Camilo Lara is an obsessive record collector, music label executive and, lately, successful musician.

By LARRY ROHTER


MEXICO CITY - A lot of Camilo Lara’s friends still find it strange to have to regard him as a budding pop star. They are more accustomed to thinking of him as an obsessive record collector or as the chairman of the EMI Music record label here, not as an artist who played to thousands of people recently at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio, California.

But as the founder of the band the Mexican Institute of Sound, Mr. Lara has carved out a comfortable and expanding niche for himself on the international music scene over the last four years. His quirky but infectious blend of traditional Mexican folk styles with electronica, hip-hop and even Bollywood sounds is increasingly surfacing not just on dance floors, but also on television and film soundtracks and in commercials and video games.

“Camilo is a real connoisseur of music who knows about all kinds of weird stuff,”said Mike D of the Beastie Boys, whose first contact with Mr. Lara came in his capacity as a record executive.“Like a lot of people of our generation, he believes that anything is fair game, that anything and everything is of interest and can be made to fit together.”

Not bad for a one-man project that started almost as a private joke. Mr. Lara, 33, a former D.J. and radio host, used to amuse himself and his friends by making sound collages as a Christmas gift each year. But it was only after a record label in Spain heard of his compilations and contacted him that he realized he could make the jump from record company executive to musician.

“It was like turning theory into practice,”said Mr. Lara, who remains the chairman of EMI Mexico.“I had always wanted to make music that included everything I liked and had influenced me because I thought that when you confront the music of Latin America with pop - cumbia with‘Star Wars’or the Gladiators with Perez Prado - the result of that mixture could only be something interesting.”

Though initially conceived strictly as a solo studio undertaking, the Mexican Institute of Sound has gradually evolved into a live band, consisting at the moment of two D.J.’s, a drummer, a bass player and Mr. Lara on keyboards.

Mr. Lara’s growth has been aided by an encyclopedic knowledge of music and a record collection that is legendary here: some 45,000 vinyl albums, about 30,000 CDs and plenty of rare eight-tracks. Rock dominates his holdings, reflecting the tastes of his teenage years, when he was a fan of bands like XTC, the Smiths and Bauhaus. But he said he had listened to everything at least once, and he seems to have almost instant recall.

“Camilo has a brain like an elephant for tracks that he has already heard,”said Holger Beier, a German producer and songwriter who works with Mr. Lara.“He searches really deep and has tastes that are really wide, from hip-hop to Hindi music. It may seem chaotic in the studio, but he knows what he wants. He listens and then throws everything into this big Mexican pot.”

Mr. Lara said that one of the first records he remembers buying was the soundtrack to a Mexican children’s television show written by the Mexican composer and arranger Juan Garcia Esquivel, famous for his use of exotic instruments, manipulation of stereo effects and lush orchestrations. That led Mr. Lara to a fascination with pioneers of electronic music, like Perrey-Kingsley, Bruce Haack and Pierre Henry, and orchestrators of exotica like Les Baxter and Raymond Scott.

Another huge influence on Mr. Lara’s anything-goes approach is cumbia. Elites in Latin American tend to look down on that genre as tacky. But Mr. Lara opens both the new CD and his previous one,“Pinata,”from 2007, with cumbias, partly“to make a statement because I tend to be a revisionist and love things that history seems to have crushed or which seem without relevance or were never on anybody’s radar screen.”