From the local to the national: the struggle for the aural national subject

In Colombia, a country that is as miscegenated as it is segregated, the fact that musics from Afro-Indigenous origins such as cumbia and vallenato were annexed into the national discourse is perplexing to say the least. There, the relation between music, race, geography, and nation has been a complex one. As Nancy AppelbaumFootnote ¹² argues, Colombia has been constructed as a ‘country of regions’ since its very inception. Throughout the nineteenth century, when criollo elites were leading the newly independent Latin American nations through their early stages of republicanism, ‘They were concerned with the international image of their nations in a transatlantic context that increasingly equated modernity with whiteness. [At the same time] They were reluctant to completely reject the racially structured labor systems upon which their own fragile fortunes depended.’Footnote ¹³ Colombian elites, balancing between maintaining racial difference and promulgating homogeneity, considered discourses about mestizaje (race mixture) an asset in the nation-building project, even as they clung to their whiteness.

Such contradictory narratives were further complicated by Colombia's segmented territory as well as its widely diverse population. Equating physiological ‘types’ with geographical place, nineteenth-century intellectuals ‘emphasized the importance of the natural environment in shaping the character of each regional society and population’.Footnote ¹⁴ Throughout the twentieth century, discursive formations of race and nation have been widely dynamic in Colombia. From intellectuals in the first half of the century advocating for eugenics as a form of state policyFootnote ¹⁵ to the multicultural moment in which I situate my study. During these epistemic shifts, the race-region relation has sedimented in the national imaginary. Broadly speaking – and following the country's ‘natural regions’ discourse – the Andean plateau, and particularly the major urban centres such as Bogotá and Medellín, is rendered as mostly white-mestizo, with the northwestern Atlantic coast labelled as tri-ethnic (white, African, and Indigenous) and miscegenated, with its rural areas being predominantly Afro-Indigenous and racialized. Along with these differences are a series of attributes having to do with sexuality, work ethic, family values, etc. that are indexed to each regional ‘type’. In the national imaginary, this has effectively led to the construction of the Andean urban white mestizo as the normative subject, with the peripheral coastal subject as an Other.Footnote ¹⁶

As a result, a long-standing relation of alterity runs deep between the Andean metropoles (el interior, or interior region) and the Atlantic coast and its peripheries (la costa). This relation of Otherness is key to better understand the national circulation of coastal music and its eventual rise to national popularity. The consumption of coastal musics in the interior, I argue, has been historically traversed by an unresolved – yet not oxymoronic – friction between Otherness and desire. While most literature on the topic has focused on coastal music that became a ‘national sound’, I take a different approach to this issue. I focus not on the musics that made it into the canon, but on the ones that did not, the residual, so to speak. Furthermore, I trace how these processes of inclusion/exclusion continue to develop in contemporary Colombia. More specifically, I examine how local musicians from different backgrounds such as Carmelo Torres, Los Toscos, and Edson Velandia interact with such discourses. However, first it is important to introduce the musicians.

As mentioned, Carmelo Torres is Colombia's most renowned performer of accordion cumbia. He was raised in the rural San Jacinto region, a predominantly miscegenated area in the Colombian Northwest with a dense Afro-Indigenous population and that is considered one of the places where cumbia's origins have been traced. Currently in his sixties and from a peasant background, Torres has been performing professionally since age sixteen.Footnote ¹⁷ Over the last decade, he has been touring in America, Europe, and Asia with his own band, mostly performing traditional tunes by composers such as Adolfo Pacheco and Toño Fernández and carrying the legacy of Andrés Landero, otherwise known as ‘The King of Cumbia’. Torres met Landero in 1975 and eventually became his pupil. After Landero's passing in 2000, Torres was anointed as his direct successor and one of the main keepers of accordion cumbia – a style recognized as Landero's – a legacy that Torres assumes with a sense of responsibility.Footnote ¹⁸ Descendent of a long-line of gaiteros (the person who pays the flute-like gaita, one of the iconic instruments of Colombian coastal cumbia)Footnote ¹⁹ Landero himself was part of the legendary Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto. Eventually, he would start adapting the gaita melodies to the accordion as well as the overall style of the indigenous instrument to the European one.

Los Toscos is a Bogotá-based collective formed by bassist Santiago Botero, guitarist Enrique Mendoza, and producer Benjamin Calais. Individually, the band's members are involved in projects that include jazz, noise, multimedia collaboration, experimental music, and improvisation. Both Botero and Mendoza hold graduate degrees in music and teach at local universities. The French-born Calais also mixes records and runs the local venue *matik-matik*, a node for the local underground scene and an important space for the way this racial assemblage has developed, as I elaborate below. Los Toscos is conceived as an eclectic project reflecting its members’ diverse influences. They function as a side band of sorts, inviting artists from different backgrounds to perform and record. Their first album featured New York-based saxophonist Tony Malaby, an active figure in the ‘downtown avant-jazz’ scene. Finally, Edson Velandia is one of the most provocative figures in the Colombian independent music scene. A performer/composer, his body of work includes several solo albums, a CD of children's songs, tunes denouncing state violence, big band pieces that he conducts using a machete in lieu of a baton, and even an opera about a man that is constipated because his chamber pot was stolen.Footnote ²⁰

While Andrés Landero was at the centre of a group of accordion musics that eventually became a symbol of national aural identity, he was paradoxically shunned from the canon. Towards the second half of the twentieth century, cumbia in its more ‘traditional’ iterations and other types of accordion music from these regions were interpellated by political and intellectual elites and eventually annexed to nationalistic discourses.Footnote ²¹ However, Landero's accordion cumbia fell through the cracks of this sanctioned national sound. Ana María Ochoa Gautier calls this ‘entextualizing’, that is, the process through which – in this case – a particular group of accordion music from the region, eventually grouped under the genre denomination vallenato, ‘came to be mobilized as a valid folk regional music by a political and artistic elite within the Caribbean’.Footnote ²²

Ochoa Gautier echoes Peter Wade in arguing that curating, exalting, and promoting these musics was a process advanced by intellectual and political interests, predominantly white mestizo elites. Aside high-ranking government officers, literary luminaries such as Colombian Literature Noble Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez were instrumental in consolidating the national status of vallenato. The fact that García Márquez was one of the genre's most important chroniclers in his early days as a journalist, and that he further mythologized vallenato in his seminal novel A Hundred Years of Solitude, proved fundamental in transforming the emerging genre from regional music practice into a national soundtrack.

