From a young age, Eder Camacho had big ambitions as a musical artist: performing on flashy stages, recording albums in studios, and touring across Colombia. But as a native of Guapi, a fishing town nestled deep in the jungles of western Colombia, his dreams seemed to be a stretch. Not only did Camacho live in a remote village far from any big city or studio, but he performed Pacific music — an Afro-Colombian genre that had failed to gain traction outside of the Pacific Coast region. As the name suggests, Pacific music originates along the rural Black towns that dot the Pacific Coast, where music is central to everyday life, and births and even deaths are celebrated with the sounds of palm-wood marimbas, mesmerizing chants, and deep African bass drums. But despite the region teeming with talent, it had never succeeded in developing a robust music industry, in part, due to geographic isolation, poverty, and conflict.
In 2020, that changed with the advent of Discos Pacífico, a Colombian record label that offers training, networking, and resources exclusively to artists from the Pacific region, hoping to platform artists usually limited by circumstances. To date, the label has helped catapult the careers of eight artists and groups, like Bejuco, Semblanzas del Río Guapi, and Verito Asprilla, bringing fresh sounds to an already sonically diverse country. “We want to be a platform for these local movements to help them resonate with audiences that naturally wouldn’t find them,” says Diego Gómez, creative director of Discos Pacífico.
Gómez knew that Pacific music was special from the start. After returning to Colombia from studying musical production in Australia, he founded Llorona Records in 2007, a record label specializing in supporting local music movements. Attending the Petronio Álvarez Festival, the largest celebration of Pacific music in Colombia, he found a showcase of unique sounds passed down and perfected over generations that moved revelers into a trance. He tried to recreate the magic he had witnessed with Llorona Records. In 2019, the label released De Mar Y Río, a groundbreaking Pacific music album recorded by the group Canalón de Timbiquí, which scored a Latin Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album. For Gómez, it was clear that Pacific music was having its moment after having gone unnoticed for years.
However, the challenge ahead was securing investment to produce projects representing a genre that remained relatively unknown. Then Gómez got a call from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.S.’s foreign aid agency, that changed everything. The agency explained that it was looking for a partner to launch a record label for musicians along the Pacific Coast, a region historically marked by poverty and violence, in order to grow jobs for youth. Gómez immediately jumped at the opportunity and established Discos Pacífico as an imprint of Llorona Records. Understanding the challenge of creating a label for such a niche industry, Gómez called the unexpected partnership a “miracle.”
Signing onto a record label can transform an artist’s career, but for many Pacific music artists, it can feel like an impossible prospect. For much of the last century, record labels focused on developing an industry in the Caribbean Coast, home of cumbia and vallenato, while leaving aside the talent from the Pacific. The presence of armed groups in the area also warded off investment and prevented the growth of local businesses. Camacho, however, always believed in making it. For many young musicians from the region, their dream is to play the six-day Petronio Álvarez Festival, which draws crowds of nearly 600,000. But Camacho dreamed bigger. In 2009, he co-founded the traditional ensemble group Semblanzas del Río Guapi and played Petronio Álvarez for the first time in 2011. They proved themselves as a band to watch by winning the festival’s competition for two consecutive years. But coming from Guapi, a town reachable only by boat or plane, seemed to limit their professional possibilities.
We want to be a platform for these local movements to help them resonate with audiences that naturally wouldn’t find them.
Camacho faced two options: move to Cali, the largest city on the Pacific Coast where the Petronio Álvarez Festival takes place, or stay in Guapi and remain unknown. But Discos Pacífico provided a third option. After being discovered by Gómez, Semblanzas del Río Guapi signed onto the record label and received funding to record their first album. Even while they recorded in a professional studio in Cali, they could continue to live in their rural hometown, a source of pride and inspiration for the band. In the 12-track album Voy Pa’ Allá, the group wrote odes to the Pacific’s rivers and jungles, vignettes of everyday life, and songs about peace. Their music resonated with a larger audience than they expected. The band went from being relatively unknown, reaching no more than eight listeners per month on Spotify, to about 100,000 once their album debuted in 2021. Two years later, Semblanzas was playing Bogotá’s Estéreo Picnic, considered Colombia’s most renowned music festival internationally. “To live in a small town in the middle of the jungle of the Pacific Coast… and to arrive in Cali and in different cities and be widely embraced is incredible,” says Camacho.
While Semblanza del Río Guapi’s talent is undeniable, recording with producers such as Iván Benavides, who has worked with Colombian superstars Carlos Vives and Aterciopelados, or making it to Estéreo Picnic would have been impossible without the help of Discos Pacífico, Camacho notes. Just the cost of leaving Guapi for a concert in Bogotá, which requires them to travel by canoe, moto taxi, airplane, and bus for hours, almost always exceeds what they are paid by venues. “If there isn’t a record label that supports these types of emerging projects from the territories, then it’s difficult to reach the big cities and to show our work,” Camacho says.
Voy Pa’ Alla was one of the first albums released by Discos Pacífico. Since 2020, the record label has released dozens of EPs and albums from artists across the Pacific region. As the label grows, they’re now reflecting on how Pacific music can evolve while staying true to its roots. One answer is the type of experimentation artists like Semblanzas del Río Guapi and Bejuco are exploring. Camacho shares that when writing their first album, Semblanzas turned toward their ancestors for guidance, retracing the origins of Pacific music via the trans-Atlantic slave trade and finding inspiration in countries like Mali. They made a new genre dubbed “Afro-juga” that blended traditional rhythms of juga from the Pacific with modern African sounds.
Bejuco, a band born in the coastal city of Tumaco, had a similar epiphany when they produced their 2021 album, Batea, with Discos Pacífico, incorporating Nigerian Afrobeats into their marimba-driven brand of music and creating what they call bambuco beat. Similarly, other artists on the Discos Pacífico label have drawn inspiration from American hip-hop. Newcomers, like 21-year-old Véronica Asprilla, who goes by the moniker Verito Asprilla, are testing the bounds of the Pacific music label by rapping over beats that sample traditional sounds.
While her first encounter with music was through Pacific songs, singing and touring with a traditional ensemble, she later discovered a penchant for trap and wrote her first rap song at 16. When she signed to Discos Pacífico, the label immediately understood her vision. They produced her first EP, 2022’s Mundo Lila, infusing Black genres like hip-hop, dembow, and reggae, with a local twist, which attracted instant buzz. Her 2023 single “Verito de la Perla” evokes the sound of remote jungles and riverside towns while still feeling modern. That fresh approach to Pacific music earned her a slot at Esteréo Picnic and Lollapalooza Chile, as well as a tour through Europe last year. Once on stage, in cities from London to Berlin, she repped the Pacific Coast and the culture that has shaped her into the artist she is today.
“You can’t be Black if you don’t love your culture, your ancestors, and where you come from,” Asprilla says. “That’s why I like to say out loud, ‘I’m Black, I’m young, and I’m here.’”
