It's been a year and a half and people are still talking about "El Gallinazo." It was January 2022, the night of an all-night rave at the ex-Balneario Olímpico, a waterpark near the Mexico City airport that comes alive at night as a hulking, brutalist warehouse venue. Jeff Mills was the marquee act, and his tour manager was stressed. Just before doors, he'd asked the promoter to relay a message to the opening DJs to please refrain from playing too fast, so as not to diminish the intensity of Mills's set. Regal86 (who didn't want to reveal his full name due to visa considerations) was one of the openers.

"The crew that comes out to my gigs, they come because I play fast," he told me over Korean fried chicken on a foul February night in Brooklyn. "So what am I gonna do? They'd be pissed if I played some half-assed set." He started out at a brisk 160 BPM.

"Then this guy came out of nowhere and asked me to slow it down 40 BPMs. And I was like, 'hell no,'" he said with a glimmer in his eye. At that moment, Regal86 happened to be scrolling through a folder of tracks on his CDJ screen when he landed on it: "El Gallinero (Axis Remix)," often referred to by its nickname, "El Gallinazo." The club was heaving and, by all accounts, the molly going around that night was strong. "Aw shit," he thought, and pressed play. "Then I looked down at the crowd. Yep—total shitshow."

It wasn't until the next afternoon, when he rolled over and reached for his phone, that he realised what he'd done. He was tagged in half a dozen Facebook posts. "Why the fuck would you play 'El Gallinazo?'" one person wrote. Another person DM'd him and told him to retire from DJing. The gist of these posts was that Regal86 hadn't only disrespected God himself, Jeff Mills, but had flaunted the unwritten rules of techno and brought shame upon the Mexican scene by making them look like a bunch of uneducated hicks. But Regal86's defenders were in the comments, too, accusing his detractors of being suck-ups who were desperate for validation from European and American DJs.

Produced by Ramirez, an Italian group with a Colombian frontman, "El Gallinazo" is a gabber track built around the sound of a chicken going buk-buk-buk-bukaw—hence the name, which comes from the Spanish word for rooster. The Dutch label Thunderdome released it in 1993, and from there—somehow—it ended up as the soundtrack to a recurring segment on the Mexican trash TV show Pácatelas. Part of the show's twisted comedic appeal was how the host, Paco Stanley, humiliated his sidekick, Mario Bezares, by making him do a strenuous chicken dance whenever "El Gallinazo" came on. (Bezares later spent a year in jail in conjunction with Stanley's murder, but that's a story for another time.) On one such occasion, when Bezares was doing the worm, a sizable bag of cocaine fell from his pocket on live TV, a scandal that enshrined the song in Mexican popular memory.

When Regal86 dropped "El Gallinazo" just after midnight on that January night, he wasn't just trolling the techno purists. "It's high-energy, it has Spanish lyrics, it's funny, it's satirical," he said, listing all the things he likes about it. "But it's also just a big tune." And though it may seem like a lot of fuss over playing one track at a club, the episode revealed a rift in the scene based on whether people found it endearing or embarrassing to bring Mexican pop culture into techno's high-minded, cosmopolitan milieu. Three months later, he uploaded a track to SoundCloud called "El Campanazo," a mash-up of "El Gallinazo" with Jeff Mills' "The Bells" that's so smooth it could blow the roof off a dance floor even in a country where they don't get the inside joke. That was when Regal86 became a legend.

Before he was a technero, Regal86 was a hiphopero. The 30-year-old DJ and producer grew up in Monterrey, the industrial powerhouse of Northern Mexico, and the country's second largest city. Because its economy is so tied to cross-border commerce, the region is heavily influenced by US culture, so while hip-hop never really took off in many parts of Mexico, a small but loyal scene developed in Monterrey as a result of the exchange between Mexicans and Chicanos. "My mom and my grandparents used to drive to the supermarket in Laredo, Texas," he told me. "It was cheaper and had better products, like bread and deodorant and stuff."

When he was 14 or 15, he downloaded FL Studio, which he still uses today, and started imitating Cypress Hill and Wu-Tang Clan beats because the software came with a sample pack that was supposed to make you sound like RZA. He rapped for a while, too—he was too embarrassed to tell me his old rap name—until he realised he was better suited to the buttons. By the time he was in college, he was producing and recording other rappers for walking-around money. He'd charge 50 pesos (around $5 USD at the time) for a beat, and 150 pesos for a studio recording session.