However, in this process, a great deal of accordion musics that were happening in the region were left aside. This is where Landero and his accordion cumbia fit in – or better put, where it did not. For, as Ochoa Gautier mentions, ‘with the visualisation of vallenato, the use of the accordion in genres such as cumbia became practically invisible (or inaudible) in the country’.Footnote ²³ It is important to consider the racial undertones of this exclusion. Peter Wade points out how, for example, besides García Márquez and the regional political elite, there was another crucial agent in the canonization process: the composer Rafael Escalona.Footnote ²⁴ Born into a well-to-do military family, Escalona was not the prototypical rural minstrel. A lighter-skinned, educated man that sneaked away from his upper-class setting to witness the racialized accordion parrandas (parties), Escalona eventually became a fundamental composer of the vallenato songbook.

There are several reasons why vallenato did not spread through Latin America – and the world – as cumbia did. On the one hand, one motive has to do with timing. Colombian-made cumbia hit the continent as early as the 1940s when the Latin American music industry was gaining momentum,Footnote ²⁵ while vallenato emerged as a cohesive music practice and marketable genre in the 1970s. On the other hand, an important part of cumbia's transnational success had to do with its musical simplicity. In its most basic expression, cumbia's rhythmic structure is both distinctive and malleable. It allows for experimentation and mixture while retaining its sonic character. This was not the case with vallenato which, after it was standardized, was left with a set of very specific and complex music structures that are hard to learn apart from their place of origin.Footnote ²⁶ While Landero's music practice wandered across many of the accordion styles present in the region, he did not adhere to the few that were sanctioned by local elites. Instead, he focused on developing and expanding the cumbia repertoire he pioneered, a unique and personal sound of which he was, if not the only, perhaps the main exponent.

The fact that Landero was left outside the vallenato canon made accordion cumbia unintelligible and inaudible in the national scope. Landero participated several times in the Festival de la Leyenda Vallenata, the most prestigious accordion music festival in Colombia, with no luck. In other words, the mythical ‘King of Cumbia’ was never crowned on his own turf. While vallenato went on to become one of the most consumed musics in Colombia – even resisting the reggaeton cyclone – Landero and his musical legacy continues to be virtually unknown by the bulk of Colombians. Perhaps even more telling is the fact that Peter Wade's book, still the ‘to-go’ text on music of the Colombian Caribbean due to its theoretical insightfulness and robust archival and ethnographic work, does not even mention Landero. A misfit when it comes to nationalist discourses, Landero's idiosyncratic style, now in the hands of his pupil Carmelo Torres, was eventually picked up by a new generation of Colombian musicians.

Scaling ‘La antropología’

In order to trace how the collaboration between Carmelo Torres, Los Toscos, and Edson Velandia circulates in different geographical spaces, I use the idea of ‘scales’. By scale, I mean the ways in which this aural and racial assemblage is rendered locally, nationally, and transnationally. Pioneered by Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, this approach affords thinking about not just the ways in which capitalism subsumes life, but how specific agents fit in such a scheme and, in my case, how they fit in the distributed and dynamic network of agents involved in music's circulation. By focusing on the specific track ‘La antropología’, I am simultaneously performing a ‘microlevel study’, a methodology also developed by Trouillot. He writes: ‘The shift to a microlevel implies the acknowledgment of the individual's capacity to contribute to the historical process; to generate, so to speak, “more history” than the history of which he or she is the product.’Footnote ²⁷ I elaborate on Trouillot's work not just as a way to emphasis human agency – over, for instance, the world music industry – but also as decolonial ethos, following the production-consumption chain from the bottom up.Footnote ²⁸

By scaling Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos, I underline the long-lasting processes of difference construction that have produced these geographical categories, the genealogies of racialization that have sedimented them, and their inextricable relation with music practices. But also, I highlight the potentiality that the circulation of this music has in mobilizing – in the words of ethnic studies scholar Kirstie Dorr – ‘modes of political dissent’.Footnote ²⁹ Trouillot refers to the different scales a study can engage with as ‘units’. While he did not consider the human body as a unit, his emphasis on human agency nonetheless foregrounded it.Footnote ³⁰ If, as critical geographers have argued, space is relational and ideologically produced,Footnote ³¹ then it follows that the body is the fundamental geographical unit. Thus, while I theorize Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos across different geographical spaces, I also conceive the body an integral part of this scheme. More specifically, I am interested on how the racialized body circulates across these scales. Importantly, I suggest that Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos is not just a body, but also a collection of differently racialized bodies; what I am referring to as a racial assemblage.

