Steven Brown

Born in Illinois, Steven Brown moved to San Francisco, where he founded Tuxedomoon with Blaine L. Reininger, then to New York. After playing a central part in SF’s post-punk golden age and New York's No Wave scene, the band left the toxic atmosphere of Reagan’s America in the early 1980s, wandered around Europe, and settled in Brussels for twelve years. Their ability to crystallize a certain dark and romantic zeitgeist quickly turned them into one of the most influential bands in Europe, yet their unique music transcended all genres and included incredibly wide parameters –rock, electronics, minimal music, classical, jazz, Gypsy music and pop were all simultaneously transmutated into a quasi-prescient blend. 

Years later, Steven fell in love with Mexico while changing planes on the way to Belize, and decided to settle there, in 1993. First in Mexico City, then in Oaxaca, where he built his own house. He’s been regularly returning to Europe to record and perform with Tuxedomoon, while developing various activities in Mexico, where he founded several bands (including Nine Rain and the Ensamble Kafka wind ensemble), worked as a cultural activist, supported indigenous brass bands, and rubbed shoulders with the Zapatistas in Chiapas. He’s been running Cinema Domingo, which started as weekly projections of old films in his house, then developed into a band (Cinema Domingo Orchestra) specialised in writing and publicly performing new soundtracks to old movies. Steven loves Oaxaca, its landscape, and the unavoidable daily encounters with bright and dark sides of Mexico’s history& culture.