V/A ~ Anthology of Experimental Music from Mexico

There is a certain narrative emerging from the excellent Anthologies being curated by Unexplained Sounds Group, in which the world outside the so-called global north is a place full of traditions and interactions beyond the commonalities in a genre like experimental music, whose definition is, however useful to us writers, vague and loose. The places where those commonalities are most prominent – say, a disruption of tonality, or an exploratory take on sound phenomena – become representative of a “globalized” or “universal” setting, whereas those places in which musicians veer slightly off-course become interesting*. These rationalist/romantic categories have been at the core of discussions related to modernism for a couple centuries now, and one of the shapes it is expressed through is a conceptual tension between “progress and tradition”, as the liner notes to this Anthology put it. They describe Mexico as such a place, divided between two…