Racial and racializing assemblages: cumbia beyond whitening

Deleuze and Guattari theorize the assemblage concept in their different works Chaosmosis,Footnote ³² A Thousand Plateaus,Footnote ³³ and The Machinic Unconscious.Footnote ³⁴ Like many Eurocentric thinkers, their intellectual genealogy does not foreground thinking about or through race.Footnote ³⁵ However, critical race theorists have critiqued Deleuze and Guattari's work and have elaborated on their ideas, advancing a decolonial project that, far from discarding ideas and authors deemed as Eurocentric, engage critically and productively with them. African American Studies scholar Alexander Weheliye, for example, has built on the work of black feminist thinkers Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter to offer substantial correctives that turn Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the assemblage towards critical race studies.Footnote ³⁶ Weheliye explains that assemblages (arrangement in English) ‘constitute continuously shifting relational totalities comprised of spasmodic networks between different entities (content) and their articulation within “acts and statements” (expression)’.Footnote ³⁷ Weheliye prefers ‘racializing assemblages’ to racial categories because, he argues, the former ‘construes race not as a biological or cultural classification but as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans’.Footnote ³⁸ Racializing assemblages aim to expose and dis-articulate the networks of ideas and flows of capital that construct and maintain (racial) difference. At the interception of financial and cultural capital, the world music industry capitalizes on alterity as it reifies it, and further fetishizes difference by commodifying it.

By putting Weheliye and Trouillot in dialogue, I propose two analytical trajectories: 1) a racial assemblage that groups together bodies that have been subjected to different racializing assemblages; and 2) attention to the different scales at which these assemblages function. While each of the agents that form Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos feat. Edson Velandia embody a particular racializing assemblage, once they are circulated as a collaboration, that collaboration itself becomes an assemblage. This secondary assemblage formed in their collaboration is what I am referring to when I use the concept of racial assemblage. Carmelo's black body is rendered differently in the regional, the national, and the transnational context. The same goes for each band member and Velandia. As I have shown, at the local and national scale, racial formations are concomitant with the fact that Colombia has been historically constructed as a ‘country of regions’Footnote ³⁹ in which difference and geography have been intertwined since the colonial era. However, once it is circulated transnationally, the assemblage's meaning fluctuates. Place illustrates, in this case, the spasmodic quality of racial assemblages as they traverse different geopolitical spaces. In other words, place conditions how Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos feat. Edson Velandia functions as a racial assemblage. While Weheliye's racializing assemblages prioritize ideology and ontology, I ask how race is rendered through the body and query how entities embodying different racial formations interact and are rendered as a unit in different geopolitical scales.

Studying Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos as an assemblage attends to how meaning emerges from the relation these bodies hold between each other. Meaning and content are products of the relational quality between the performers as well as the ways in which this relation is circulated and mediated across geographical scales. Meaning fluctuates in different spaces; how racializing assemblages come together must be contingent to the geopolitical location from which they are rendered. Thus, as I elaborate below, Carmelo Torres's racialized body – and by extension his aurality – is circulated and instrumentalized differently across scales. Los Toscos, on the other hand, represent what I call liminal racial subjects. Read from a transnational scale, Los Toscos constitute a racial space of ‘in-betweenness’ that mediates Carmelo Torres's aural Otherness, thus rendering it audible. Their urban subjectivity and globalized musicality makes them a mediating agent in the circulation process. Finally, I consider Velandia a meta-narrator, a critical voice that narrates the (dis)encounter from the inside with an incisive and sardonic tone. The discourses I read on Velandia's performative gesture, I suggest, do not come across for local audiences and the world music industry.

I propose the idea of the racial assemblage as a way to think about how musicking bodies with different – yet still hierarchical – racial formations interact and cohere as an array of bodies: as an assemblage of (racialized) bodies. Conceiving Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos as a racial assemblage stresses the relational quality of the collaboration and shows how discourses emerging from it are transformed in relation to changes across geopolitical scales. Furthermore, the way in which such discourses are circulated across geographical scales acts to link meaning with cultural and financial value. It is precisely the fluctuating nature of transcultural collaborations such as this one that the idea of the racial assemblage engages. Thinking at the intersection of sound, race, and place is key because the geopolitical has been fundamental in the construction of racializing assemblages from the colonial era to the contemporary moment.Footnote ⁴⁰

National identity and the neoliberal turn: globalized localisms

In the 1990s, president César Gaviria's ‘economic openness’ policy culminated the process of integrating neoliberalism in Colombia, a turn in economic restructuring throughout Latin America. In the music industry, this had the impact of dramatically downsizing what once was a flourishing local recording industry. As a result, sounds emanating from the global north dominated a good chunk of the programming and influenced the way local musics were produced. Major transnational corporations set local subsidiaries and/or purchased many local media industries. Going from a predominantly rural, poetic, and regional genre, vallenato exploded in the 1980s and into the 1990s, adapting production values and recording techniques from abroad and making itself more accessible to the diverse Colombian listener.

In the midst of these developments, groups of young, urban musicians started travelling to the Colombian peripheries in search of an alternative. Many of these had been academically trained in local schools that offered the standard Eurocentric and, to a lesser degree, jazz curriculum. A handful of them even earned graduate music degrees abroad. Fed-up with the Euro-American imports, and deeming vallenato as overtly commercial and cheesy, these urban subjects travelled to rural areas to experience local musics firsthand. Much like Stuart Hall argues, ‘The trend towards “global homogenization”, then, is matched by a powerful revival of “ethnicity”, sometimes of the more hybrid or symbolic varieties, but also frequently of the exclusive or “essentialist” varieties’.Footnote ⁴¹ For many Colombian musicians living in the cities, this ‘revival of ethnicity’ came in the form of reclaiming what they thought (or imagined) was theirs.

This process is sardonically narrated and complicated in ‘La antropología’ by Edson Velandia, who – speaking as a hypothetical rural musician – sings about an unidentified gentleman from the capital who arrives to his peripheral hometown: ‘A la sabana un caballero fue/Con un acento de la capital’ (‘A gentleman arrived to the province/He had an accent from the capital’). The unnamed character stands out not just for his accent, but also for the way he is dressed: ‘Usaba gafas oscuras de Ray-Ban/Y unas abarcas que no le quedaban’ (‘He wore Ray-Ban shades/And sandals that did not fit’). The man's stylish shades index a cosmopolitan subjectivity that is contrasted with the indigenous footwear that does not fit. Velandia's lyrics speaks of the positionality of the urban subject aiming to have one foot (or sandal) in his modern, metropolitan, and globally connected reality, and another in a timeless indigenous identity.

