Panoptica

Robert Mendoza was born in Tijuana, Mexico. He draws creative impetus from the roosters that rouse him at dawn each day and regards his computer as his primary instrument while locating common ground among house, techno, breakbeat, dub, and Mexico’s vernacular traditions. Mendoza maintains close ties to Nortec, the informal grouping of Tijuana musicians—among them Murcof, Ruisort, and Loopdrop—whose electronic productions embed motifs drawn from regional folk forms. These reimaginings frequently arise from sampled cassettes hawked by itinerant street ensembles, in which shards of twelve-string guitars, tubas, and snares are reshaped into compelling techno textures. “I like lots of Mexican music from folkloric to popular, but the music that very much rules the north of Mexico is Norteno and Banda. They are the two most popular and regional styles of music, and that’s what you hear everywhere, even if you don’t want to. Because we grew up with it, it’s easy for us to incorporate into what we do in electronic music,” he told DJ magazine. In Silicon Alley Reporter he enumerated the city’s singular features—“The little taqueria shops, the donkey painted like a zebra, the big pick-up trucks, the narcos and the judiciales, the massive grupero concerts”—adding that the collective was “recycling our environment electronically: we filter the rhythms with software plug-ins, we sample the tuba and create another kind of melody from it.”

Panoptica issued The Tijuana Remixes in 2002, an anthology of transformed Panoptica material. Contributors included Fussible, a group to which Mendoza had belonged, together with Bostich, Hyperboreal, and Panoptica himself; the set also introduced the newly recorded “She’s In Fiestas,” a collaboration with former Bauhaus bassist David J.