MARFA Part of the Marfa Lights Festival will include the premier of MXTX: A Cross Border Exchange, presented by Ballroom Marfa.
The event is scheduled for 7 p.m. Sept. 4 at the Marfa Visitor Center.
MXTX is a live performance, album and open-source audio sample library crossing physical and social boundaries through collaborative exchange.
The project involves more than 40 DJ-producers and composers from both sides of the Rio Grande.
A collective of the contributing musicians will travel to Marfa to take the stage for the West Texas Premier of the project as part of the 35th annual Marfa Lights Festival.
The Marfa Lights Festival will take place from Sept. 2-4.
“This project has been a long time in the making,” Music Curator at Marfa Ballroom Sarah Melendez said. “It’s a project that was initiated by Golden Hornet and composer Graham Reynolds out of Texas.”
Reynolds is a noted and beloved composer out of Austin who has scored a lot of Richard Linklater films.
“He’s done many incredible projects,” Melendez said. “We’ve worked with him for several different years on different projects and interesting projects that are West Texas specific.”
With this project, Reynolds has gathered 40 DJ composers and producers, 20 of which are from Mexico and 20 from Texas.
“It’s a very diverse array of musical composers and what they did is actually create a sound library that is free and accessible to the public,” Reynolds said. “It’s all kinds of little sound samples that they contributed.”
Other artists included are Coka Trevino, who’s an art entrepreneur from Monterrey, Mexico.
“It’s amazing to see this finished product,” Trevino said. “I’ve been working with this project since the very beginning and then the library, you can imagine, it’s hundreds of short pieces and to hear the album and hear it live is just mind-blowing. … We’re so proud of the people who have participated. There were so many passionate people involved with this project. It’s a dream come true to be a part of it.”
Trevino is also the founder of The Projecto.
“We do a bunch of curation for music and the arts,” Trevino said of The Projecto. “We also do creative consulting.”
Another artist included is Felipe Perez Santiago, a highly-acclaimed Mexico City composer, sound artist and current artist in residence at California’s SETI Institute.
Ramon Amezcua “Bostich” of the groundbreaking Nortec Collective, based in Tijuana is also included along with Ruben Albarran who is a renowned vocalist and activist from Mexico City and the lead singer of the legendary Café Tacvba and Gabriela Ortiz, Latin Grammy nominated composer and recipient of Mexico’s National Prize for Arts and Literature.
“What they did is an example of this project, they commissioned 12 really special artists to come and create a song and from that, they created an album,” Melendez said. “The album came out on six degrees records in April 2022 and it was super anticipated and it’s been doing well. All of this was supposed to happen two years ago but with the pandemic and everything, it’s just taken a third of a different life on. It’s been difficult with international travel getting ensembles together to be able to premier this amazing project.”
The project premiered back in April at the Fusebox Festival in Austin.
Melendez said that a couple of DJs will be in attendance including Burden and Garcia.
“Orion Garcia who is one of the curators of the project, he’s one of the main DJs that’s performing live,” Melendez said. “He’s doing some live mixing. Then Vanessa Burden is opening up for everybody.”
Showing a free premier of the project in Marfa means a lot, Melendez said.
“Really, the project is rooted in a cross border collaboration,” Melendez said. “It highlights the permeability of the border, culturally and musically. It’s showing what it can be like to build bridges through music instead of walls. That was one of the things that came up early on in the project. It was really the whole idea was seeded out of the divisiveness and politicization of how the border was being contextualized and then showing how we can bridge borders culturally through the arts. Basically, to have that premier in Marfa, close to the border feels wonderful.”
Marfa is a city that’s long known to be a small town with a strong arts culture and this premier only amplifies that.
“It’s just something special to see live music in Marfa,” Melendez said. “There’s something really beautiful about there being a live concert and people to hear it throughout the entire town. There’s something that’s really special about that. It’s so remote. Musicians have to make a special effort to come out and organizations have to make a special effort to host people, I think, whereas in cities, it’s more accessible and things are happening all the time. Festivals like this have a different feeling. It also helps pull people out of their homes and daily lives. It allows them to participate in something different. I’ve never been somewhere where you get to see so much world class music with a small audience.”
For more information about the premiere of MXTX: A Cross-Border Exchange, go to tinyurl.com/4rpetyew.
If you go
- >> What: MXTX: A Cross-Border Exchange.
- >> When: 7 p.m. Sept. 4.
- >> Where: Marfa Visitor Center.