The drive to achieve aural authenticity is at the centre of the man's enterprise; an authenticity that he thinks he is entitled to because he happened to be born in an arbitrary geopolitical space that makes a nation and that he needs in order to circulate the ‘people's cumbia’ transnationally, thus becoming a legitimate exponent of this folk. The fragility of the nation concept, the primary rubric under which this music is being mobilized in the transnational market, is underlined by Velandia, when the gentleman in the song is confronted by the local musician and points out that his aspiring pupil cannot really learn how to play the ‘people's cumbia’: ‘Y yo le dije usted puede engañar/Al que no entiende de la melodía’ (‘And I told him you can deceive/Those who don't know about melody). This is emphasized by telling him that if he really wants to find his roots, his identity, he has to go back to his city: ‘Pero si usted lo que quiere es raíz/Tiene que irse pa’ su capital’ (‘But if what you want is roots/You have to go back to your capital’).

This (dis)encounter is not only narrated through the lyrics. Rather, the negotiation is also taking place musically. In ‘La antropología’, Torres's accordion is a key feature, playing the intro, an instrumental soloistic bridge, and an outro. Andrés Landero's style is well represented by his pupil; there is a heavy yet syncopated rhythmic feel and a punchy attack on each note followed by a rich and potent sustained sound, something that Landero pioneered when he adapted not just the melodies, but also the playing style and even the timbre of the indigenous flute-like gaita to the European instrument. The upper-register of Carmelo Torres's diatonic Corona III button accordion is pungent and concise, going from heavily articulated in the beginning of each phrase to longer and robust notes towards the middle and end. These are complemented by his left hand, which plays a steady yet syncopated vamp. The melodies, though clearly on F minor, are built around its minor seventh chord, sometimes hinting towards its minor dominant chord.

Los Toscos provides a solid base.Footnote ⁴² While the bass guitar and the guacharaca (scraper) are customary in accordion cumbia, both of them bring a back-beat-infused heaviness, creating a less syncopated and more downbeat-driven sense of groove. The bass creates a denser texture by using a fuzz pedal during the busier parts of the song, and by sliding in between the fifth and the tonic during some of the sections. The drums add to this rhythmic and textural density by constantly crashing on the downbeat. Interestingly, the indigenous alegre hand drum, which on the other tracks of the album supports and exalts Torres's regional style, is hardly present in ‘La antropología’. The guitar goes from arpeggiated background accompaniments, to noisy, short soloist comments that develop into a dense and distorted wall of sound. Overall, Los Toscos seem to stay closer to Torres's style, signalling a process of transculturation carefully calculated by them, aiming to bring their globalized musicalities to the table without overrunning Torres, who, in the end, is the core of the whole project.

A desire for the ‘national Other’ is at the centre of both the collaboration and the song. Velandia narrates this when the rural subject (i.e., the Other) tells us how the man from the capital came to learn the tradition ‘from the root’: ‘A mi me dijo el caballero aquel/Que pa’ pegar había que ser raizal’ (‘The gentleman told me/That in order to make it you needed to be raizal’). The word raizal is key here. Broadly defining black or Amerindian communities with recognized and – most importantly – state-sanctioned ties and right to certain territories, the raizal concept has been recently mobilized, primarily by the state and media, in an effort to annex these marginalized communities and the systematic inequality and genocide they have endured into national discourse. Such efforts represent a timely addition to the nation project underway since the 1991 constitution declared Colombia a ‘pluriethnic’ and ‘multiracial’ country.Footnote ⁴³

On the local and national scales, Velandia underscores the contradictions inherent to this aural and racial (dis)encounter. Switching shortly from the rural subject's point of view into his own, in the chorus Velandia exposes the desire for the Other and its aural authenticity – a libidinal economy or economy of desire – but also the very flawed nature of this enterprise, since ‘Una cosa es el indio/Y otra cosa es la antropología’, a chorus that – perhaps intentionally – uses the loaded word indio that to this day still functions in Colombia as a racial slur directed towards Amerindian populations, and often as an insult amongst white mestizos to refer not necessarily to their racial background, but to someone rude, uneducated, and ignorant. Used within the colloquial expression translatable to ‘theory is one thing, and practice is another thing’, the chorus encapsulates, on the one hand, the contradictions inherent in desiring the racial Other in a racially unequal country and, on the other hand, the impossibility of the urban gentleman in grasping these traditions, since his roots are – in Velandia's words – ‘in the capital’. This is a narrative that touches a sensitive root in a local music scene in which a notion of authenticity based on place – that is, equating national origin with a sort of ‘folk legitimacy’ – has become a source of financial and cultural capital for Colombian white-mestizo musicians, particularly in the Euro-American market.

There is an insightful self-reflexivity to the collaboration and to the song itself. Both its text and music constitute a sort of meta-criticism, as the band themselves (Los Toscos) can potentially be the unnamed urban dilettante. However, this relation can be complicated. Landero's accordion cumbia fell outside of the national (or nationalistic) canon. Thus, Los Toscos are not playing into hegemonic notions of nation and aural national identity. Rather, by engaging with these apocryphal sounds, they are going beyond the mediated notion of what Colombian accordion music is supposed to be, potentially complicating what national music and, more fundamentally, what the Colombian subject is.

From the national to the transnational: ‘¡Colombian Roots meets Garage Fuzz!’

