Nudo is Joaquin Tenorio and Eric Hernandez.
We’re both from the Texas/Mexico border; Joaquin from Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua and I’m from Eagle Pass, Texas. We met through a mutual friend of ours who would intermittently bump into Joaquin as a regular at La Perla on 6th and Comal. For weeks he kept hitting me up to meet this kid Joaquin who he sensed I would get along with, but I kept blowing them off for no reason (hater). When we finally met we hit it off pretty quickly and started making music together within a week or two of meeting, weird industrial collage music at first and then eventually we started to get regional with the motifs. We picked the name Nudo (which means ‘knot’ in Spanish) in reference to the unbelievably tangled network of lives and lifestyles, systems, idealogies, bulwarks, cash flows etc of the border region. Absolute in its beauty and its brutality.
What are some of the influences on your recent work? Musical or otherwise.
We’re both really into instagram comedian Jesus ‘el Chanconkle’ Olguin. He can make me belly laugh and sob from the same post. We’re constantly sending his posts back and forth to each other. He’s like a construction worker from Guerrero, Coahuila who lives in San Antonio and makes vlogs of himself speeding in his truck, fishing with his kids, hounding his buddies, stuff like that. We both work doing manual labor so seeing somebody who’s encrypted his daily life into this weird performance art that can veer from lighthearted in-jokes into heartfelt posts about visiting what’s left of his late grandmother’s home in Guerrero is singularly compelling. Music wise I think with this next release we’re trying to chop tuba basslines and Tejano textures into something like footwork polka. We’re trying to find a way to make that 2/4 time signature into something that can be played as easily at a rave as it can at a cookout. Recombinant Norteño. Joaquin has been getting into programming and his understanding of this sort of harmony that is possible when everything is written correctly and pored over, when every line of code is double checked, I think that thoroughness seeps into the music. He has like 10 versions of every song with minute differences. Almost totally imperceptible to me, but really important to him. I just try and enchant the music with hyper regional samples off of Johnny Canales youtube archives and interviews with brickmakers, Tejano musicians, sound bites from news bulletins, contextual stuff like that to make it unmistakably ‘of the zone’.
What have you been listening to lately?
We’ve both been listening to a ton of Cakedog (Leland Jackson) and the recently deceased Jon Hassell, as well as a lot of the kids playing corridos tumbados, which is this newer narcotized take on corridos and rancheras coupled with rap aesthetics. It’s kind of had a boom in the past year and a half. It’s beautiful to see those storied strumming patterns and rhythms get this youthful life breathed into them, a great inspiration to see these songs become huge hits with iphone voice memo recording quality and a deliberately hand played, unquantized feel about them. Junior H, Natanael Cano, Los Del Limit, are some hitterz in the genre. Shoutout to the 15 year old Lluvia Arambula, who is the best requintera in the whole scene and who recently parted ways from playing with Tony Loya to make her own tracks, and they slam. I actually cried watching a video of her playing live on Pepe Garza’s youtube channel. And of course, Joaquin and I are just both constantly deep diving into Norteño and Tejano deep cuts, nonstop studying b sides and hits from all eras and regions.
What does “avant-garde” and/or “experimental” mean to you?
I think experimental is just a mode to be in. Like making decisions not based in logic or sense. Sometimes people think it has a certain predetermined sound to it, but I think it’s more about making a sort of ‘wrong’ decision and just leaning into it until it turns into the right one. We think that some of the most ‘experimental’ sonics happen with absolutely no pretension or thought really at places like bailes and pulgas. Just the idea of an entire group of people who, when they really want to cut loose, want to throw on a 6/8 timed huapango or a polka or a Norteño cut with a really garrish and opulent horn section is miles more ‘experimental’ than like, a modular synth jammer or something of that ilk, just because the headspace, the MODE, you have to be in to feel catharsis from that is more ‘experimental’. That music is like harsh noise to a certain type of person, almost totally textural and inscrutable. It’s what’s blasting out of the work trucks that drive around their neighborhoods laying tile, building houses, etc.
What work of yours would you like us to include in the post?
No work to share as of yet! BUT we have an EP on the way from NYC label Gone Baby hopefully before the year is up, and our last release Maquila Egregore can be streamed at the Artfisia bandcamp/soundcloud. We hope people are still getting some juice out of that.
