| | |  Entertainment 
A New Frontier for Indie Rock, Down in Mexico
 Ben Sisario - New York Times
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March 10, 2010
| | Todd Patrick, better known as Todd P., is organizing an indie-rock festival in Monterrey, Mexico. (Robert Stolarik/New York Times) | |
It was a scene of classic do-it-yourself Brooklyn concert promotion: In a small apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a dozen young workers who could pass for American Apparel models crowded onto sofas one afternoon last week, typing furiously on laptops as they completed preparations for a rapidly approaching indie-rock festival.
The bands for that festival, called MtyMx, included many whose music blasts through headphones on the L train every day, but the event is far from subway reach, in Monterrey, Mexico. And in addition to the usual calls to agents and equipment-rental companies, the workers were contacting Mexican bus operators whose numbers had been gleaned from Spanish-language newspapers.
The organizer of the festival is Todd Patrick, better known as Todd P., a figure who might be unfamiliar to casual rock fans but whose underground mover-shakerness has earned him a reputation as something like the D.I.Y. Bill Graham. There has seemingly been no dingy basement, loft or former industrial space in Brooklyn or Queens that Mr. Patrick has not used to present a band that was unknown yesterday but will be buzzed about tomorrow. And his efforts at cultivating a network of cheap, all-ages performance spaces are widely credited with helping to develop the New York indie-rock scene over the last half-decade.
MtyMx, which will take place on the grounds of a drive-in movie theater over three days beginning March 20, is far more ambitious than anything Mr. Patrick, 34, has tried before. It has 78 bands, including boldface indie names like Andrew W. K., Dan Deacon, Liars and No Age, along with dozens of Mexican groups, among them Chikita Violenta, Los Fancy Free and XYX. Mr. Patrick, who is presenting MtyMx with a like-minded partner in Monterrey, Yo Garage, has scheduled MtyMx around the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Tex., which begins March 17, and chartered buses to ferry bands and fans on the seven-hour trip from Austin.
To some extent MtyMx is a reaction to the sprawl of South by Southwest, whose showcases are surrounded by an ever-expanding periphery of unofficial, corporate-sponsored parties. Mr. Patrick, one of the great talkers of the New York music scene — a coffeehouse chat the other day turned into nearly three hours of a wide-ranging discussion of music, politics and history, most of it a monologue — is diplomatic enough to say that MtyMx is not an anti-South by Southwest gesture, but he makes clear that he is no fan of Austin in March.
“It’s not so much a comment about what they’re doing as a disregard for what they’re doing,” he said of his festival. “I’ve never enjoyed going to big multivenue festivals. Everyone knows that those bands are going to be playing the worst set of their lives. Everyone’s drunk, you never get any sleep the whole time, and it’s all networking and schmoozing. It’s a necessary evil, but afterwards you kind of want to wash it out of your hair.”
As a regular visitor to Mexico and Latin America, Mr. Patrick wanted to offer bands a new route for their post-South by Southwest tours, which can otherwise entail a lot of unattended Sunday and Monday night shows in the Deep South. But the recent announcement of MtyMx has raised a lot of digital eyebrows, with many American bloggers and their mostly anonymous commenters questioning the safety of the trip given the widely publicized Mexican drug war.
Creating some confusion, a second festival has been announced for Monterrey shortly before South by Southwest. Festival NRMAL, whose namesake is a small graphic design firm there, takes place on Saturday with more than 40 bands, again split between reasonably well-known American rock and electronic acts (Yacht, Awesome Color, Nite Jewel) and a roster of Mexican bands that reflect the growing popularity of indie rock there.
Although NRMAL, on the grounds of the Alianza Francesa school, appears to be slightly slicker than MtyMx, they both pull from similar musical strata, and are inexpensive: NRMAL is $23 for one day, MtyMx is $30 for three. NRMAL, however, is counting on a largely Mexican crowd, while MtyMx is expecting 20 percent or more to be from the United States. (Both are busing musicians from Austin.)
For Mr. Patrick, Americans’ worries about safety feed into his broader political and social aims for MtyMx. The fact that most American bands will probably breeze into Mexico but many of their Mexican colleagues might be stymied by visa restrictions in their efforts to get to Austin should cast a light on border inequities. (“There’s a ton of kids in Mexico who love this kind of music, but they’ll never be able to see them,” he said. “That border might as well be the Berlin Wall.”) And the media, he said, exaggerates the drug violence.
“I want to dispel this misperception that a) this country is the Wild West and is unsafe, and b) that there is nothing there to see,” he said. “It’s right over the border and yet so many of us will not go to anything but a protected beach resort. It’s absurd. And the best way to attack absurdity is to prove it wrong.”
Of course there is a risk of danger. Violence has spiked near the Mexican border in recent years, and a travel alert for Mexico issued last month by the United States State Department said that some travelers on the highways between Monterrey and the United States have “inadvertently been caught in incidents of gunfire between criminals and Mexican law enforcement.”
Mr. Patrick cites government statistics from the state of Nuevo León that put Monterrey’s murder rate at about the same as New York’s. And his belief that a successful MtyMx would help correct American distortions about Mexico were shared by Alan Palomo of the band Neon Indian, who was born in Monterrey and raised in Texas.
“People have this idea that it’s all poverty-stricken, that it doesn’t get any deeper than border towns and grimy ports,” said Mr. Palomo, whose band is playing the third day of MtyMx. “I have always found that tremendously offensive. There is this exoticized notion about this festival, and people have a lot of fear and curiosity. Now they have an excuse to see what the area really has to offer.” |
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