In Meet The Selectors, we highlight the selectors, DJs and music experts that have presented Listening Sessions at the Devon Turnbull Listening Room in 180 Studios. First up is Club Coco label head, curator, DJ and radio host Coco María.

When Coco María, real name Ana Lucia, took to the turntable at Devon Turnbull’s Listening Room in 180 Studios, the vibe she curated straddled the lines between a seminar and a party. Her Journey Through Latin Percussion Listening Session traced rhythms from Africa to Latin America, illustrating how percussion has long carried the stories of migration. For every foot-tapping percussive hit and hip-swinging groove, Ana provided context and storytelling, a perfect blend of pleasure and pedogogy.

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“Even if at the beginning I had a bigger preselection of Latin music, I was tuning my ear, hearing the percussion on every song,” Ana says about the event. “I tried to represent as many places as possible. There was research, there was filtering. It was an interesting exercise.”

The event thoroughly encapsulated her style. Coco María is not just a DJ with deep crates; she’s a selector who thinks like an educator.

“I was always a musical person since I was a little girl,” she explains. “I was born in Mexico, which is a country where you hear music everywhere. I came from a musical family, so I started collecting music since I was a little girl.”

Vinyl, now central to her identity as a DJ, only entered the picture in her twenties after she moved to London. “At that time, I really thought vinyl was dead, 100 per cent,” she laughs. “But I was in a group of friends into collecting records, going to fairs, going to markets. What caught my attention was that they found things that were not easily available. They found old music. That was the starting fire.”

Her first digs opened up a whole new world. One of her early favourites was a 45 by a British band she’d never heard of, picked up for 50 pence. “The surprise was I found this record of a band I had never heard about, and it was such a track… What blew my mind was, how did I find this for 50 pence in a forgotten box, and it’s such a banger? That’s what kept me going: how many more songs are out there that I don’t know, that are forgotten but have the same potential?”

Collecting soon led to DJ sets – first in small bars, then on radio, and eventually, at festivals where Ana developed a name for her fun, insightful sets. A turning point came at Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide Festival in France. “I had never played for so many people in my life,” she said. “Before, I was just playing little bars. But this was another level. I did a good job, and that was the moment I thought ‘Okay, maybe I belong to this world’.”

Independent radio is central to her work as a DJ. From her Breakfast Club Coco residency on Worldwide FM to newer shows across Europe, it keeps her on the hunt for music and demands a constant working knowledge of the industry. “Especially for radio, I feel like my antenna is always on,” she says. “Even if I have a lot of records I love, after a while I feel stagnant, like I’m repeating myself. To find motivation again, I go searching.”

Ana doesn’t see records as nostalgic. For her, they provide focus and creative boundaries to work between. “With CDJs, when I see all the titles and names, my brain gets foggy,” she explains. “Probably because there are too many options, all the names mix up, and I struggle more to know what to play. Whereas with my record bag, I know: this is what I have, this is mine. I get more creative and more playful, probably because there are fewer options. It’s also about senses—touching, feeling, seeing the needle, being present.”

In 2020, Coco María hosted Who’s There?, a short documentary on Amsterdam’s record shops, from Rush Hour to Red Light, for The Vinyl Factory. “Moving to Amsterdam during the pandemic was isolating,” she remembers. “Those videos helped me navigate. Now I feel part of a very tight music community.”

It was at this time, during the pandemic, that Ana began shifting from DJ to curator. A casual conversation about releasing a friend's song turned into a collaboration with beloved Swiss label Bongo Joe. The result was Club Coco, a 2021 compilation spotlighting contemporary Latin sounds.

“It felt very natural,” she says. “All these people were friends. It was like organising a party, just in vinyl format.”

She wanted to highlight what was happening in the present day rather than digging for old gems, forging an alternative to the cycle of reissue compilations. “Many labels are releasing older music, which is great. But I wondered where is the new music? I was really proud to make a selection of musicians who were new and active. Plus, during the pandemic, artists needed that support.”

A follow-up, Club Coco ¡AHORA! The Latin Sound of Now, arrived in 2023 and reinforced her role as a singular voice in contemporary curation.

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Ana often approaches compilations and radio shows as if they were lessons. “When I prepare these sessions or radio shows, especially on a special topic, I feel a little like when I was preparing lessons as a teacher,” she says. “Set the mood, make sure everybody’s on the same page, give feedback, ask questions.”

Similarly, a teacher’s sense of responsibility weighed on her during her Listening Session. “What if someone never heard music from that country? I think I could have done it more extensively, set the context better. But I wanted to represent the roots, like starting with African percussion before moving to the indigenous sounds of Latin America. It’s educational.”

The set also posed practical challenges. “I was thinking that this was a really great sound system, so some records will sound better than others,” she says. Although she worried about presenting in English, she found the room receptive. “There’s always a part of me aware that English isn’t my native language. I had never done anything like this in English, so that was a little block. But it was a very interesting exercise.”

This autumn Coco María launches Club Coco: New Dimensions in Latin Music, the first release on her own label. Due via her freshly launched label Club Coco on September 26, it gathers 11 tracks stretching from Bogotá to Naples, Lima to Amsterdam and New York and is set to be another instalment in the series.

“There are a couple of songs I’m really excited to share, because it’s musicians I really hope to see shine,” she says. “A lot of these musicians have never released anything. I’m hoping they see people like our music and keep doing it. Like motivation.”

Like her Listening Room session, the compilation maps the present through the past, placing today’s sounds in a long rhythmic continuum.

After stepping back from radio, Ana is now returning with new residencies alongside a run of gigs. With her label now taking off at the same time, she’s looking forward to a stacked calendar of events and showcases, reaching more listeners and dancers than ever before. “It’s a nice momentum at the moment. Things are connecting.”

Pre-order Club Coco: New Dimensions In Latin Music, out via Club Coco on September 26. Find out more about the events at Devon Turnbull's Listening Room in 180 Studios here.