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Illustration by
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July 01, 2025
For nearly a century, leisurely strolling through the Colombian cities of Cartagena and Barranquilla has meant being ready to party on any given corner. Booming from colorful sound systems known as picós, the sticky coastal air buzzes with a dizzying mix of Jamaican soca, Ghanaian highlife, Congolese soukous, Arab disco, and local staples like salsa and champeta. These mobile discos, usually family-owned and passed down through generations, are synonymous with the neighborhoods where each clandestine party was formalized into a micro-economy. Picós are emblazoned with cheeky names and flashy visual identities, with the entrepreneurial selectors known as picoteros gaining notoriety with “exclusive” record collections procured through port bartering and specialized brokers.
Picoteros vary widely in their approaches. Consider the preservationist efforts of Pickup El Coreano in Barranquilla, which adheres to a classic vinyl format for a more artisanal, throwback feeling. Then there’s Cartagena’s El Rey de Rocha, a touring Goliath that fills local baseball fields and overseas halls with a tech-forward set up of digital screens and large lighting rigs. The euphoric free-for-all of picó encapsulates the layered idiosyncrasies of the Colombian Caribbean, where race, class, and colonial history coalesce into a uniquely collective listening experience, distinct from the sonideros of Mexico or the radiolas of Brazil.
The DJ and visual artist Edna Martinez grew up in this sonic and cultural melange. On her new compilation, Picó: Sound System Culture From The Colombian Caribbean, the Berlin-based curator takes crate-digging to new heights, assembling a globe-spanning tracklist that serves as a rhythmic history lesson. One of the earliest featured cuts is “Como Duele Una Traicion,” sung by Esternina Reyes, better known as La Calandria, which spotlights the popularity of Puerto Rican jíbaro music during the 1950s and ‘60s. The cut was emblematic of Cartagena picós El Químico, El Gran Tony, and El Ciclón, also known for spinning Antillean genres like descarga, pachanga, rumba, and mambo.
Martinez is a native of Cartagena, a popular tourist destination she describes as “naturally musical” yet fragmented by racial and wealth inequality. Hailing from one of the city’s many peripheral, low-income neighborhoods, she recalls the windows in her grandmother’s home rattling under the bass of a picó that played at a nearby cock pit. After a decade in Europe, she holds on to noise as a sort of immigrant comfort, musing, “The thing that drives me crazy in Germany is the silence!”
But noise is also resistance, and in the Caribbean melting pot that bred picó, music remains a crucial vehicle of memory. Picoteros famously tested their records in the town of San Basilio de Palenque, banking on the tastemaking of a community whose percussive history laid the foundations of cumbia and champeta. Founded in 1603 in the foothills of Montes de Maria, Palenque was the first settlement of free slaves in the Americas, most of whom escaped the transatlantic trade in which Cartagena was a gruesome protagonist. Traditions of drumming, dance, hair care, and even language have stood the test of time; the Palenquero tongue is a singular blend of Spanish, Portuguese, and Bantu. And upon the influx of African records, DJs and bandleaders maximized a kinship that never felt foreign, as on the compilation highlight “Puxa Odette,” a vivacious Angolan semba performed by Conjunto Ana N’gola, colloquially referred to as “El Palenquero.”
To that end, the compilation also explores the African music boom of the 1970s, when records from Nigeria and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) arrived on merchant ships—and rejuvenated picó repertoires. “Egbe Ne Lueli” (by the trumpeter Zeal Onyia) and “Igbala Oso” (by Peacocks International Highlife Band) trace the formative lineage of Afrobeat and mbaqanga down to their eventual Colombian descendant, champeta. Nodding to this most recent chapter, Martinez included The Shoe Laces’ breezy “Isitha Somuntu,” a jealously guarded signature record of Picó El Conde; in the 1990s the song was flawlessly covered by a team of musicians contracted by El Rey de Rocha, sewing the seeds of champeta’s hybrid originals.
“In the early days, picoteros scratched out the center label on their records so nobody could copy them,” says Martinez, underscoring the fierce competition between established sound systems. “We’re talking about music that came in English, French, or Lingala, so people gave each song and genre their own names.” Notable examples include “Igbala Oso,” which became known as “El Guanaso,” while “Isitha Somuntu” is often referred to as “La Muñe.” “It’s so funny how we treat songs from Congo and Mozambique like anthems and don’t even know what they’re called,” she adds. “But these are working-class folks in the barrios, not academics and researchers, so in many ways this practice redefined the music and made it unique to each picó, and ultimately to the culture.”
Human connection is the principal catalyst behind Martinez’s work of the past decade. In September 2017, she launched El Volcán – El Orgullo de Berlin, a picó party complete with neon art and live percussion that fostered a space of tropical communion for the city’s rapidly growing Latin American diaspora. Two months later, she debuted another recurring fête called LatinArab, exploring the many intersections of Latin and Middle Eastern music over centuries of immigration and cultural osmosis. In 2021, Martinez was invited to helm a monthly picó show on Worldwide FM, expanding her influence as an ambassador for the Colombian Caribbean. And her eventual move to NTS Radio, where she now presides over a sonically voracious series focused on champeta, has yielded one of the station’s most beloved offerings in recent years.
“It’s astonishing how in the Colombian Caribbean you can find music that connects you to the rest of the world,” says Martinez, whose own in-compilation remixes leap from the Algerian disco of Afous’s “Anavdhou” to the Guadeloupan gwo ka of Erick Cosaque’s “Ajaccio.” The album curation began in 2020, but was stalled by the pandemic and the licensing challenges of generational hand-offs. Now with the release finally on the horizon, a documentary companion piece is slated for later this year, featuring interviews with artists, legendary picoteros, and label heads, bridging the countless musical dialogues between the Caribbean and Africa.
“Picó was historically subject to exclusion, and it’s just now being recognized as a vibrant and beautiful culture,” reflects Martinez. “Picó forged a local identity throughout the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, before we were having conversations about minorities and Afro roots. That’s why people love their picós, and defend them, and get their logos tattooed. Picós represent neighborhoods and entire families. It’s pop culture we don’t take for granted. It’s not like the government gave everyone a corner and a grant. So there’s a lot of beauty in that periphery, and within that beauty, freedom.”
