Mexico City’s late-night raves take place in a wide spectrum of clubs from dives to bottle service spots, but also in galleries and underground spaces. There’s a community of club kids in oversized tees and cut-out sweatsuits who ride their personal trips, lace-gloved hands making maps in the air in response to the DJ’s machinations.
Dancefloor wraith Wasted Fates is one of the favorite captains of this scene. Today he and Extasis Records release his Data Nomadics LP, an emotionally intense, 16-track map to the after-hours scene where Wasted thrives. It’s not music to space out on — syncopated beat delays and frenetically layered percussion moments make Data Nomadics an audio trip that demands you to keep your focus on the beat, your body, and the interaction of those two things.
“A club track is what makes you move,” says Wasted. “It’s a conversation between the bodies of those who dance, of how well you translate the external bodies and where you bring the senses of each one. In these tracks, sometimes I look for universality and in others I look for new forms of chaos.”
This is his first major album release, but Wasted Fates (aka Octavio Kh) is far from a novice. The Monterrey native is a 15-year veteran of producing, and says it was his sisters who first introduced him to electronic music when he was still a preteen. At 16, he started attending the raves that raged in the areas outside of Monterrey.
“I loved the energy and spending the night dancing until the morning came,” he says. “I challenged myself to see who could last longer, me dancing or the DJ playing – [it was] almost like a game, like a workout.”
He moved to Mexico City three years ago and was suddenly surrounded by producers — among them the NAAFI crew and Extasis Records, founded by Lao and Jack’ie Lo — who were just as obsessed with creating alternate universes as he was. “I had always made music on my own,” says Wasted Fates. “But when I moved here, I clicked with everyone really quickly. Everything has unfolded from there.”
The network of like-minded beatmakers gave him the support he needed to create this labor-intensive project, even when two of his computers died. The technological challenge only made the album a rumination on “the survival of being able to transport yourself without an interface,” as he puts it.
Wasted is already at work on an EP that will be released by NAAFI in 2017. He describes it as “misty, more intimate and with diffused elements. Production has been incredible and it’s turning out very pretty.”
Wasted Fates’ Data Nomadics EP is out now on Extasis Records.