Si Me Duermo…Choco (If I fall asleep … I die) is a new album by Roberto Mendoza, one of the members of the Nortec Collective and a key figure in the Mexican electronica. Emerging in the late 80’s in electro post industrial music, Mendoza is most well known as Panoptica with a swag of minimal techno releases on the Certificate 18 label and a Peel session under his belt.
A deep sense of reminiscence fills this album, haunting grime laden guitars lie superimposed over minimal tech structural form, along with spectral dream vocals and melodic guitar memories. The ghosts of post punk arise and spread across the tracks weaving decades together and providing a template of sound and time compressed. Collaborations with David J. Haskins (Love and Rockets) no doubt help a sensed of rekindling these moments in time in as much as the mastering technique of Stefken Betke (Pole) adds sonic depth and resonance so familiar his work on ~scape. Where on one hand the formal memory is noted, the contemporary technique is fore grounded. Glittering acoustic guitars overwhelmed by sonic grunge and brighter toned electronics and deep base tones are all present here as if all the sounds in Mendoza’s world become apparent at once.
If a sonic encapsulation of a lucid dream could be constructed it is here, masking highly developed technical prowess in a coat of remembrance and dreamlike intonation, updating the waking dream for the listener. Awakening to a dreamlike sound is a kind of paradox and to a casual listener it may seem that the conjunction of sound worlds woven together here are at least a contradiction, if not a riddle or paradox, but the beauty is held within the contradiction of form.
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