While for the Colombian listener the act of rendering Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos is mediated by the many discourses that make the nation, foreign consumers lack such a context. In this section, I trace how the racial assemblage is circulated in the transnational market. Following Ochoa Gautier,Footnote ⁴⁴ I use the word recontextualization to discuss the prominent role the music industry plays in creating meaning around local musics. According to her: ‘the construction of knowledge about traditional music shares with the recording industry the act of musical entextualization and recontextualization as fundamental practices’.Footnote ⁴⁵ I show how, to make this racial assemblage intelligible, the transnational industry subsumes and further essentializes it under the category of nation. Shortly after the album Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos was released in CD format in Bogotá, some of its tracks were re-issued by Brooklyn-based label Name You Can Trust (NYCT) and France-based label Galletas Calientes (Hot Cookies), both in 2016. Each of these vinyl 45 RPM 7″ discs contains one track on each side. Interestingly, ‘La antropología’ was not included on either. This begs the question: why, from a total of four tracks that were selected for international pressing, was ‘La antropología’ not included?

In their ‘about’ page, NYCT presents itself as an independent label manufacturing ‘a mix of vintage & modern sounds typical of the New York experience’ that intimately connects to the city's immigrant population. The label's roster is ‘a perfect glimpse into the global yet local New York City underground.’Footnote ⁴⁶ Importantly, the label's catalogue, currently composed of more than sixty vinyl releases, focuses on current trends of pan-Latin American dance musics such as cumbia and, to a lesser degree, salsa. Lately, NYCT has been strengthening its ties to the Colombian cumbia scene, publishing local underground referents Meridian Brothers, Romperayo, and Frente Cumbiero.

While NYCT has been expanding its roster, it is still dominated by New York City-based projects. The label was launched in 2007 with a 12″ EP by their ‘flagship operation’ – as NYCT calls it – Greenwood Rhythm Coalition. Likely alluding to the Greenwood Heights neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York, the band's ‘unique hybrid of Latin & Caribbean rhythms, B-Boy breaks, live instrumentation and studio wizardry have earned their vinyl releases critical acclaim amongst the DJs and mass appeal on the dance floor’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The underground globalized sonority of the band prefaced NYCT's international expansion. Contemporary sounds – arguably ‘uniquely hybrid’ in the label's ears – emanating from Latin America, the United States, and Europe have shaped NYTC's reputation as a leader in the emerging independent circuit of a trend I would call ‘pan-Latin American musics meets globalized grooviness’. Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos forms part of a recent interest NYCT has taken in showcasing relevant yet little known Colombian artists.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the particular case of Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos, no money exchange has taken place. Rather, the label covers the costs of mixing and pressing, and gives a quota of the copies to the musicians, a fairly common practice.

Galletas Calientes was originally created by two DJs who were active in France's ‘underground free rave party movement’ during the 1990s.Footnote ⁴⁹ According to them, the ‘amigo's project of a two-man-band creating a fusion of Latin music and French songs’ eventually landed in ‘South America’. Once in Colombia, they ‘embarked on an intense and passionate exploration of modern and past Colombian folklore’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Having a smaller roster than that of NYCT, with only close to twenty releases on vinyl, CD, and digital formats, Galletas Calientes focuses mostly on ‘modern and past’ Colombian music, with an emphasis on current Afro-Colombian sounds. For them, ‘“the new Colombian scene” cleverly and skillfully adapted all types of other genres to the richness of its folklore’ thus ‘embody[ing] the new concept the label was embracing’.Footnote ⁵¹

NYCT exalts New York City as the centre and quintessential example of human migration and the music cosmopolitanism that comes with it; New York City is thus reified as the fundamental place from which these local musics are funnelled into the global north consumer. By rendering Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos as ‘¡Colombian Roots meets Garage Fuzz!’ on a stamp-like seal on the front and back cover, NYCT recontextualizes it, subsuming this complex racial and musical assemblage under an obscure category that invokes the nation. The ‘¡Colombian Roots meets Garage Fuzz!’ aphorism underlines the liminality of the record. If, on the one hand, ‘roots’ invokes a racialized exoticized sonority, the ‘garage fuzz’ alludes to a racially unmarked aurality. The lingua franca ‘garage fuzz’, and the Anglo aesthetic it presupposes, bridges the epistemological gap between the ‘rootsy’ (the raizal in Velandia's words) and ‘the modern’. Ochoa Gautier argues that such recontextualization of sounds involves ‘localizing global sounds as well as globalizing local ones’;Footnote ⁵² something that is at the core of NYCT's politics of circulation. The ‘authentic yet hybrid’, ‘folksy yet modern’, ‘indigenous yet cosmopolitan’ discourse becomes crucial in the mediating process. Ultimately, the record constitutes, in the words of NYCT, ‘the quintessential bridge between the old and new generations of Colombian musicians’.Footnote ⁵³

This narrative is echoed by Galletas Calientes. Connecting Torres to the legacy of Landero and describing Los Toscos as ‘an avant-garde, experimental jazz band from Bogotá’,Footnote ⁵⁴ they also stress the aurally and racially mediated nature of the project, even reproducing NYCT's ‘¡Colombian Roots meets Garage Fuzz!’ moniker. Analyzing these acts of recontextualization exposes the sensitive balance of this equation. Thus, returning to the question of why ‘La antroplogía’ was not included in either of the foreign reissues, we can see how it is not so much that Velandia's lyrics are considered a scalding critique to the way this music is being circulated and, by extension, to these foreign labels’ modus operandi. Rather, ‘La antropología’, featuring a third white mestizo party singing an original song outside the traditional songbook, makes this musical and racial assemblage too complex, making it – once again – potentially unintelligible and inaudible.

