes down, the crowds thicken outside the 80-odd cantinas along the avenue, and pulsing jock-rock mingles with the aroma of stale beer and fresh vomit to form Revolucion's unmistakable atmosphere. "This is what the world knows of Tijuana," says Pepe Mogt, 31, smiling at the drunken humanity sprawled out before him. "It gives us a lot of material."

What Mogt makes of it is called nortec, a new breed of music that mixes traditional Mexican norteno and tambora riffs on the accordion, tuba and drums with electronica. In the two years since nortec was born, it has become the dominant sound of Tijuana's cool set. But in the same way that rock 'n' roll is more than just the sum of a few chords, nortec has expanded well beyond some creative samples and a break beat. Graphic artists, fashion designers and filmmakers have been inspired to 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; an economy propelled by the dual engines of drug traffic and high-tech maquiladoras; a large, stable middle class sandwiched between grotesque poverty and excessive narco wealth. The goal, simply, is to transform the strangeness of Tijuana into art.

Like Tijuana, Pepe Mogt's musical taste is an accident of geography. Local Tijuana radio played the music of a few electronic bands, but the airwaves were mostly filled with norteno and tambora--Mexican variations on the polkas and waltzes that German farmers brought to central Mexico in the 19th century. With help from a hip uncle, Mogt discovered the sounds of Kraftwerk, New Order and Depeche Mode that were beaming in from San Diego's 91X. Soon he was crossing the border a few times a week to go to concerts and paw through the bins of San Diego's record stores. By 1986, he had scraped together enough money digging ditches and working in restaurants to buy a Yamaha Portasound and began making music with an adolescent synth band called Artefakto.

But nobody was listening. What little tolerance existed in Tijuana for electronic music was obliterated by the arrival in the early '90s of rock en Espanol, an irony-free form of hard rock. Artefakto broke up, but Mogt and his friend Melo Ruiz, 32, kept experimenting with techno and electronica under the name Fussible (foo-SEE-blay) and sending out tapes to record companies. "Our music was too strange for the Mexican labels," Mogt recalls. "They kept telling us to make it more pop or put vocals on. The European labels thought it was too old and unoriginal, because in Europe, you know, there are 300 guys doing break beats. The problem was we were trying to sound just like them."

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."

It's another typical Saturday night. A few blocks farther down Revolucion Avenue from the jock-rock clubs, several hundred young hipsters--mostly locals but with a few gringos mixed in--crowd the anteroom of Tijuana's grand old Jai Alai Palace for a nortec party. Ramon Amezcua signs a few autographs and nods his head rhythmically to the distinctive, trippy sounds of Hiporboreal. Pepe Mogt is stationed behind the soundboard, checking levels and thinking about how he will close the show with a DJ set. Nortec has made Pepe a successful man. He recently quit his $12-an-hour job as a chemical engineer at a maquiladora, where he mapped computer formulas for face creams. Tijuana Sessions is selling well, and he has lucrative gigs scheduled this summer in Los Angeles, London and Barcelona. His home, in Tijuana's Las Playas neighborhood, has an ocean view, cathedral ceilings and a custom-built studio, where he shows a visitor his collection of 40 keyboards. As midnight approaches, the visitor looks at his watch and makes a gesture that says it's time to go. "Why are you going?" he screams over the music. "Everything you need is here."

TIME.com ON AOL To hear samples of nortec music, including Polaris, go to time.com/nortec