Pachyman : Another Place
The late Lee “Scratch” Perry, a vocalist, musician, studio god, dub creator, and Godfather of Reggae, once told an interviewer that he was 75,000 years old and came from the planet Sirius. Perry had a lifetime full of antics. He liked to talk, spout gibberish, and add to the larger-than-life legacy he’s accrued, but he was no fool. I once saw him perform in San Francisco, where Mad Professor was running the boards, twisting knobs and guiding the sold-out crowd at Maritime Hall through some heavy audio trip by way of dub wisdom. My man Lee Scratch? He was on stage wearing an “adult diaper” or “incontinence brief” for yuks—your mileage may vary—smoking what could be the largest spliff I’ve ever witnessed in my life. Yes, it’s show, finger quotes, business… but Mad Professor was there, putting in work.
Understand this: without dub, there is no Portishead, no Massive Attack. For that matter, there is no drum and bass, no grime, no footwork, no house, no disco. But more importantly, there is no DJ Steve Aoki tossing cakes from the DJ booth on patrons who paid anywhere from $43 to $413 for the show. Dub is the granddaddy of electronic music. You can even witness a certain wing of UK jazz from Nubya Garcia, Theon Cross, etc., who pull inspiration from their sound system roots to churn out a next generation of jazz fans that prefer it with a side of bass-bin bidness.
So when the Puerto Rican-born, Los Angeles-based musician Pachy Garcia decided to make his fourth album, Another Place, it had to go beyond the foundation he’s built since 2021. As he told Juno Daily: “I wanted to try new ideas with the same sounds; maybe see where dub could have gone if pushed further and into different genres. Dub has always had that experimental approach to music, and I wanted to continue that tradition of exploration.”
From his cozy basement studio 333 House in Los Angeles, Pachyman has fortified a following who may not have been familiar with how this music came about. Through TikToks and music videos, he’s deliberately shown himself at the keyboard, playing bass, picking and strumming guitar, on drums, at the tape machine, and behind those mixing boards—letting a new generation know how this sacred music called dub was made when he was young and becoming hooked on its repetitive and oh-so-cavernous trove of frequencies that allows bass and rhythm to communicate without uttering one word.
From track one, “Calor Ahora,” a combo of that dub delay vastness mixed with his Puerto Rican roots, we immediately understand what his fourth and always-moving album is doing: letting Garcia’s talent bloom. Another Place works through the way that dub took rock, disco, cinematic charts, and post-punk’s idealistic vision of itself through a much more rhythm-based prism. There are still those stand-out spliff skanking dub-reggae combos, such as “SJU,” “Another Place” and “ADSH” that Garcia can grind out like a bucket and put you in that zone.
Planet Sirius, as my man Lee Scratch said, but Garcia’s fourth album gets its wings and hybrids up the joint with atonal ideas, getting loose on rhythm and bass stretches, clashing with rock ideas, in a good way, such as “False Moves,” or the euphoric, library music, drive-in movie interlude “Strikes Back” and the cold-crushing ESG banger “Hard to Part.” Another Place takes into consideration how dub, quietly, through numerous subgenres, or gentrification names, if you will, took over the world.
Label: ATO
Year: 2025
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Pachyman : Another Place
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