Picó: Sound System Culture From The Colombian Caribbean

Released on Strut Records in June 2025, Picó documents a sound system culture that's defined street parties in Cartagena and Barranquilla for decades, built on rare African and Caribbean vinyl imported and played on towering, custom-built speaker rigs. Curator Edna Martinez, who grew up around picó culture, traces the deep musical exchange between Colombia and West and Central Africa — highlife, soukous, mbaqanga and champeta all sit side by side here, alongside a handful of her own edits. It's a compilation that treats crate-digging as serious cultural documentation rather than nostalgia, and offers a genuinely different entry point into music that rarely gets this kind of context outside specialist circles.

Edna Martinez is a Colombian DJ, producer and visual artist based in Berlin, whose work centres on the picó sound system culture she grew up around on Colombia's Caribbean coast. She's spent years researching and collecting the African and Caribbean records that shaped picó parties, tracing musical lineages that rarely get proper documentation outside the scene itself. This compilation reflects that research directly, pairing rare archival tracks with her own contemporary edits, and positions her as one of the most thoughtful voices currently working to preserve and contextualise a culture too often reduced to a stylistic reference point.