Meet Medio Oriente, Chile’s wildest post-genre electronic collective
Get to know Segunda Mordida, C678924, Astrophysics, and more.
pc: @2gundamrdida and @sellomediooriente.
In the basements and abandoned lots of Santiago, Chile, students of the city are raving, two-stepping, and trance-dancing to the music of a tight-knit record label: Medio Oriente. I first came upon the collective through 2025’s MUNDO, the digital hardcore album by label founder Segunda Mordida (2MA). Mordida’s project sprints through breakbeats, pitch-modulated field recordings, and samples, at times sounding like an acoustic punk record that was mixed and mastered on a Nokia phone. In each track there are poignant lyrics, expressive feelings of misanthropy and paranoia.
The Medio Oriente label occupies a compelling new territory in the Santiago underground. Besides Segunda Mordida’s MUNDO, the label has put out a variety of other projects from producer-artists C678924 and DJ Daddy Yonqui; ambient artist Arboretum, and indie rock band Monitos Chinos. The group has co-hosted events in Santiago with artists like Umru and the Brazilian goth-experimental band Astrophysics.
Medio Oriente might consider themselves wayward descendants of La Nueva Escena — the Chilean rock scene that popped off in the 2010s with artists like Niños del Cerro. In 2019 and 2020, amid growing tensions within the country culminated in a series of massive demonstrations and riots throughout the country that were only exacerbated by years of COVID. Both Medio Oriente and La Nueva Escena channel authentic angst into a form of musical catharsis, though Medio Oriente's sounds more digitized and aggressive.
On Segunda Mordida's Bandcamp, his bio reads "desde 2019," the year of the Estallido Social riots. One could also look at his song “Gracias por la intervención estatal,” which writes an ironic and bitter thank you note to state-sanctioned violence: “They say there's no one outside, they say everything is fine / Women and children sleep, there's nothing left to fear... Thank you for the intervention, otherwise we would perish.”
Ahead, find a guide to the players in the Medio Oriente scene and other close influences in La Nueva Escena, making some of the most abrasive and inventive music in Chile’s underground.