This signals an economy of desire based not so much on authenticity, but on never-ending hybridity. That is, contrary to erasing the mediation, these acts of recontextualization underline the hybrid quality of this racial assemblage. As Joshua Tucker – echoing Timothy Taylor – argues, ‘the theoretical discovery of permanent hybridity and the glorification of an experimental spirit tend to enforce new modes of authenticity, reworking hierarchies of social and aesthetic distinction rather than assuaging such inequalities’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Thinking from the current state of Peruvian cumbia, Tucker insightfully critiques scholarly discourses that exalt hybridity as an alternative to essentialized discourses of cultural purity.Footnote ⁵⁶

Making Carmelo Torres legible (and audible) to the national and transnational consumer seems to be an important part of what this project is doing. Shortly after the CD was released in Bogotá, for example, Carmelo was profiled in mayor media outlets such as Arcadia (one of the major national cultural magazines) and in Noisey (VICE's music journalism online platform). While Carmelo Torres has been an active performer for decades, mainstream media started covering him after 2016. This double-mediation that Los Toscos as well as NYCT and Galletas Calientes do for Carmelo Torres has put him on the radar of the international circuit. Over the past few years, he has been touring widely over Latin America, Europe, and Africa, mostly with his own band. More recently, the crew of BBC Radio's podcast The Sound Odyssey travelled to Colombia to meet with Carmelo, interview him, and document his collaboration with British musician/actor Johnny Flynn, a (dis)encounter that I turn to next.

Sounding the erasure: the BBC meets Carmelo

The Sound Odyssey is a series of BBC documentary podcasts in which British musicians travel to different parts of the world to embark in transcultural collaborations with local artists. Hosted by Gemma Cairney, the series aims to showcase these British artists ‘in a new light … exposing their artistic process as they create something new in different and unfamiliar surroundings with an artist they have never met before’.Footnote ⁵⁷ For Carmelo's episode, they invited musician/actor Johnny Flynn, described by the BBC as a ‘folk song collector’ particularly interested in ‘the migration of musical instruments especially in South American and Amazonian culture’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In his transcultural voyage, Flynn is interested in charting cumbia ‘ethnographically, or anthropologically, through the instruments and the architecture of what people are capable of making through the technology that they have’. The specific ‘technology’ he refers to is the European accordion, highlighting the fact that he is familiar with the three-row button diatonic type used in accordion cumbia and that he has used ‘in a lot of traditional British folk music’.Footnote ⁵⁹

On the 26-minute podcast, eighteen of them are spent talking with Colombian interlocutors about Carmelo Torres, accordion cumbia, Colombia, and Bogotá. These interlocutors are knowledgeable members of the emerging cumbia scene, including producers, managers, and performers. Mario Galeano, one of the leading figures of this scene and the guacharaquero (scraper player) on Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos, comments that Carmelo's is a musical tradition that is ‘in decline’. He describes the collaboration between them (Los Toscos) and Torres as thus ‘we, a whole bunch of really noisy [guys] playing in the background’. It is likely the BBC ‘discovered’ Carmelo through Los Toscos, as indicated by the fact that when Carmelo's music is played in the background, all of the tracks come from their collaborative album. Finally, during minute eighteen, Carmelo is interviewed. Questioned about the history of the accordion in Colombia and his thoughts on the collaboration with Flynn, Torres replies that he is happy with it as he is always up to ‘innovate’.

A fascinating moment of anthropological gaze is captured when Cairney (the hostess) narrates Carmelo and his band's first meeting with Flynn as it unfolds. First, Carmelo is introduced to Flynn's idea of adapting the lyrics of an old British folk ballad to a cumbia beat. Flynn explains that these words were collected in an old book without melody. As Cairney describes the scene, Carmelo's accordion and the scraper interlace with Flynn's fiddle and a guitar in a clumsy jam. After a short chat between them, Flynn presents the books from which he extracted the lyrics to Carmelo and asks for his approval while explaining that he intended to ‘make that into a cumbia song’. Then, we hear a Colombian musician (perhaps from Carmelo's band) teaching Torres the first chords of Flynn's arrangement. Translating from strummed guitar into the voice, this ‘musical decoder’ turns the chords into sung triads in order to make them more familiar to Carmelo's ear. Over the guitar and the scraper, this ‘decoder’ sings what he calls ‘first position’ to Carmelo – likely something similar to the Western concept of tonic – a D chord that constitutes the tonal centre of the arrangement. Carmelo quickly catches on and plays it in his style.

Without stopping, and keeping the harmonic rhythm, the decoder sings the next chord: a C♯ diminished triad. Immediately, Torres hesitates, struggling to find the pitches. Instead, he plays an E diminished triad. Arguably due to the fact this chromatic movement is odd for Carmelo's ear and his accordion technique, instead of moving to the seventh chord (C♯ dim.) he moves to the second degree (E dim.). As this happens, Cairney continues to narrate the scene: ‘at the moment, there's a lot of discussion trying to work out how we can get Carmelo to connect with this British folk sound and vice versa. So, there's a discussion about simplifying certain parts of the song to make it more cumbia.’Footnote ⁶⁰

The overall scene and Cairney's narration expose the complexities of the (dis)encounter. Signalling an Eurocentric ear, the host sets up a simplicity–complexity scale based on Western tonal harmony. It follows that, in order to make Flynn's arrangement ‘more cumbia’, it has to be simplified; a simplification that – while is not explicitly expressed by any of the parts – has to do with modifying (or ‘simplifying’) the chromatic harmonic movement in order to bridge the epistemological gap. Interestingly, in the final recording the chromatic harmonic movement was not excised. Rather, we hear Carmelo constantly stepping out of the groove when the C♯ dim. chord kicks in: a micro-erasure in Carmelo's own ‘sounding’. This collaboration process contrasts with Los Toscos's. The latter's familiarity with Carmelo's music genealogy – not just with the music's history but its stylistic features – makes the mediation process smoother. Flynn's collaboration, on the other hand, is quite rocky, and the end product, while still retaining Torres’ idiosyncratic sonority, has a more Frankenstein-ish quality to it, making the sutures of interculturalism more audible.

