Diving into the shadowy history of Mexican experimental electroacoustic music, Aurora Central delivers the first ever vinyl reissue of what is widely regarded as the country’s greatest holy grail: ‘Música Electroacústica Mexicana’. Originally issued in 1984, comprising the work of four of Mexico’s most important composers - Antonio Russek, Raúl Pavón, Roberto Morales, and Vicente Rojo - it is the country’s first and arguably the most important document of historical electroacoustic music ever produced. Threaded by towering artistry and profound states of abstraction, it’s nothing short of monumental, engrossing, and as important as reissues get.

Accessing the history of avant-garde, experimental, and electronic music from Latin America has always been a complex affair. The true breadth of occurrence and activity during the mid to late 20th Century was sinfully under-documented, due to political and economic circumstances that unfolded across numerous decades, and scant recorded releases that appeared during this period - despite being some of the most striking and unique creative gestures produced anywhere - have proven to be remarkably difficult to access and obtain. Over the last decade or so, a steady stream of reissues and archival releases, have begun to offer a glimpse of the remarkable creative triumphs that transpired in Peru, Chile, Argentina, Cuba, Brazil, and Venezuela, bringing to light the work of singular composers like Walter Smetak, Marco Bosco, Priscilla Ermel, Fernando Falcão, Jocy de Oliveira, Horacio Vaggione, Ángel Rada, Edgar Valcárcel, Mesías Maiguashca, Oksana Linde, Miguel Flores, Arturo Ruiz del Pozo, Susana Baron Supervielle, and others, but very little attention thus far has been paid to the small but remarkable context of experimental music that occurred within Mexico. Recently, the Monterrey, Mexico, based imprint, Aurora Central, has taken great lengths toward illuminating the country’s contemporary scene, bringing forth stellar releases by Mabe Fratti, Concepcion Huerta, Gibrana Cervantes, and numerous others. However, until now, they have yet to plumb Mexico’s rich, 20th Century history of avant-garde sound. With their widely anticipated, first ever reissue of ‘Música Electroacústica Mexicana’ - arguably the most important document ever produced of Mexican electroacoustic music - we are finally offered this gift. Originally released in 1984 in a tiny edition, and easily among the rarest and most sought after records in the entire Mexican canon - capturing the bristling experimental gestures of four of the country’s most ambitious composers - Antonio Russek, Raúl Pavón, Roberto Morales, and Vicente Rojo - it's an astounding body of work that entirely rewrites the widely known history and context of these sounds.

Like those attending to most countries across Latin America, the history of avant-garde and experimental music in Mexico is difficult to glean: burdened by external neglect, and social, political, and economic circumstance that weighed heavily on the country from without and within. Among the leaders of the cultural movement of Modernism that swept Latin America during the early 20th Century - riding the wave of multicultural and radically left ideas that helped to define the post-colonial period, often sculpting hybrids from indigenous forms and instrumentation, coupled with new European concepts - many of the country’s composers stood at the forefront of the global scene during their respective eras, notably Julián Carrillo, who is regarded as having been the first to reintroduce microtonal music into the Western tradition - Silvestre Revueltas, Carlos Chávez, Manuel Enriquez, Mario Lavista, Federico Ibarra, Manuel Ponce, and many others. Like most Latin American countries, the character of the political circumstances that transpired within Mexico - while different and highly specific - have a direct correlation to the development and sustained practice of experimental electronic and electroacoustic music within the country during the second half of the 20th Century.

Many countries in Latin America were among the first in the world to establish electronic and electroacoustic music studios, in part due to close creative relationships established by pathways of immigration that had brought Jewish intellectuals and artists, who had fled Europe during the 1930s and 40s for the region, and brought with them the most cutting edge musical ideas. These relationships endured into the post war period, seeding numerous cities with emerging technologies and groundbreaking ideas, until waves of right-wing military dictatorships - which swept the region during the 1950s and 60s - suppressed them. Mexico, perhaps due to lower levels of European immigration and its close proximity to the United States, followed a different path, with its creative sonic counterculture being far more connected to the emergence of Rock & Roll. While the avant-garde continued to thrive over the decades, it wouldn’t be until the early 1970s that its first, briefly lived, electronic music studio would be established.

