Inside A La Altura: Meet Mexico’s Experimental Music Pioneers

Start with the opening track: a low rush of wind, wooden percussion, distant calls and a piano that seems to enter from another room.

Antonio Zepeda and Eugenio Toussaint’s “Viento de Lluvia” does not sound like a museum reconstruction, and it does not behave like conventional jazz. It feels like weather being assembled by hand. That tension—between old instruments and new technology, inherited culture and imagined futures—is the thread running through A La Altura: Visionary Mexican Music 1977–1999.

The new two-volume anthology from Light in the Attic and Mexico City label Discos Carbon collects 25 artists from a period of Mexican music that remains surprisingly poorly documented outside the country. There is ambient music here, along with free jazz, progressive rock, electro-acoustic composition and private-press experimentation. But those labels only get us so far.

The more interesting story is who these musicians were, how they found one another and why their work has taken so long to reach a wider audience.

Not one scene, but a network

The artists on A La Altura did not belong to a single movement with a manifesto and membership list. They came from different cities, generations and musical disciplines. Some had conservatoire training. Some came through rock groups. Some researched instruments held in archaeological collections; others built sounds from synthesisers, tape, broken objects or free improvisation.

One important point of connection was El Tianguis Cultural del Chopo in Mexico City. Established in 1980, El Chopo became a place to find records and information that were difficult to access elsewhere. Imported releases from labels such as Rough Trade, 4AD, Crammed Discs and Wax Trax circulated alongside locally made records, cassettes and fanzines. Musicians exchanged ideas and distributed their own work beyond the usual commercial channels.

The records gathered here are therefore not examples of Mexican musicians simply copying an international avant-garde. They show artists who knew what was happening elsewhere but were asking their own question: what might modern experimental music sound like if Mexico’s indigenous instruments and suppressed histories were allowed to sit at its centre?

Antonio Zepeda and Eugenio Toussaint: “Viento de Lluvia”

Antonio Zepeda’s route into this music began with rhythm. He played and studied percussion associated with Caribbean and Brazilian traditions before turning increasingly towards ancient Mexican wind and percussion instruments. Over decades, he built an unusually deep practice around flutes, whistles, drums, rattles and resonant objects whose histories stretch back well before Spanish colonisation.

Eugenio Toussaint came from a different musical world. A pianist and composer, he was a founding member of Sacbé, one of the defining groups in modern Mexican jazz. His work moved between jazz improvisation and chamber composition, bringing a precise harmonic intelligence to Zepeda’s earthier sound palette.

On “Viento de Lluvia”, taken from their 1993 collaborative album Paisajes, neither musician dominates. Zepeda’s breath, percussion and environmental textures create the landscape; Toussaint’s piano and acoustic guitar give it shape without pinning it down. It is a useful first lesson in how to hear A La Altura: the historical instruments are not ornamental colour added to a Western composition. They determine the pace, space and logic of the music.

Listen: Antonio Zepeda & Eugenio Toussaint – “Viento de Lluvia”

Luis Pérez: rebuilding a lost orchestra

Luis Pérez provides perhaps the clearest example of the research behind this music. Born in Mexico City in 1951, Pérez began investigating pre-Columbian musical instruments in the early 1970s. His work took him beyond learning established playing techniques: many of the instruments he encountered had survived as archaeological objects, while the musical systems once attached to them had not.

That left him with a difficult and fascinating task. How do you approach an instrument when its original repertoire cannot simply be read from a score? Pérez studied surviving artefacts and indigenous traditions, learning how clay flutes, ocarinas, whistles, drums, shells and other sound-making objects behaved. He then used recording technology and multi-tracking to imagine how they might function together.

Ipan in Xiktli Metztli, the 1981 album represented on Volume 1, is less an act of historical recreation than speculative composition. Voices and percussion gather into ceremonial patterns; whistles occupy registers that can feel closer to birds or weather than to a conventional lead instrument. “Suite al Culto” condenses that approach into one of the anthology’s central pieces.

Pérez was not attempting to freeze these instruments in the past. By placing them inside a modern studio construction, he asked what a pre-Columbian orchestra might become in the electronic age.

Listen: Luis Pérez – “Culto Solar: In Altepetl Tonal”

Jorge Reyes: from progressive rock to ritual electronics

Jorge Reyes began as a classically trained flautist, studying at the National School of Music at UNAM in Mexico City. His education then widened dramatically. He studied jazz improvisation in Hamburg, travelled through Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, and spent time learning Indian flute and percussion techniques.

Back in Mexico, Reyes co-founded Chac Mool, one of the country’s pioneering progressive-rock bands. But his solo music moved into stranger territory. Electronics, processed voice and studio effects began to interact with stone percussion, ocarinas, shell trumpets and drums. His live performances could resemble ceremonies as much as concerts; his well-known Day of the Dead appearances at UNAM’s Espacio Escultórico made sound, landscape and ritual part of the same work.

