Mexico City's electronic music scene has been doing something interesting for long enough now that "emerging" is the wrong word for it — the thing has emerged, it is here, it has produced artists whose work is being heard and respected internationally and whose influence on how electronic music is being made in Latin America is already measurable. WSÁBE is one of those artists, and her work is the best evidence I know of that what's happening in CDMX is not a local phenomenon but a genuinely global contribution to the form.
The way she combines club music structures with elements from Mexican musical tradition — not as pastiche, not as the kind of "Latin flavouring" that international producers sometimes apply to tracks as a kind of musical tourism — but as something fully integrated, where the traditional elements and the electronic elements have equal claim on the music, equal weight in how it functions — this is harder than it looks and more interesting than most people realise. The rhythmic complexity that results, the way things sit against each other and create friction and resolution simultaneously, is extraordinary.
I've played WSÁBE's recent work to people who primarily listen to European electronic music — Berlin-inflected techno, UK club music, French house — and watched them respond to something that uses a similar vocabulary but speaks with a completely different accent. The comparison is instructive. You hear what the European tradition takes for granted and what the Mexican tradition brings that isn't available there.
The City as Sound
Mexico City is an extraordinary place to make music. I've spent time there, and the sonic texture of the city — the noise and the music and the religious processions and the traffic and the birds that sound wrong if you grew up in the northern hemisphere — all of it creates an environment that gets into music made there in ways that are subtle and pervasive. WSÁBE's music has this texture. It sounds like it comes from somewhere dense and alive.
The club culture context is important too. CDMX has developed a cluster of nights and spaces and promoters who are building the infrastructure for adventurous electronic music in the way that London and Berlin built theirs over several decades. This infrastructure — the places where music is played for bodies in the dark, where a DJ or live act can test ideas on an audience that is genuinely listening with their whole physical selves — is what makes music like WSÁBE's possible to develop and refine.
On Looking South
I've spent too much of my listening life looking east and north — towards London and Berlin and New York, towards the traditional centres of gravity in electronic music — and the correction has been revealing. Not in the sense that the music from those centres is less good than I thought, but in the sense that the map I was using was incomplete. South America and Central America and the Caribbean have been making music that is not derivative of European electronic tradition for as long as that tradition has existed. It's been there to be listened to. I just wasn't listening in the right directions.
WSÁBE is a reason to recalibrate. Her music is not making a case for being taken seriously — it doesn't need to. It is simply excellent, and the excellence is its own argument. I've been listening with a gratitude that is partly for the music itself and partly for being corrected about where to look.
The scene in CDMX is continuing to develop. I am paying close attention.
The music that comes out of Mexico City right now is not waiting for permission. It's happening on its own terms, in its own time, for its own audience, and for anyone else who finds it. I found it. I'm not leaving. WSÁBE is making some of the most interesting electronic music anywhere and the anywhere includes everywhere.
The electronic music coming out of Mexico City is not a trend or a moment — it's a scene with history and continuity and ambition. WSÁBE is one of the best arguments for paying attention to it. Her music doesn't need the validation of being discovered by a European press that's a decade late to the party. But it does need ears, and I'm offering mine without qualification.
