Today Nortec Collective featuring Bostich + Fussible drops their third album, “Tijuana Sound Machine,” so this weekend Guanabee Editor Cindy Casares spent a few hundred minutes talking to founder Pepe Mogt, aka Fussible, about the album, the group and life in Tijuana.

Like a lot of people who are not American, Pepe Mogt aka Fussible, speaks more than one language. We both grew up on the U.S.-Mexico border, me on this side, him on that, but his English is far better than my Spanish, so I ask him if we can conduct this interview in my native tongue. I ask him in Spanish so I won’t feel like a complete pocha and Daniel Mauser, my Mexico City-born publisher who, in a fit of paranoia, I brought along as a translator, says I sound pretty damn good in Spanish. But when it comes time to talk to Pepe about his moogs, I’m not taking any chances. Besides, I want America to read this story. All of America. So English it is.

Guanabee: So how old are you, Pepe?

Pepe Mogt: 38.

Guanabee: Tell me about how you grew up.

Pepe Mogt: I grew up middle class in Tijuana. You know, very normal. I went to school all the way through college. I studied engineering. My parents wanted me to be a lawyer or a doctor or something. There were no musicians in my family.

Guanabee: How did you get interested in music, then?

Pepe Mogt: It was always something I loved. In high school I hung out with the people who were into music. I paid for my own music lessons, but I never played any instruments as a kid except for the flute when I was very young. I played the flute. Badly.

Guanabee: So engineering was your thing?

Pepe Mogt: Yes, I went to college for engineering in Tijuana but I was always doing music on the side. Even when I got into my profession, I was working in a laboratory building machines, but I was always composing music. And I never thought of music as my hobby. It was always my passion.

[I have this image of a mad scientist creating super Norteño robots in his lab.]

Guanabee: How did you get interested in electronica?

Pepe Mogt: Growing up, we listened to radio stations from San Diego and I was always listening—in the 70’s—to, you know, Kraftwerk, and German Punk Rock. We also grew up with House Music and Techno. And in the 80’s, being from Tijuana, I could easily get a local passport and go across to see many bands in San Diego. Depeche Mode, for example. My dream was to be an electronic musician, but I started out as a fan, not a producer.

Guanabee: What about Norteño?

Pepe Mogt: Even though Norteño was here I was not into that, because its the music that your parents listen to, or when you were on the bus, or on the street —its the ambient sound of the city. I did not like Norteño at all, but as I grew I began to open up to different sounds.

Guanabee: I know exactly what you mean. Norteño music is like the wallpaper of South Texas [where I grew up.] It wasn’t until I moved away and it was suddenly not there that I really appreciated it.

Pepe Mogt: Yes, and I’m still in the process of learning about it.

[This strikes me as funny and yet the exact same situation I am in with the Spanish language. Not to mention Norteño music. I realize that Nortec Collective are perhaps the perfect artists to illustrate the 21st century Latino-American experience. Even if they are Mexican.]

Guanabee: So what about your collaborator Bostich— Ramon Amuezca? First of all, how did you guys come up with your names?

Pepe Mogt: Bostich got his name from a Swiss band called Yello. They did a song called “Bostich.” He was a big fan of that band and he picked the name like in 1986. Fussible means fuse in Spanish. The only significance is that it’s an electronic device. Me and Jorge Ruiz started a group called Fussible in 1988. Jorge came up with the name. About 5 years later, Jorge left the group to start a family and I kept the name. We have plans to collaborate in the future.

Guanabee: And Bostich, he’s a dentist, right? Does he still practice?

Pepe Mogt: Yeah, and it’s not because he is my friend or anything, but he is an awesome dentist! He has a small dental center with about two other dentists. The bass player for Love and Rockets is a patient and a lot of the Nacional execs [Nortec Collective’s record label in the States] see him.

Guanabee: Ha. Do his non-music industry patients know what he does on the side?

Pepe Mogt: His patients might not recognize him because we kind of hide on stage. Most people don’t really recognize us, but he is the bald guy and I am the guy with the long hair.

Guanabee: Stalkers be notified. So, tell me how you ended up putting this music you didn’t like into this music that you loved.

Pepe Mogt: In the late 80’s and early 90’s, I was doing a lot of electronic music on very, very independent labels abroad. We were more into industrial, and I was getting bored. It sounded very European. I started to notice I didn’t have a distinctive sound. So I thought, let me compose one song for an experiment—not to create a movement. We did not think, oh how can we be different? Mariachi! No, it was not deliberate. It was by accident that I created a demo using some Norteña and I was like wow, that was really good. So I shared it with my friend who was a dentist.

Guanabee: Bostich.

Pepe Mogt: Bostich. And the collective was born.

Guanabee: And how exactly do you go about getting the Norteña music into your machines? Is it original? Or are you sampling pre-composed stuff?

Pepe Mogt: Well, we have a lot of bands who play Norteña here in the restaurants, so at first, we would hire them to play as studio musicians and we would mix and come up with the music. Then when touring [their second album] “Tijuana Sessions, Vol. 3” we started hiring them to come with us and play on tour. Now many of them are our friends and we know them well. Some of them who collaborated on “Tijuana Sound Machine” are part of the Collective. They are 100% working for Nortec. They are helping us build up ideas

Guanabee: So are they now composing music with your style in mind?

Pepe Mogt: Well, it varies. Ramon does some songs and I do others, but as for the musicians, they play their type of music. They are true Norteños. They are like “real ones.” I would say we produce our records based on what they play. After I have learned more about how they play, I will be producing a full Norteño record with Juan Tellez.

