- Michelle Lhooq offers her take on Aphex Twin's debut performance in Mexico.
- Ceremonia GNP, a one-day festival a few hours outside Mexico City, has been bringing buzz-worthy indie and legacy acts to Mexico for the last seven years. This year's lineup felt especially relevant to the current global electronic music zeitgeist: headliners Aphex Twin and Massive Attack scratched the '90s nostalgia itch, Kaytranada, Modeselektor, DJ Koze, and Jon Hopkins hit the middle-ground sweet spot, and Rosalía, Yaeji, Pussy Riot, Bad Gyal and a bevy of other femme and queer acts repped the wave of what's next.
Playing in Mexico for the first time, Aphex Twin began with the ambient drone of his own "Tassels," his famous logo flickering to the reverberations on a fortress of LED screens. He remained hidden behind this elaborate lighting rig, the carrot-colored top of his head occasionally peeking out. Aside from a smattering of his own tracks ("Domino," "1 Chink101," "X - Rays," "Isopropanol," "Donkey Rhubarb"), his set was a hodgepodge of angsty industrial, breakbeat and deconstructed club music. Jako Maron's folkloric atmospherics in "Maloya Valsé Chok 1" bled into the disembodied wails of "Whip" by Naked. The emotive synths of IVVVO's "Untitled" built into the frenzied war drums of "The Curtain Fall" by Tomás Urquieta. (It seems that Aphex Twin has been listening to a lot of Halcyon Veil and Lorn—the latter was played five times in 90 minutes.) Sometimes, tracks were loosely mixed into each other, but often they were interspersed with a few seconds of silence, leading to strange lulls filled with the screams of his devout fans.
While it was refreshing to hear such wildly challenging tracks during a main stage headline performance, it was impossible to ignore the inherent inequality of a high-earning artist playing songs by underground producers who earn a sliver of his income and remain uncredited (except on Reddit and SoundCloud comments), since Aphex Twin hasn't posted his tracklist. This tension was further exacerbated by the barrage of visuals, from a 3D rendering of his grinning face on a cheerleader's body to his logo mapped on the faces of people in the crowd, who were being filmed live by a camera crew. After a while, the non-stop deluge of his logo started to feel like a tired branding exercise.
Luckily, there were moments of real transgression and transcendence to be found in other corners of the festival—especially in the tent curated by the local queer collective Traición, whose lineup was the main reason I blew a hole in my wallet flying out for the festival. The queer dance crew Young Boy Dancing Group drew gasps and giggles from the crowd as they stuck candles and lasers up their asses and contorted their bodies into quasi-religious transfigurations. The South African duo FAKA commanded the crowd with their hypnotic, slinking take on gqom, while the NAAFI affiliate Debit's rhythmic house and hard techno drew drag queens in stilettos to vogue on top of speakers. False Witness's "In The Dark" elicited screams from the rave-ready crowd.
Ceremonia GNP took place in a sprawling asphalt lot, with bland LED-lit stage designs and amusement park-style attractions reminiscent of the corporate festival aesthetics of Coachella or Electric Daisy Carnival. But it was these little moments of ecstasy, intimacy and anal-laser delights that made being lost in a mass crowd amidst blinking Corona ads worth it. They were a reminder that the global queer underground is thriving—and that one day, they might be the headliners, not just footnotes in an uncredited set.