Consumer Guide Album

Edna Martinez Presents Picó!: Sound System Culture From the Colombian Caribbean [Strut, 2025]
Unlike the radio show featuring Congolese soukous guitar maestro Diblo Dibala that Berlin-based Colombian DJ Martinez assembled last year, this one goes straight ahead and showcases pure picó, which is what becomes of African LPs when they're absorbed as anonymously as is practical, like with their labels scraped off, into local Colombian sound systems commandeered by local DJs called picós. Melding Dibala into this concept was a stroke—he's a unique musician whose style fit right in. But Martinez's command of the many variants that result when Afropop tracks like these are blended into hybrids that's she assembled here into an album that retains an articulate, congruent, varied Afro-Caribbean groove—a groove that even if you're not dancing feels like an Afropop subgenre with its own unique and fundamental identity even if it's never inspired its own pet name. A−