There is also this other band, a Norteña band called Agua Caliente, who are becoming quite famous right now. We worked with them before and we work off each other to come up with new sounds, with new music. Bostich went with them to a gig recently to enhance their sound. It’s a fantastic collaboration.

Guanabee: Do you play any instruments besides electronic ones?

Pepe Mogt: I used to play the recorder in school, very badly. After that I went to study classical music, piano and guitar. But I am not a very good player. I am better at working with dials and buttons. I totally get into it—moving dials and pushing buttons. So, with the Collective, we invited a bunch of musicians and artists to collaborate. Graphic designers, too. Fritz Torres did the art cover for the album. He’s also involved in the visuals for the show. Other artists did album covers and short films. We created Nortec to be part of an aesthetic, not only the music, but graphic design, as well.

Guanabee: Yes, I’ve noticed that graphic design seems to be as important to your shows as the music. How did you get hooked up with those guys?

Pepe Mogt: Well, when we moved away from electronica to Nortec, a lot of people turned their backs on us, [he laughs] but the ones who remained, a small group of them at the time, were these really interesting people: graphic designers and filmmakers and they helped out with the visuals of the show.

[In a documentary on the graphic design of Nortec Collective called Paso del Nortec/This Is Tijuana!, Fussible’s early shows are described by one of the designers as very boring to watch live with only two guys standing around tweaking knobs on their samplers. These artists saw an opportunity to fill a hole with a whole new aesthetic inspired by the music and culture of Norteño and Tijuana combined with visual effects already known to rave and techno audiences.]

Guanabee: Well your shows seem to have come a long way. That video you guys posted of your live performance in Mexicali looked like people were having a pretty good time.

Pepe Mogt: When you listen to Nortec, it’s totally different live. We always respond to the situation. The show in Mexicali was crazy. It only cost like $1 to get in and 4000 people showed up and the age range was like 14-21. They were crazy—in a good way. They just wanted to dance.

Guanabee: So is Nortec something you guys own, or are there other artists out there doing it?

Pepe Mogt: Sure, Terrestre —which is Fernando Corona who did the soundtrack for Nicotina—He released an album with the Nortec sound. It’s good. And Plankton Man did an album with Nortec sound. There are also advertisements that use the Nortec sound.

Guanabee: What about Kinky?

Pepe Mogt: I like Kinky. They share a similar sound, but I wouldn’t call that Nortec. Nortec is specific for Tijuana. An aesthetic for the city. All the music, art, anything has something to do with the city. Even a song like “Tijuana Sound Machine,” the video reflects part of this happening here in Tijuana.

Kinky is reflecting more of a Monterrey Norteño. Their own thing. You can call it Nortec but only their remixes—which we did.

Guanabee: That might explain why in Paso del Nortec, when the graphic designers talk about the image of the zebra donkey which they say is the perfect symbol for Tijuana—a hybrid of a hybrid—I was completely unfamiliar with it. I don’t think they have those in Matamoros, Tamaulipas. [The town across the river from where I grew up.]

Pepe Mogt: Matamoros is a lot older than Tijuana. I think TJ is only like 100 years old [Wikipedia says it was founded in 1889.] and it was created to be a tourist trap. So they used to have these donkeys painted like zebras pulling carts for tourists to take pictures on. It was a way to make money. This was like in the 1930’s and 40’s and you’ll see the old black and white pictures and you can see that the animal is clearly a donkey. Which is pretty ridiculous.

Guanabee: That’s great. Can you give me an example of how the new album reflects what is going on in Tijuana now?

Pepe Mogt: Well, for example the track “Retén”—it means police check point. Here in Tijuana, things have gotten pretty violent recently. About 6 months ago, when we were composing the album, there were a lot of check points around the city where you’d have these guys pointing 16mm weapons at you. So, the music in the song is relaxing, but the sample on it is the sound of this rude guy asking you where you are going.

Also there’s the track, “America’s Most Wanted,” which is about when you cross the border to the U.S. and the immigration treats everybody like they are America’s most wanted. Whether you dress nice or bad, or if you come from France, everybody gets treated like that. In the 80’s you could cross easily. After Sept. 11, it changed drastically. It’s about the paranoia of the government institution.

Guanabee: Yeah, I went to Vietnam last year and by far the rudest immigration we went through was America’s. And that includes Korea and communist Vietnam.

Pepe Mogt: And you see so many wanted posters. Suddenly there are so many posters. Who is America’s most wanted? Everybody.

Guanabee: You must get to travel a lot then. What are your travel plans for the immediate future?

Pepe Mogt: We’re in Las Vegas May 6, then some gigs in Tijuana, Mexicali, the Mayor’s festival in Mexico City, Paris and a European Tour from June to August.

Guanabee: Wow, well I feel even more grateful that you took so much time to talk to us. Oh, by the way, I meant to ask you, is there any truth to the rumors on Wikipedia that you guys announced in January that you are dissolving as a group?

Pepe Mogt: Absolutely not. You know, you really shouldn’t get your information from Wikipedia. I think anybody can edit that stuff.

Guanabee: Yeah, we’ve heard something about that. Well, that’s great news and a great note to end on.

[At this point, Daniel interrupts us.]

Daniel Mauser: I have one more question.

Pepe Mogt: Yes?

Daniel Mauser: Cindy wants to know if you have a girlfriend.

Pepe Mogt: Lots of them.

[While I figure out a way to smother Daniel with his mouse pad, you can buy Nortec Collective Presents: Bostich+Fussible “Tijuana Sound Machine” digitally today and in stores, May 6th.]

Nortec Collective Presents Bostich+Fussible [MySpace]