While both Flynn and Los Toscos desire Torres's musicality, the process goes differently for each of them. Scaling these collaborations, we can identify important nuances between the national (Los Toscos) and the transnational (Flynn) subject, and see how indeed the racial liminal subject does make a difference, not only in the way the musical collaboration unfolds, but also on how these racial assemblages are circulated. For Carmelo Torres and Los Toscos, the nation category makes the assemblage more stable, more hearable, and thus more marketable. In contrast, the Carmelo-Flynn assemblage lacks aural clarity and geopolitical stability. To be clear, the intent behind Flynn and the BBC crew seems far from pernicious. Flynn elaborates his thoughts on tradition using the famous Mahler quote ‘tradition is tending the flame, not worshiping the ashes’. While Mahler's concept of ‘tradition’ is arguably a far cry from Flynn's, in this context it seems to echo Carmelo's impetus for ‘innovation’. While commendable in spirit, this approach to transculturalism presupposes a meeting between equals. On this point, I echo Joshua Tucker's admonition:

Anthropologizing the Self and the Other: aural self-cannibalization

A desire for the Other runs throughout both the song ‘La antropología’ and Carmelo's (dis)encounter with the cosmopolitan music scene. The title of the track alludes to a fundamental feature of both the world music industry and ethnomusicology: making the Other the object of anthropological gaze. As Roshanak Kheshti argues, this economy of desire is at the core of the world music concept. For Kheshti, ethnomusicology and world music constitute two sides of what she calls the ‘world music culture industry’. Following her, I conceive this industry as one that ‘is characterized by brokering – whether in exchange for actual or symbolic capital – in racialized gender’.Footnote ⁶² The figure of the racial liminal subject is fundamental, rendering racialized sounds audible.Footnote ⁶³ Velandia's song speaks eloquently of the inextricable relation ethnomusicology has with – in the words of Khehsti – its ‘commercial doppelganger’ world music.Footnote ⁶⁴ However, scaling this racial assemblage shows us that over the last century North–South power structures have mutated. The act of mediating is no longer the privilege of the Anglo-centric world music industry. There is a shared agency to be accounted for.

To be sure, this agency is distributed between the labels who circulate the music and the artists who mediate it. For the latter, such agency tends to fall on the racial liminal subject. The current state of cumbia's circulation certainly illustrates this. As the aforementioned studies by Madrid, Fernández L'Hoeste, Baker, and Tucker show,Footnote ⁶⁵ the current transnational circulation of these musics are headed by middle- and upper-class musicians from the Latin American metropoles and/or settled in the global north. Whether strategically or not, mobilizing regional racialized sounds has become a way to position these white-mestizo musicians in the global circuit.

In the Colombian music scene this is a disputed and volatile terrain. From local musicians who want to capitalize on the cumbia boom, to judicious researchers of this music and everything in between, Velandia's message in ‘La antropología’ echoes a critical point of view that touches a sensitive fibre in a compact music community. As stated above, Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos feat. Velandia’s song constitutes an act of self-reflexivity and meta-criticism that, far from being a foregone conclusion, signals an ongoing discussion over how identity is negotiated and continuously reconfigured through the music-nation dyad. While for the Colombian listener the message of ‘La antropología’ could be buried under its whimsical, seemingly playful tone and floor-filler quality, Velandia has been openly critical about the local cumbia scene.

In conversation with Colombian musician Yesit Ipuján, Velandia asks, ‘Don't you find this cumbia boom annoying?’ (‘¿no te fastidia un poco ese boom de la cumbia?’).Footnote ⁶⁶ He then elaborates, arguing that he finds this ‘trend’ a bit ‘snob and opportunistic’, not because it is a novelty due to the fact that – for him – cumbia has always been around. For Velandia, the difference lies in the fact that now the music has turned into a fetish, an exotic commodity. In his words, he sees the recent developments in cumbia's transnational circulation as ‘looking at ourselves through an exoticized gaze’ (‘es como mirarnos exóticamente a nosotros’). Riffing off his interlocutor, Velandia uses the world ‘anthropological’ (drawing a subconscious connection to his song) to express this act of auto-inflicted exoticized gaze. That is, the act of making oneself the object of anthropological inquiry.

For Velandia, this act of aural self-cannibalization implies annexing oneself to the world music industry (‘Aceptar por ejemplo términos como que nosotros somos música del mundo’). This, he states, is ‘one of the most pathetic and colonialized things there can be: accepting that you belong to that [industry]’ (‘Ésa es una de las cosas más patéticas y más colonialistas que puede haber: aceptar que uno pertenece a eso’).Footnote ⁶⁷ We can see how deep Velandia's reservations run. The fact that he expresses them through his sardonic poetics in a collaboration centred around cumbia makes his song with Carmelo Torres and Los Toscos a potential Trojan horse. Interestingly, both Velandia and Ipuján are not based in the major Colombian cities such as Bogotá, Medellín, or Cartagena, where this boom has been taking place.Footnote ⁶⁸ The geopolitical is relevant here, as both of them are looking to this cosmopolitan scene from the outside, perhaps with a critical insight brought by living in the ‘periphery’.

