With walkmans and dumbphones returning from the grave, someone who can translate the lives of the first tapes explains how music was experienced in a galaxy not far away, at a time when globalization was but a mere murmur.

In a clash of two mythologies, it was Quetzalcoatl Street where Thorvald Pazos Haga — one of the hidden pillars of Oaxaca’s music scene — experienced live rock in Mexico for the first time in the late ‘80s.

“My first live music events I ever attended were gigs back in 1987, ‘88,” Pazos Haga, Oaxaca-born of Swedish ancestry, recalls. “Just around the corner, there was a party hall and this party hall gradually began to be utilized to host rock gigs. The metalheads, metal musicians have been the ones with the most energy, who worked the hardest to play their music, to listen to it, to share it with others and to make the movement grow.”

Since then, music consumption feels otherworldly, the lifelong music enthusiast explains. A return to physical media and a decentralised music culture thus poses an opportunity to travel in time and foster a more creative relationship with sound.

“Nowadays, young people and people in general listen to a lot of music on their phones. So I think that in doing so, they become trapped by what is dictated by the media owners,” Pazos Haga says. “So you no longer stumble upon things; instead, your personal taste begins to be steered toward whatever the media happens to be playing.”

For him, the journey with the medium began with vinyls, which were not a collector’s item but still hard enough to find in a rural city like Oaxaca in the ‘70s.

“I was lucky enough that my dad and my mom listened to different music styles and genres from jazz, rock and roll to Mexican music,” the now record shop owner says. “The first records I bought, my first vinyls, were for a birthday back in 1979. It was the Foxy album that featured the track ‘Get Off.’”

Buying a vinyl back then was not the same as driving fifteen minutes to Broadway Records. Oaxaca was not an industrialized city yet, department stores weren’t even a dream, next to the street markets that hid around a dozen record shops at the time.

“You bought [records] based on the covers, you’d buy the records that caught your eye, that you liked for the cover art and design,” Pazos Haga said. “Nowadays, when I chat with my friends who are in their fifties, we recall ‘how we used to buy records, based entirely on the covers.’ There weren’t any music magazines in the city, there were one or two in Mexico City about rock or pop music but none that made it to Oaxaca.”

More of an act of faith than true conviction, characteristic of Latin American syncretism, the life-long bassist explains, music was a mysterious happening. It was a chat with a store owner, the exchange of an apocryphal cassette, a half-achieved recording.

“That’s how you bought [records], in between chats with classmates. School was the way to find new music, by exchanging cassettes,” Pazos Haga explains. “In my case, cassettes were used primarily for recording the things I liked or for swapping music.”

His first introduction to mixtapes in ‘84, while the Discman made its debut in Japan the same year, speaks to the history that physical media holds. Lining the walls of his record shop, cassettes stand as a testament to a time when globalization hadn’t reached music but tunes still found their way around the world.

“In the case of traditional music, there have always been new ways of making it, there is a fusion that new artists or the youth make with Oaxacan music,” Pazos Haga explains, holding titles like “Skapotecos” and “Electric sierreño.” “Traditional music is mixed with electronic music, hip-hop, rock overtones and that way traditional music also finds new color with modern mixes.”

“So I decided I liked this so much that I started mixing in 1984, turning practically into a DJ at school parties,” Pazos Haga recalls, as if foreshadowing his career as a music producer. During his tenure as a DJ, he played genres like disco and high energy while also attending rock gigs and infiltrating local scenes to understand the subcultures enriching them.

Picking up radio waves at midnight and asking relatives in Sweden and Mexico City for radio recordings, Thorvald opened his horizons while stray cassettes began insinuating electric guitars and distortion in his cobblestone streets.

“The bands that we heard of among ourselves as teens were those that called themselves ‘hard rock,’ heavy metal, that played thrash,” Pazos Haga says, naming underground fusion bands and international one-hit-wonders that only some dive bars remember. “I started getting involved in gigs myself because I began working around 1987 with local bands, handling the sound setup. I really liked that whole aspect of audio engineering and since my friends who had bands and were playing out needed a technician, I stepped in to take on that role.”

Chameleon-like in his music taste and performance, Pazos Haga collaborated with childhood idols, historic bands and new talents in a multitude of ways — as a musician, producer and mixer. With the fervor of those who maintain ancient temples across Oaxaca, Thorvald tends to his shop and studio in a mission to preserve the physical testimonies of music.

“I never had any problem with liking rock and blues so much, later on, as I came to understand Son Cubano, tropical music, or cumbia — or even disco or High Energy — I liked those too,” Pazos Haga says, recognizing a fragmented music landscape. “Hating on other genres, it causes things to grow more slowly. Divisions exist and it’s only natural that’s bound to happen. The problem arises when, perhaps from your guitar, or your jarana, your congas, you declare that the other genre is bad or ugly.”

Surfing the new wave of analog media, Pazos Haga and his fellow unnamed heroes stand as the backbone of music culture, not industry. Offering the spaces and expertise for music to thrive, Oaxaca’s own thunder patron explains his record shop stands as a venue for local artists to take their performance from their room to the international stage. Taking on the role of those who welcomed him into the music world, Pazos Haga now stands as a crossroad between an isolated past and an expanding music scene.

“Ever since I opened the shop and the studio, I envisioned both being connected because many of the records that I sold in the early days had almost no one from Oaxaca. So I said ‘no, at least when it comes to rock, we need a store and a studio to provide a showcase to exhibit the music of Oaxaca,’” he who breathes and bleeds music says. “That is precisely what we hope to achieve: that music reaches everyone.”