Available November 27, 2026
Visionaries in Mexico have sought ways to look beyond the stars for millennia. Ancient civilizations like the Maya and Aztecs designed their cities as gigantic star maps, orienting their buildings to mark equinoxes, solstices, and zenith passages. This inquisitive form of meaning-making through art has long been endangered—first by Spanish colonizers; then by the Mexican government’s throttling of artistic expression in the late 20th century; and now by the violent anti-Mexican sentiments of the present day propagated by U.S. President Donald Trump. And through it all, the Mexican spirit of astral curiosity has continued to inform the artistic brilliance of sculptors, writers, painters, and especially musicians in Mexico.
In the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, artists from around the country were deeply engaged in the project of bringing forgotten Mexican instrumentation into the many worlds of experimental music. As Carlos “Tropicaza” Icaza says in the liner notes of Light in the Attic’s A La Altura: Visionary Mexican Music 1977-1999 - Volumes 1 & 2, it was a moment in which musicians were “search[ing] for a Mexican musical root” by integrating ideas from the contemporary worlds of classical minimalism, ambient music, new age, free improv, and electro-acoustic composition with the incorporation of Pre-Colombian instrumentation.
These two collections of Mexican experimental music feature 25 visionary artists over two volumes. The intention is twofold and embedded in its title: A La Altura (or To The Height). These artists were actively engaged in a form of consciousness raising, whether by questing for the stars through their music or by elevating the artform itself. Just as boldly, these two volumes make the statement that Mexican artists and composers like Luis Perez, Ana Ruiz, Antonio Zepeda, and Jorge Reyes should be spoken in the same breath as Michael Rother, Terry Riley, Hiroshi Yoshimura, and the many other artists who have been rightly feted for their spirit of experimentation.
Compiled and produced by Mexican journalist, musician and DJ Icaza and dublab radio founder and LA Phil Creative Producer Mark “Frosty” McNeill over the span of nearly a decade with the support of all artists represented, A La Altura does exactly that. “We want to raise the profile of these artists to show they’re on the same level as those at the vanguard of the most celebrated boundary-pushing movements in global music history but with deep roots in Mexico,” McNeill says. While you might hear a few familiar flourishes, what holds these collections together is their difference, the sense that the music they contain is being made by people who aren’t ignorant of the world beyond their physical borders, but who are more interested in transcending borders altogether.
They’re after “a dreamed heritage,” as McNeill poignantly puts it. “It's incredible to celebrate the deep friendships we have between the U.S. and Mexico, and our common love of music and art,” Light in the Attic’s Matt Sullivan says. “And it shows a side of Mexico that a lot of people like me didn’t know about.” While Icaza, McNeill, and Sullivan had talked for years about putting together a project focused on Mexican music, it wasn’t until the early days of the pandemic that they began their work in earnest. The collective shift toward more introspective music, and the looming reminder of mortality, brought new urgency to the project. As did the continued inflaming of the U.S. president’s negative rhetoric concerning Mexico. For Icaza, it was important to show how Mexican composers and performers understood themselves not only as consumers of work made by artists from other countries, but as peers engaged in an ongoing discussion about the state of the art. They were tapped into international musical scenes while shaping their own voices from uniquely Mexican perspectives. It was just as important to demonstrate the ways in which musicians and music fans from the U.S. and Mexico have forged bonds for decades, regardless of any constructs of political ill will.
Much of the music contained on A La Altura can trace its lineage to El Tianguis Cultural del Chopo, or El Chopo, a flea market in Mexico City where people have been trading musical ideas for decades. Since its opening in 1980, when the Mexican government was actively repressing countercultural expression, El Chopo introduced local musicians to records being put out by Crammed Discs, Rough Trade, 4AD, Wax Trax, and other labels in the international vanguard. “Back then, it wasn’t that easy to get to know the underground music from different countries,” Icaza says, and while the music that flowed through El Chopo gave local artists plenty of ideas, it was their interest in forging a bond between the music of the avant-garde and imagining a Mexico whose indigenous expression had never been suppressed that gave their music its considerable power. Forced into the margins by their government, these artists responded by forming ad-hoc listening networks, putting out their own records, and trading them with one another at the market—a distinctly DIY practice that, in a nice bit of futurist kismet, allowed for a kind of networking, creative exchange, and record distribution that now dominates the internet.
Some of these artists—like Ana Ruiz, whose free jazz combo Atrás del Cosmos toured Mexico with Don and Moki Cherry, and whose solo synthesizer piece “Ananecia 12” is collected here—were classically trained. Others—like journalist and broadcaster Walter Schmidt, who’s represented here with a multilayered piano experiment “L’Vampire”—didn’t identify as musicians at all. Jorge Reyes, Antonio Zepeda, and Luis Perez alchemized pre-Colombian instrumentation with modern electronics and electric instruments, producing new forms of music that suggest an alternate Mexican history in which artistic suppression never happened. Their exploratory ethos is matched by electro-acoustic experiments by Antonio Russek and Ariel Guzik, while the set also illuminates the astonishing works of once-obscure figures like Xavier Zetina, F. Steel, and Aristeo. While the sounds these artists produced might differ from an aesthetic standpoint, they share a punkish, DIY spirit to their work that in turn brought them closer to their Mexican-ness.
Icaza and McNeill assembled both volumes of A La Altura not as a way of providing a definitive guide to a discrete scene—such a thing would be impossible considering the range of musics, originating from across many Mexican states, and throughout the wide span of time represented here—but instead made their sequencing choices based on a feel for how the songs fit together. By bypassing the idea of canonization, they instead emphasize the listener’s present experience of this music, and indirectly suggest that there is much, much more brilliant music where this came from.
A La Altura: Visionary Mexican Music 1977-1999 - Volume 1 will be released on 2xLP & Digital on October 30th, 2026, followed by A La Altura: Visionary Mexican Music 1980-1997 - Volume 2 on 2xLP & Digital on November 27th alongside a 2xCD edition with 64-page hardcover book; Volume 2 includes 4 tracks that have never been released.
Advance single “Pirámide” by La Pirámide is out now on all DSPs. Pirámide was a Mexico City-based band formed by Jorge García Castil, former bass player in the groups Los Locos del Ritmo and Mister Loco. The track “Pirámide” appeared on the group’s debut album, originally released in 1985 and featuring three different parts assembling an aural form of a pyramid.
Both vinyl volumes were manufactured at renowned pressing plant Optimal and are presented on standard black wax as well as limited color editions (Volume 1 in purple and pink and Volume 2 in yellow and blue), and are accompanied by a 12-page booklet. Both formats’ liner notes were written by Icaza and include rare and unseen photos. All editions feature cover art by the great Eduardo Terrazas, whose iconic work with Lance Wyman for Mexico’s 1968 Olympics is a masterpiece of modernist design, and whose aesthetic principles predicted much of the music contained within these sets. The project has been lovingly remastered by multi-Grammy nominated engineer John Baldwin with gorgeous graphic design and layout by Darryl Norsen, who also put together a number of very special merch pieces incorporating the art of Terrazas, including a slipmat, t-shirt, blanket, and tote bag – all of which will be available on October 30th at LightInTheAttic.net.