In the midst of this overlapping discourses, it is important to ask how the listeners are interacting with them. This is a complicated question. In Colombia, the small niche market consuming these underground musics precludes any massive impact. Here, thinking about place becomes useful, as situating this music in the context of where it is being consumed can shed light on issues of reception. Founded in 2008, *matik-matik* is a bar/venue that has become one of the most important spaces for underground musics in Bogotá. Most of the Colombian projects published by NYCT have either developed or were born there, including Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos. French-born Benjamin Calais, the producer behind the project, runs *matik-matik*. The venue has become one of the most important nodes of the Bogotano music scene, nourishing projects that go from improvisation, contemporary music, multimedia, ‘tropical noise’, and much more. The place has been fundamental in supporting the underground music scene and providing musicians who work at the fringes of the aesthetically normative with a space to work and create community, including myself.

The project Los Toscos is a product of the scene nurtured by this venue. Located in a middle-class area of Bogotá, *matik-matik* and its bold programming attracts mostly university students, artists, and young professional, predominantly white mestizos. The venue expanded into a record label (*matik-matik* discos), which originally released the album Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos. I opened this article describing the release party that took place there. In a videoclip available on YouTube,Footnote ⁶⁹ we can see the full band (Carmelo, Los Toscos, and Edson Velandia) in action. The event was indeed a party. Standing up and dancing through the song, the audience joins Velandia in the catchy chorus ‘Porque una cosa es el indio y otra cosa es la antropología’ (‘The indian is one thing, anthropology is another’). The chorus's vernacular and witty nature makes it instantly memorable. Velandia approaches Carmelo, sharing the microphone with him momentarily to sing the loaded words, thus epitomizing the racial assemblage I have discussed.

In Los Toscos's YouTube channel, at the time I am writing this,Footnote ⁷⁰ the studio track of ‘La antropología’ has gathered over 176,000 views, a fair amount for this type of music. Of the sixty-plus comments the song has to this day – the vast majority from Colombians based on the vernacular – most of them are shout-outs and congratulations. A couple of them do address the songs’ content, reading it as a humorous critique to anthropologists (and other social sciences scholars) and their relation to indigenous communities. Through my experience in this music scene, it is hard to assure that the issues I am reading through Velandia's words have permeated the community. Rather, I see younger generations of musicians in the cities turning to local musics such as cumbia and reclaiming their ‘cultural heritage’. It would be irresponsible to essentialize a widely diverse music scene that includes people from very different backgrounds, artistic motivations, and aesthetic practices. As this investigation shows, far beyond a homogenous community, the current state of cumbia in Colombia constitutes a disputed and heterogenous terrain. Nevertheless, nationalist discourses continue to prevail, making them a regulating concept for many local artists.

The ways in which each of the parts of the assemblage negotiate their relation to cumbia sheds light on the complex discourses put in motion by this music's circulation. Furthermore, scaling this circulation shows us how meaning is indeed contingent to place, what Weheliye, following Deleuze and Guattari, calls the ‘spasmodic quality of assemblages’.Footnote ⁷¹ Apart from, and mostly unconcerned with, ideas of musical ‘authenticity’ or ‘hybridity’ – so pervasive nowadays and that more often than not stem from an Eurocentric gaze – Carmelo Torres is invested in un-silencing and advancing Andrés Landeros's legacy. Collaborating with national and foreign artists has proved to be an effective strategy in doing so. Los Toscos's liminality resounds both locally and abroad. It is through them that Torres is rendered intelligible to the middle-class, white mestizo, young listener. As I have shown, such liminality is paralleled by the complicated ways in which the band fits in the ‘country of regions’ that is Colombia, going simultaneously with and against the grain of normative local discourses of music, race, and nation. Finally, Velandia, looking to the historical relation of alterity between ‘the coast’ and ‘the interior’ from the outside and critically approaching the current cumbia boom, insightfully problematizes this (dis)encounter. The witty tone of the critique seem to mask its causticness for local audiences. Once this assemblage is mediated by foreign record labels and catered to the global north consumer, all these issues seem diluted and are subsumed into the independent world music industry.

Closing remarks: cannibalistic auralities, or who is the cannibal?

The double-mediation that Los Toscos and NYCT and Galletas Calientes do for Carmelo Torres put him on the map of the underground international circuit. This is a mediation not unlike the one described by Velandia, when the local cumbia musician tells us how the gentleman from the capital begs him to teach him how to acquire his aural authenticity: ‘Cómo hago yo pa’ que me suene propio/Me preguntaba que yo le dijera’ (‘How do I do to sound legit/He kept asking me’). This music, the gentleman tells the local musician, is very desired, not locally but abroad: ‘Que aquí en Colombia no es la sensación/Pero en Europa sí es apetecida’ (‘That in Colombia is not that popular [the music]/But in Europe is very desired’). Nevertheless, such ‘pre-modern’ aurality needs to be mediated by the local cosmopolitan subject in order to commodify it: ‘Esa cultura de tribu caníbal/Que ellos no entienden cuando es natural’ (‘That culture of cannibal tribe/They don't understand in its natural state’).

Quite explicitly, Velandia underlines how these racialized, potentially sub-human sounds need to be funnelled through the racial liminal subject if they are to be circulated. This is an asseveration not far from the truth, as several of the bands working with cumbia that have emerged in Colombian cities over the last ten or more years continue to tour profusely in the global north, particularly in the European summer festival circuit. As in the song, these bands tend to offer the mediated ‘local yet cosmopolitan’ sound.

As Trouillot argued, microlevel analyses like this one provide us with the ethnographic clarity and theoretical insights to critically approach emerging racial formations and modes of consumption.Footnote ⁷² The desire for this music continues to grow worldwide. However, unlike many of its regional incarnations that carry the burden of its racialized and classed past, cumbia's current circulation plays a balancing act between commodifying and mediating difference, thus recasting the libidinal economy of the – now independent – world music industry anew. While Velandia's humorous and sharp account tells us about a ‘cannibal culture’ that is unintelligible to the Eurocentric gaze in its ‘natural state’, the cannibalistic seems to remain an adequate rubric to think how local musics flow in the neoliberal market.