The music of the Texas duo Nudo is unmistakably a product of the environment in which they were raised, a singular push-pull of inputs. Their new record for Halcyon Veil, Alma Blindada, fuses experimental techniques with the regional Mexican music that defined Eric Hernandez and Joaquin Tenorio’s upbringing in rural Texas and the border town of Juarez. Nudo incorporates samples, field recordings, and electronics in service of a sound that captures the textures of the Texican landscape they know so intimately—the joy and the strife; the desert calm and the looming conflict. 

Alma Blindada sounds not unlike Negativland, if they were raised on música norteña. On the album, radio interchanges between Mexican soldiers share space with corrido samples. There is wonky computer processing and instrumentation from 1guerobass1, a bass player known for his collaborations with Junior H and Peso Pluma. The album title, too, displays the duo’s taste for regionally-minded references. “Alma Blindada means armored soul, or bulletproof spirit,” Hernandez said in a statement. “But ‘blindado’ is also narco slang for a protected person.” We talked to Hernandez and Tenorio about the music that shaped their band.

Do you have any formative musical memories?

Eric: A memory that stands out for me is listening really loudly to “Tarzan Boy” by Baltimora on a big sound system in the living room of the house my parents shared with three or four of my aunts and uncles and a lot of my cousins while they attended college in Kingsville, TX. I don’t know why but I remember it just being a really exhilarating experience and to this day there’s still a tinge of that feeling encrypted into that song for me. I think it’s that rolling electro tom intro, it just grabs you and goes right into that vocal. I remember it sounded enormous and so futuristic or something like that. I only lived there the first three years of my life so it’s pretty telling that I can recall listening to that, I must have been two years old or so. I think it was re-released in 93 so it must have just been AROUND. That was definitely the earliest moment I can recall where I thought, “this bangs.” And maybe another moment was listening to “Throwing It All Away” by Genesis in a similar fashion in that same living room. The kind of thing where you forget about it and then one day that melody finds you again or you encounter it on the radio or in the wild after years of not hearing it and it just zaps you back to that exact moment when it first CRANKED and you realize my god its been there in my head all this time.

Joaquin: When I was 13 a friend of mine gave me a USB with a cracked "Guitar Pro" (a multitrack software with MIDI instruments). It had thousands of tabs for bass and guitar. Around that time, I didn’t have the internet, so all the music I knew about was from reading "Microsoft Encarta" and Mexican "emo music" magazines that I would buy from an Oxxo. So, through that program Guitar Pro, I was able to learn and listen (in 8bit) all of the tracks that I was reading about.

Describe your musical environment growing up.

Eric: My parents were very religious, Church of Christ, which is not typical for Mexicans. Catholicism is usually the default. There were a lot of hymns and worship songs in Spanish, my grandmother had the Hymns of Glory and Triumph hymnal memorized. You could ask her, “sing ‘Hymn #55’” and she would know what song it was and could sing it. Those melodies are deeply ingrained in me even though I lose the words sometimes. Very old and very American melodies, just sung in Spanish.

My mom was more pointedly and casually religious than my dad and truly mostly only sang to herself and taught us little nursery rhymes and lullabies and joke songs and teeny bopper stuff like Luis Miguel and Menudo and Jeanette. She liked Mariah Carey, though, that was like the one contemporary thing she was into. My dad was a self-taught drummer and guitarist and had very eclectic taste, he was kind of a new waver in the 80s, he was like a wannabe John Hughes character in rebellion to the cholo and cowboy archetypes he was surrounded by, very much like smooth rock and synthpop, OMD, The Cars, Joe Jackson, Talk Talk. Guys like that, Tears For Fears, and the like. 

He taught me bass first, then guitar, when I was around 12. “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” by CCR, I remember. There weren’t a lot of musicians in my extended family but my great grandpa on my dad’s side was a storied jazz and session drummer in Piedras Negras, Coahuila MX.  My dad would tell me about how he used to play the drum roll and cymbal crashes at the bullfighting ring. And about how he played in the house band on a really fancy passenger train, in the lounge car, where politicians and movie stars would eat and drink when they would take this cross country railroad trip in central Mexico. I remember imagining about him a lot. 

Joaquin: Nothing crazy, it was always a very personal thing growing up. I guess in my family the person that influenced my music taste from an early age was my grandpa, he used to work at a music store and he had a lot of vinyls and cassettes most of them were boleros, trios, rancheras, huapangos, and romantic ballads. I revisited all of his collection when I lived with him for two years while I was still going to high school.

What was the first album that you consumed very intentionally—music that you sought out?

Eric: The first album that felt like it was totally mine was probably Strawberry Jam by Animal Collective. It came out the year I started high school, and while it incorporated so many components that were well liked in my friend group—screamo cadences, trippy guitar, and lots of effects pedals—it just seemed to repel every one of my friends I tried to show it to, which for my young elitist self was really funny and impressive. I think I always looked for music that had that repellent component. Noise, black metal, free improv shit. Punk, psychobilly (haha), and death metal were huge in my hometown so it felt good to repel kids who aimed to be repellant themselves. I was deep into blogs. I think at the height of my collection my iTunes said it had 43 days of music if I let it play continuously, which is just beyond excessive and dumb haha. But that was my mindset, I’d download someone’s whole discography if I liked an album or even a couple songs.

Joaquin: It was from a Black Sabbath box set that my dad brought from a bodega he used to work at when I was a kid. I was obviously drawn by the imagery and wanted to know all about it.

What was your entryway into experimental music?

