October 16, 2002

Sound systems

Sonidero Nacional the cure for your pain ...

Blanquito Man

TOY HERNANDEZ IS walking through the Mexican desert with a sound system on his back and a Rasta cap on his head. In the video for "El tren," a song by Mexican accordion giant Celso Piña that Hernandez produced through his Monterrey-meets-Kingston Matanchen Sound System, Hernandez plays the part of the drifter sonidero searching for sounds and spreading them into the open air.

In Latin America, sonideros are, in practice, DJs in that they play records and CDs for dancing crowds. But literally, a sonidero is a soundman, someone who speaks and breathes and transmits sound, someone who, in a sense, is sound. So much so that the term is even often used interchangeably to mean the person who plays the music and the sound system itself – the mixers, microphones, decks, effects boxes, and towers of bass-blasted speakers – that the music pours out of. The DJ who is the system that is the sound.

But in "El tren," there are no speaker towers; there is no dancehall yard, no bank of stacked gear, tangled wires, and twirling lights. Hernandez – the former DJ for hip-hop crew Control Machete – is alone and mobile, a sort of barrio Mexican Alan Lomax who, instead of collecting sounds to museumize them as authentic artifacts, collects sounds to mix, filter, sample, and distort. Hernandez marks the birth of a new breed of sonidero, the studio sonidero who takes cues from the traditional sonideros of outdoor and nightclub bailes and then applies their mix-and-MC techniques to studio recording. He's given his "sonidero nacional" treatment not only to Piña but to a whole array of new-school Latin American artists, including Julieta Venegas, Ely Guerra, Kinky, Los Tetas, Estopa, and Zurdok.

In the video he searches for his two collaborators: "Mr. Cumbia Man" Piña and Venezuelan ragga MC Blanquito Man, who orders Hernandez (whom he christens in Spanish patois as "the roots selectah") to "give it to the accordion hard in the echo chamber." The album "El tren" comes from, Celso Piña y Su Ronda Bogota's Mundo Colombia, is full of moments like this, where traditional Colombian cumbia and Mexican norteño wind up in a Mexi-Jamaican sound clash laced with digital rocksteady beat breaks and talk-over commentary. In the middle of "Yola veo" 's conventional lost-love laments, a deep, distorted voice reminds us that as acoustic and organic as the track might sound, we are still in sonidero territory. "For the whole Colombian world," it rumbles, "pure sonidero machine."

In the Colombian world that Piña and Hernandez pay their respects to, the sonidero machines are called picós (a Spanish take on "pick-up" amplifiers) and the DJs picoteros. The compilation Champeta Criolla Vol. 2 (Palenque) is put together so it sounds like a continuous picó party pressed to CD, complete with legendary Colombian selectors chatting between songs, rewinding tracks, and stuttering samples. "Another headache for my neighbor," boasts Chawala before the King Elio Boom explode into "El fulo." "If you want exclusives," El Conde promises before "El rico cuji," the Cape Verdean funk of Luis Tower, "El Conde is the Bible, the pure truth."

The music they all blast is champeta, shorthand for what happens when West Africa gets reintroduced to the once-upon-a-slave-trade Caribbean coastline of Colombia. In the late '70s West African sailors passed through the heavily African port cities of Cartagena and Baranquilla armed with LPs of soukous, highlife, and Afro-beat. The African sound soon met up with the Latin sound and champeta's "colombiafrica" fusions of cumbia and highlife, merengue and soukous (Champeta compiler Luis Silva calls it "Cumbia Soweto") became the soundtrack to an African reawakening sung in Spanish.

But because champeta is defiantly black music on a continent that still defiantly denies and suppresses its black roots, the scene's zealous embrace of pan-African blackness has kept it in the Colombian underground. In Baranquilla, dancing champeta is even banned from public places. "Sound systems are the universal conservatories of marginal suburbia," Silva writes in his liner notes. "The university of African history for hundreds of young champetuos."

As a result, the keepers of these conservatories, the deans of these universities, become more than just selectors, more than just sonideros. They become secular, everyday gods, divine sound-bearers who channel history and conjure community out of vibration and wires. Toward the end of Champeta's notes there is a prayer to Rey de Rocha, the head of one of the first major champeta sound systems. "May the spirits of our ancestors always carry all of the sound systems of Colombia towards heaven," it reads. "May our record players always make the law and free us from evil." In the sonidero cosmos, playing records is public ritual and hearing them is public salvation – the cure for your pain mixed across channels by the almighty selector on high.