Founded in 1994, Ultra-red are an audio activist group producing radio broadcasts, street actions, performances, recordings, installations and public actions. Exploring acoustic space as enunciative of social relations, the group's work radicalizes the conventions of electro-acoustic and ambient music. In practice and membership, Ultra-red occupy the borders between art and political organizing. Ultra-red have developed projects around a variety of urban ambiences including needle exchange (Soundtrax, 1996), public sex (Second Nature, 1999), public housing (Structural Adjustments, 2000), spaces of resistance to global capital (Value System, work in progress), labor (Social Factory, work in progress) and education (School of Echoes, work in progress).

"La Economía Nueva" is composed entirely from source recordings made at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, on the US / Mexico border, on 10th December 2000 – United Nations International Human Rights Day. Sounds were taken from demonstrations held that day in opposition to "Operation Gatekeeper." This massive militarization of the border between California, USA and Baja California, Mexico, has had the practical effect of regulating the flow of cheap labor while capital and jobs freely cross the border thanks to official "free trade" policies such as NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement).

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