Nortec Collective Reaches iTunes Latin Albums Top
Posted by Elena del Valle on August 25, 2005
Tijuana Sessions Vol.3 Album Cover
The Nortec Collective reached the top of iTunes’ Top Latin Albums chart with their new album Tijuana Sessions, Vol. 3. One day after the release of its sophomore album, Tijuana’s Electronica band topped the iTunes’ Latin albums chart, beating out multi-platinum acts like Shakira, Thalia, and Juanes. The new album Tijuana Sessions, Vol. 3 was released nationally on July 26th.
The Nortec Collective is five artists: Fussible (Pepe Mogt), Bostich (Ramón Amezcua), Panóptica (Roberto Mendoza), Clorofila (Jorge Verdín) and Hiperboreal (PG Beas). These musicians created and perform a style of music called Nortec – a fusion of Norteño ("from the North") and Techno, documenting the collision between the style and culture of electronica and traditional Mexican music. The new album features the first single "Tijuana Makes Me Happy," as well as "Tengo La Voz." Influential Los Angeles public radio station KCRW was the first station in
Nortec Collective members see Tijuana as their home, and as a border metropolis of almost two million people, a major hub of global pop culture on par with Tokyo, New York, LA, and London. Some consider Tijuana as America’s most important switching point, where cultures, cash, languages, styles, laborers, and sounds all migrate into each other, clashing, connecting, merging and marrying. Their Tijuana is Macintosh G5s and bad sewage, digital file swapping, Moby concerts and vaqueros blasting Los Tucanes de Tijuana from their pickup trucks.
The Nortec Collective is not a thing or a genre or a group or a band, but an entire electronic aesthetic. Band members and their fans see it is a convergence of high-tech and low-tech, of North and South, of all things techno with all things norteño, of all the things that are a part of the rural and urban. The sound of the Nortec Collective is “the sound of the First World in the Third and the Third World in the First.” Nortec Collective music has appeared in commercials for Volvo, Dell, Fidelity Mutual, Edwin Jeans (w/Brad Pitt) in Japan, Nissan, and others. The track Almada is featured in EA Games’ FIFA 2005, and an interactive book entitled Paso del Nortec. This is Tijuana dedicated to the Nortec phenomenon that was recently released in the U.S.