Crucial to understanding the histories of radical music in Latin America are the social, political, and economic circumstances that swirled around these sounds during any given era. Mexico is no different. While it was one of the few Latin American countries to be spared an explicit dictatorship during the second half of the 20th Century, beginning in the late 1960s its artists labored under equally right-wing suppression of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), who were engaged in a “dirty war”, backed by the United States, that attempted to suppress all political dissent. This led to the horrifying events of 1968’s Tlatelolco massacre at Plaza de las Tres Culturas, in Mexico City; 1971’s El Halconazo massacre, and the fall-out from The Avándaro Festival - often called the "Mexican Woodstock" - which effectively led to the banning of all left-wing, progressively minded, and countercultural music in the country for more than a decade to come. It is for this reason that there is so little documentation of activities by avant-garde and experimental artists during the 1970s and 80s. What little there is - the work of artists like Luis Pérez, Jorge Reyes, Carlos Beltran, Antonio Zepeda, Arturo Meza, and Eblen Macari - was privately pressed under difficult circumstances, and, by accounts, why the country’s only electronic music studio was shut down, after only a small number of years, during the early 1970s. All of this makes the existence of ‘Música Electroacústica Mexicana’, issued in 1984, that much more important. It is almost the only document of explicitly experimental electroacoustic music to have appeared in Mexico during this period, and the first record of its kind to appear.

As solitary as it is, it is hard to fully know how representative of the broader context ‘Música Electroacústica Mexicana’ is. Comprising the work of four visionary composers - Antonio Russek, Raúl Pavón, Roberto Morales, and Vicente Rojo - it may be just the tip of the iceberg on historical terms. It might also represent a rough totality of the artists working in this way within Mexico during this period. The tools were expensive and without a state funded studio, the ability to make sounds like these would have been incredibly limited. Originally released as the 3rd installment of ‘Colección Hispano-Mexicana De Música Contemporánea’, a small series of LPs co-curated by Antonio Russek and artist Ángel Cósmos, issued by the independent imprint, Centro Independiente De Investigaciones Musicales Y Multimedia, exploring experimental and avant-garde music by Mexican composers, each of the album’s sides is dedicated to a single work by two of its composers. It is a mind-blowing, and completely revelatory immersion into a creative context, from which otherwise very little is known outside of Mexico.

Beginning with the nearly 14-minute-long piece, ‘Para Espacios Abiertos’ (For Open Spaces), by Antonio Russek - arguably the most enduring and important Mexican composer of electroacoustic music - ‘Música Electroacústica Mexicana’ opens with a powerful punch. Percolating electronic textures move across the surface like the amplified flow of sand, before giving way to processed punctuations and a startling sense of space, sculpted with such mastery that you’d expect such a thing to have been produced at GRM or EMS, rather than a small private studio far from the beaten path. From here, we progress into Raúl Pavón’s fittingly titled ‘Fantasía Cosmica’, a tense work, alluding to the otherworldly through deconstructed, warbling and subsumed melodies, bristling electronic clusters, and pulsing punctuations. The second side introduces us to the composer Roberto Morales, whose ‘Agua Derramada’ (Spilled Water), dives into remarkable states of abstraction through its delicate arrangements of subtle textures, pulsing tones, and shifting resonances, before taking these states even further into the depths with Vicente Rojo’s ‘Vulcan’, a truly remarkable gesture of processed sounds and electronics that arcs and flows with a strikingly complex sense of structure and sonic interrelation.

Unlike the majority of the work of many other experimental Mexican artists during this period - Luis Pérez, Jorge Reyes, Antonio Zepeda, Arturo Meza, etc. - who channeled Mexico’s ancient history and indigenous sound spectrums into their work, the artists encountered across ‘Música Electroacústica Mexicana’ followed a different path; one of total abstraction that internalized the country’s distinct cultural identity and sensibilities in rigorously experimental ways. Visionary by any set of standards, these works offer a striking blow to the long-standing histories of electroacoustic music, which favor artists working in Europe and the United States, making its reemergence as much a social and political intervention as a creative revelation.