Aníbal Velásquez has been played on NTS in shows including Carlos René, featured first on 3 April 2015. Songs played include El Vampiro , Mambo Loco and Descarga Loca.

If you come from the northern end of South America, Anibal Velasquez’s name won’t make your obscurometer’s needle quiver. Born in 1936, he’s recorded over 300 albums and scored hits in Colombia and Venezuela; to this day, he’s a big draw at the Carneval in Baranquilla, which is one of Colombia’s premiere cultural celebrations and has been designated by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Like the Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou, the subject of other Analog Africa volumes, he’s been sufficiently successful in his own land that he never needed to solicit interest in ours. But his relationship to his homeland’s culture is an ambivalent one. Since his main instrument is the accordion, he was a natural beneficiary when vallenato, a squeezebox-based musical style typified by lyrics dramatizing the drug business, hit it big in Colombia’s Costeño region in the late 1960s. But a disenchanted Velasquez swam against the stream; as vallenato got slower, he sped his music up.