At the time, Monterrey was famous for its nightlife, which was anchored by the much-loved rock club Cafe Iguana, where Regal86 occasionally watched rap shows as a teenager. But the city, long considered one of Mexico’s safest, became a war zone almost overnight. The notoriously cruel Zetas cartel, seizing on the power vacuum caused by the US-backed war on drugs, had rolled in guns blazing to try and wrestle control of the region away from the Gulf Cartel. The bullet holes are still there in the facade of Cafe Iguana from when, around midnight on Sunday, May 22nd, 2011, narcos sprayed the club with automatic rifles for refusing to pay for their protection. Two clubgoers and two bouncers died.

At the forefront of the hardgroove revival, Regal86 has brought his unmistakable imprint to the retro techno subgenre.

Monterrey's city-wide curfew took effect right as Regal86 came of club-going age, so he had something of a stunted social life as a young adult, spending weekend nights locked in at home making beats by himself. "All the discipline I have now comes from that time when I was stuck indoors making a beat a day," he said. "At least it was useful for something."

From the hardcore boom-bap of '90s Chicano-led groups like Cypress Hill and Funkdoobiest, Regal86 fell in love with the slow and syrupy sounds of Houston and Memphis hip-hop. His experiments with these influences culminated in the 2015 album Full Trouble, his favourite of the 40 self-releases on his Bandcamp, pairing cloud-rap synths with sub-bass that sounds like it's rattling from the trunk of a passing vehicle. He picked his artist name in reference to the 1986 Buick Regal, one of the cars that low-rider mechanics love to customise.

When the violence subsided and Monterrey nightlife cautiously reopened, Regal86's first gig was at a small club called Art Studios, which has a DJ booth in the middle of the dance floor and a garage door that opened so people could hear the music as they walked by. The friend who invited him that night was also the person to turn him onto techno—funnily enough, by showing him a Jeff Mills track that sent him into an obsessive frenzy. "When I first get into some '90s DJ, for example, I go on YouTube and study everything they've ever done," he said. "I often find info on Blogspot sites that haven't been updated since the 2000s."

In an effort to reconcile these interests, Regal86 took '90s hip-hop instrumentals and chopped them into their constituent parts, before loading the drums and basslines into a sampler and reconstituting them as techno. With FL Studio, it's easy to add heavy swing to a pattern to give the beat an organic, galloping feel—the opposite of much of techno's automaton gait. By layering in shakers, brushed hi-hats and jazzy Detroit synth stabs, he arrived at a style that harkens back to the sub-genre hardgroove (RA editor Andrew Ryce refers to it lovingly as "bongo techno"), which is displayed with utmost virtuosity on his 2023 album La Onda.

That album is an homage to the 1993 cult film Blood In Blood Out, about Chicano gangs in East Los Angeles. It samples a number of rap groups that were big in LA at the time, as well as sound bites of dialogue from the movie. The album art—by Monterrey illustrator Adrian Leal—brings the aesthetic full circle with references to classic symbols of the culture: a low-rider rearing up on its hydraulic lift, a goth clown in baggy pants and an eight-ball rendered in a tattoo style. Musically, it fits within a lineage of Chicano techno producers like Santiago Salazar, DJ Rolando (AKA The Aztec Mystic) and Developer, whose lean but subtly funky sound—often associated with the Berlin club Tresor—is experiencing a revival with a new crop of DJs and dancers.

The Monterrey-born artist has burst onto the techno scene with a series of jaw-droppingly consistent releases.

But Regal86 isn't hitched to any genre. In fact, he has a remarkable ear for recreating all kinds of '90s and early '00s styles. When we spoke at dinner in Brooklyn, he was at the tail-end of an eight-stop US tour where, at each gig, he sold $60 USB sticks loaded with more than 500 original tracks: techno, jungle, drum & bass, garage, booty bass and, of course, his signature brand of dreamy rap instrumentals. He has no problem thinking about music as a business enterprise, and he even plays to his consumers' tastes by checking his Bandcamp stats and producing more of whichever genres are selling. He estimates he's earned enough off Bandcamp sales to buy himself the car he's always wanted. He said he heard six of his tracks being played at different clubs during his recent weekend in New York. "The New York DJs tend to play this one a lot," he said, pulling out his phone and pointing at one of the EPs on his Bandcamp page. "But this one here gets a lot of play in Los Angeles."