“Sazilakab” captures an earlier point on that path. Its patient repetition and suspended atmosphere make the comparisons with ambient music understandable, but Reyes’s materials and intent push it somewhere more specific. This is not anonymous relaxation music. It is music concerned with memory, place and the possibility of making ancient sound sources speak in the present tense.

Listen: Jorge Reyes – “Sazilakab”

Ana Ruiz and Atrás del Cosmos: Mexico’s free-jazz connection

A La Altura also reaches into a history of Mexican free jazz that has only recently begun to reappear on record.

Pianist Ana Ruiz founded Atrás del Cosmos in Mexico City in 1975 with saxophonist Henry West and percussionist Evry Mann. The group is widely described as Mexico’s first free-jazz ensemble. Ruiz had grown up hearing jazz and Afro-Caribbean music, but her approach was not based on reproducing an American style. Atrás del Cosmos used improvisation as a method: a way for players to listen, collide and build form in real time.

The Don Cherry connection is not simply a convenient comparison. When Cherry came to Mexico in 1977, Ruiz helped host him; Atrás del Cosmos later performed with Don and Moki Cherry during their time in the country. It is direct evidence that this Mexican free-jazz community was connected to a wider international network of improvising musicians.

Ruiz’s contribution to Volume 2, the previously unreleased synthesiser piece “Ananecia 12”, presents another side of her work. It trades the physical push and pull of a jazz group for solitary electronic space. Heard alongside Atrás del Cosmos, it shows why reducing these musicians to one genre misses the point: the same artist could move between collective improvisation and private electronic study.

Listen: Atrás del Cosmos – “What Reason / Clapping Hand I / Baba”

La Pirámide: constructing music in three dimensions

La Pirámide’s self-titled track is one of the easiest entrances into the collection—and one of its most deceptive.

The Mexico City group was formed by Jorge García Castil, previously the bassist in Los Locos del Ritmo and Mister Loco. “Pirámide” appeared on the band’s 1985 debut and is built in three connected sections. The title is not merely decorative: the piece is conceived as an aural pyramid, accumulating layers and changing perspective as it develops.

Its bass movement and synthesiser pulse initially feel closer to cosmic jazz or progressive rock than archaeological experimentation. Gradually, however, the arrangement becomes harder to locate. Melodies rise and disappear, hand percussion shifts the centre of gravity, and the track seems to reveal a different face depending on where you enter it.

Listen: La Pirámide – “Pirámide”

Why A La Altura matters

There is an uncomfortable habit in reissue culture of describing music as “lost” when it was never lost to the people who made it or the listeners who kept it circulating. Much of this work survived through artists, collectors, private pressings, cassettes and personal networks. What was missing was not the music itself, but sustained attention from the wider international record industry.

Compiled over nearly a decade by Mexican journalist, musician and DJ Carlos “Tropicaza” Icaza with dublab founder Mark “Frosty” McNeill, A La Altura does not pretend to be a complete canon. Its sequencing encourages connections instead: between Ana Ruiz’s free jazz and private synthesiser work; between Luis Pérez’s research and Jorge Reyes’s ritual electronics; between progressive rock, indigenous instrumentation and the informal circulation of music through El Chopo.

Light in the Attic renders the title as “To the Height”, although the Spanish phrase a la altura also carries the sense of being equal to the occasion—or on the same level. That double meaning contains the anthology’s argument: Luis Pérez, Ana Ruiz, Jorge Reyes, Antonio Zepeda and their peers should be heard alongside the European, Japanese and North American experimental musicians whose catalogues have already been extensively reissued and celebrated.

That argument is persuasive because the music does not need historical importance to excuse it. These tracks are absorbing, peculiar and often beautiful in their own right.

The records

Volume 1 spans 1977–1999 and includes Antonio Zepeda with Eugenio Toussaint, Jorge Reyes, Luis Pérez, La Pirámide, Tribu and Arturo Meza. It arrives on 30 October 2026.

Volume 2 follows on 27 November, moving further into electronic and electro-acoustic work from Ana Ruiz, Oxomaxoma, Gerardo Bátiz, Ariel Guzik and others. Four of its thirteen tracks are previously unreleased.

Both editions have been sourced from original tapes and masters, remastered by John Baldwin and pressed as double LPs at Optimal. Each includes detailed liner notes and rare photographs. Eduardo Terrazas—whose work with Lance Wyman helped create the visual identity of the 1968 Mexico Olympics—provides the brilliantly geometric cover art.

Pre-order A La Altura: Volume 1

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