Peter Holslin shells seashells down by the sheshore
Some of the best music in Mexico has its roots in a podunk desert city just south of California’s Imperial Valley. Mexicali (pop. 689,775) has a large Chinese-Mexican population, fields of green onions, maquiladoras, dirt roads, and a charming strip club-turned-hipster bar called Berlin 77. The spazzed-out noise-punk band Maniqui Lazer is from Mexicali. So is outlaw country star Juan Cirerol. But my personal favorite from the area is Siete Catorce, a prolific beatmaker whose murky, tripped-out dance tunes cross pre-Hispanic tribal groove with electronic cumbia, minimal techno, purist dubstep, and whatever else strikes his fancy.
The young producer, who’s now based in Mexico City, has been getting considerable attention from Mexican taste-makers in recent months. He originally came out of Tijuana’s “ruidosón” scene, and like his compatriots in that bustling border city to the west of Mexicali, his music fuels the party while capturing the zeitgeist of anger and frustration over politics and narco violence. With a laptop setup and Terminator-like resolve, he’s capable of performing till the sun comes up. But his appreciation for mood, texture and restraint makes his music pleasurable to take in on headphones, as well: It’s sculpted but shadowy, propulsive yet unpredictable.
Siete Catorce’s SoundCloud page is well worth a trawl. On it there are minimalist dancefloor bangers like “frustración”—which, despite what the title suggests, is nothing if not satisfying thanks to its catchy synth hook and reverb-submerged four-to-the-floor groove. However, you’ll also find more exploratory tunes. “Black Puddle” (a remix of a track by Juárez beatmaker Mock the Zuma) is layered with syncopated kicks, metallic percussion pops, and scissor-snip hi-hats, with some judiciously-applied wobble bass thrown in. The 8-minute “Voces,” meanwhile, is like a mutated take on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works: a deep bass drum shifting in tempo against vocal sighs that are slow and strangely beautiful.