Last year, Regal86 quit his graphic design job at a creative agency in Monterrey and moved halfway across the country to Guadalajara in pursuit of a woman. They broke up within days. But he decided to keep the room he rented in a shared apartment with his friend and frequent collaborator Daniel Ceballos, AKA 1OO1O, owner of MoveLike Records. He has resisted the temptation to move to Mexico City, which is noteworthy because Mexico City is like a black hole that lures talent from other cities with the promise of high-profile gigs and media exposure. But he makes regular forays into the capital to play tastemaker clubs like YuYu, where he has an all-night residency that sold out the last two times, and buzzy roving parties like EXT. and Lapidación.

His seven-hour sets at YuYu are a feat. When people play that long, it's usually in the context of a more European afterhours style, where you let a track run for six to ten minutes before mixing out. Not Regal86: he plays tracks for three or four minutes while mixing on four channels simultaneously. As a producer, he has a direct-to-DJ mentality, releasing EPs every few months with tools that are designed to be looped and layered, including his recent package of "drumapellas," which are so sparse they're not even supposed to play as stand-alone songs. His own sets are a flurry of non-stop activity. "My mixing style is like heating up tortillas, and sometimes you get burnt," he laughed, blowing on the tips of his fingers.

Regal86's approach to the studio is monk-like. He once created a challenge for himself to finish one track a day for 30 days, then release all 30 as an album. He produces music in the box, with almost zero gear, using the laptop keys as a piano rather than splurge on an external keyboard. He's equally ascetic when it comes to touring. "I'm like, let me stay at your apartment and you can add what you would have spent to the fee," he said. "I don't care about taking selfies at the hotel or whatever, I just need to sleep."

His latest album La Onda is an arsenal of hardgroove that feels like a milestone for this new wave.

After our interview he sent me a photo of the "murder basement" he was crashing at during his New York stint. The amenities included a cot, a space heater and a concrete floor covered in stained white tarp. He always shows up fresh to his appointments nonetheless, keeping his scalp cropped with clippers he brings in his luggage, though he can't always do laundry and fears being invited to a shoes-off apartment when he's out of fresh socks.

As one of the few Mexican DJs getting booked in Europe these days, he's aware of his role as a kind of ambassador, and he rolls with it. He'll mix purist techno with remixes and edits of recognisable vocal tracks, including rap and R&B, but also regional styles like corridos, a folksy Mexican storytelling genre. This, and the fact that he mixes without headphones—using the waveforms on the CDJ screens—hasn't gone over well with some Mexican DJs. During his HÖR set last year, he abruptly mixed gangster rap and a couple of corridos and it produced a predictably polarised response. One Mexico City festival promoter started a flame war on Facebook by saying something along the lines of: "Thanks to this idiot, the Europeans are gonna think we're all a bunch of Speedy Gonzaleses." The promoter, who is white, was presumably referring to Regal86's brown skin, shaved head and loose-fitting fashion sense.

Historically, white DJs have been overrepresented in the Mexican electronic music scene, especially the more affluent social circles covered by international media. "You don't actually see that many brown DJs playing at certain clubs in Mexico City," Regal86 said. "And being white doesn't necessarily mean you have money, but there are certain beauty standards people like to see. You have to look a certain way on Instagram, you know?"

But the DJs who insist that techno is one specific thing and nothing else are starting to feel like a vestige of a bygone era. And when it comes to comments sections, the haters are greatly outnumbered by people who find Regal86's brown pride refreshing and reaffirming. "Did I just hear the word verga out loud during a HÖR Radio set?" one follower wrote below the controversial video in question, referring to the vulgar Mexican slang for "cool."

Regal86 may not yet have enough acolytes to play festivals like Dekmantel or Sónar, but he has what many DJs with five-figure fees covet: a loyal, grassroots fan base who are rooting for him to show the rest of the world what Mexico's made of.

"You don't actually see that many brown DJs playing at certain clubs in Mexico City," he said. "And being white doesn't necessarily mean you have money, but there are certain beauty standards people like to see."