Eric: I bought a cassette of Peter Gabriel’s score for Last Temptation of Christ at a flea market when I was like 9 or 10, the cover just looked like Spawn or something. And I remember being so hooked listening to that. It had some parts that were straight up Jon Hassell ripoffs, just minced duduk and choral synths and tribal drumming. I think that made me seek out more soundtracks and through that searching I eventually found myself at Ligeti and Wendy Carlos, Ennio Morricone, Bobby Beausoleil and things like that. Way down the line that led me to proper experimental music; Bob Ashley, John Cage, K. Leimer, Hassell, Budd.

Joaquin: Café Tacvba - Reves/Yo soy (Disc 1).  Can’t remember how old I was, but around high school, I had an iPod nano and would ask my girlfriend to download discographies from torrents of artists I liked. She got me the full discography of Cafe Tacvba, one of my favorite bands because they would fuse all the music I listened to at my grandparents house with elements of punk/rock/pop. But this double-album is a very experimental one, isn’t pop at all, like they merged Mexican folklore with industrial, electronic, they used weird tempos almost like math rock, sonically is a masterpiece. It blew my mind, after that I ended up understanding other artists that I knew about but I didn’t like them ‘cause I thought they were very pretentious like John Cale. Obviously I had to buy the album, Disc 2 was more pop, like actual songs. But the way they tracklist Disc 2 was so cool they would split a song like in 20 different ways, so when you were in a car it would change the tracklist number while the song was still playing. There were only 14 songs but the CD player would read it as if there were 52 tracks.

How have you seen the narrative around regional Mexican music change in your lifetime? Do you feel part of that narrative?

Eric: To be honest, not really. I mean, it’s huge on a world scale right now, but in the areas around where I grew up, it’s always loomed large. The kind of ubiquity where your parents and people around you were never outright banging that stuff per se, but they knew every word and every song by heart. It was just a constant. That music might be new to the mainstream and to a lot of non-Latin Americans, but in the zone it’s always reigned supreme, and when those audiences get tired of it (which they will), it will still reign supreme in this zone. I don’t really consider us as part of regional Mexican music, not canonically. Maybe one day we’ll write a song that’s an umpteenth as good as Los Relampagos Del Norte’s worst song and I’ll think differently. 

Joaquin: The narrative hasn’t changed that much. Back in the day (2009, 2010s) when I started to listen to regional music, El Komander was singing anthems to sicarios and Los Buitres de Culiacan were writing romantic songs about being narcotraficantes. Now, the kids, they are still writing to the narcos, but now they are more straightforward, calling the "important people" by their names. I listened to regional Mexican because it was imposed on me by the chofers when I had to take the rutas to school. Didn’t have any other choice than to enjoy it. If you listen to it you have to feel part of the narrative to enjoy it, so yeah I would say yes as a LISTENER I feel part of it.

Are there any genres of music you don’t personally feel connected to in any way, but still love?

Eric: Indigenous NSBM from Mexico.

Joaquin: Mexican ska. As a kid it was the most fun music to dance at a quinceanera. Ya saben.

What is your relationship with sampling?

Eric: I learned sampling from being into hip hop with my friend Andres Beaschochea aka Linus. His dad sold electronics at the flea markets and he’d frequently come into having like a 202 or a Dr. Sample or an MPC in his possession for a few precious days before his old man sold it off. The flea market was indescribably important to me and him, we just COMBED that thing for any traces of subculture or nonlinearity, for every 30 Johnny Mathis or Dr. Zhivago LPs you’d maybe run into one or two things that mystified you; Wyndham Hill, library music, haunted house sounds, Coltrane, Phillip Glass, or Erik Satie. I remember we found an LP that was just Vincent Price talking about Satanism. We’d buy a lot of trash and spend a long time chopping it up on whatever machine was at hand, he had such a good grip of timing and cuts for such a young kid. My mind was more rigid and boom bap-ish. He showed me how to sample without that grid imposed onto my cutting or thinking. 

I think sampling when it’s done correctly is more generative and impressive than writing original shit. It’s the same way Dickies and a button up will always be timeless but couture art school shit will look dated a few years removed from its release. We don’t need more clothes, we need to find the swag limits of the ones that have already been made. Why are they still cool? Why can’t they be fucked with? Why does one looped second of Isaac Hayes bang harder than entire genres of “original music?” I don’t know but I’m gonna keep looking into it. 

Joaquin: It’s all about the present moment. My experience with the nowness.

Do you have any dream collaborations?

Eric: Comando LR.

Joaquin: Mmmmm... With any banda sinaloense that’s playing on a beach in Rosarito.

How about non-musical influences?

Eric: Alright it’s not exactly non-musical, but more of how I never encountered this as music, just as a constant sound environment in the area I grew up in. We lived a half mile from a pecan orchard and farm, and nonstop all day and all night in the late fall and through the winter there was the sound of this machinery going, hydraulic whirring and hissing and popping and coughing. Just machine sounds, and since it was around Thanksgiving/Christmas there was always the distant sounds of multiple parties; corridos going, ballads, children screaming, gunshots, loud cursing, and what was left of the frequencies of sub bass from a polka or a huapango, always incomplete, always far off and echoing before it made its way into my ears. These sounds in the evening and into the dead of night would mix into one beautiful overwhelming din. I stood many a night just listening. Never considering it too closely but always comforted by its constancy. When we started to play as Nudo, when we arrived at our eureka moment ’sound’, I realized that it was not too dissimilar from that sound in the distance out in the sticks where I grew up. 

Joaquin: Chespirito, La Hora Feliz and Mearleu-Ponty.