show recap: Pachyman on Halloween
I first clocked the existence of Pachyman—aka the Puerto Rican-born, Los Angeles-based dub reggae artist Pachy Garcia—through a really good PR email subject line: For Pachyman, "it’s always Reggae Christmas." My friend Matthew favors reggae and reggae-adjacent music as the weather gets cold (his playlists for this purpose are excellent) and my husband Chris, a big fan of dub influences, has said for years that he wants to do a "Christmas in July in December" party that would involve tropical vibes, including plenty of reggae music. So seeing a mention of Reggae Christmas in the wild locked me in, even before hearing Pachyman's music.
The body of the email explicated the catchy subject line: Garcia described getting into cycles where "every December or January, at the turn of the year, I get back on trying to recreate the Channel One studio sound." Such seasonal yearning produced an album released this past May, Another Place, with plush and spacey vibes that make me want to make snow angels on a patch of high pile carpet. The production is warm and organic. The percussion, subtle but still robust, tugs one's ligaments toward chill rhythmic motion.
Sami
Pachyman just played two back to back shows at Lodge Room, one on Halloween night and one on All Saint's Day, part of a tour with fellow L.A. artist Mndsgn. I was lucky to be able to attend the 10/31 show.
When I arrived, opener Gabriel da Rosa was playing charming Brazilian music and wearing a blood-spattered white blazer, both he and his drummer's noggins adorned with Baphomet-style horns. The horror costume aesthetic was offset somewhat by the pleasant nature vistas projected on the back wall. At one point da Rosa switched from acoustic to electric guitar and ripped a deeply gnarly solo over his bossa nova track—one of those fuzzy, dirty, indulgent expressions of sound that represent sheer delight at the capabilities of the six-stringed creature known as a Guitar.
Then Pachyman took the stage, accompanied by a bassist + synth player whose names I did not catch in time to jot down, but rest assured they kicked ass. Pachyman sometimes sang behind his drum kit, and sometimes sang while roaming the stage. He at one point played a melodica, and all around me phones went up to film the playing of the melodica, because playing the melodica is just a cool thing to do. The bass was absolutely filthy. The vibes were powerful. The three-piece band rendered songs from Another Place like "Calor Ahora" and "Hard to Part" in full Technicolor (or maybe more like...luminous earth tones? glowing magma?), gradually melting the typical Los Angeles rock crowd froideur until everyone's knees and hips got going in some interesting directions.
When I interviewed my friend Kiko Soirée for the blog, they mentioned a growing interest in listening to frequency music: "Just tones, for hours!" Frequency music is said to have healing properties via the elongation of certain musical tones (174 Hz for pain relief, 417 Hz to banish negativity, etc.); I guess the dub reggae of the Halloween night show provided me with a similar healing energy. The heavily reverberated vocals and dense, minimalist grooves subsumed the cortisol in my blood, relaxed my muscles, and allowed me just enough mental space to break down some of the shit that has been bothering me without causing the dreaded Live Music Mental Spiral that can happen when I get too distracted by stress to enjoy things.
Specifically I was thinking about my lack of Halloween spirit. Covid really killed it to be honest. When I was a kid I loved skulking around the streets in a janky costume with my buds, even skirting over to 'too old for trick-or-treating' status because roaming unsupervised at night was such a rush.
College was a great excuse to look sexy while drinking heavily, though by the end of my higher education, I was doing things like dressing like the Princess Diana Beanie Baby (complete with poly stuffing inside my purple sweatshirt) and spending my night scooping up wasted freshmen from the girls' bathroom floor and depositing them in their dorm rooms. I had a few great years of couples costumes with my husband in my later 20s in New York—my favorite was when we both dressed like Post Malone—but my spooky spirit waned with the pandemic and has not returned.
At the Pachyman show, I was solo (no big deal, I really love a solo concert situation) and surrounded by costumed individuals. Non-denominational witches and goblins, at least 1 Austin Powers, and an enormous inflatable Pikachu were some of my neighbors, all of them full of merriment.
As I bounced to the bass, I thought about how to recapture the zest for the holiday in the future. It might be as easy as returning to one of my easy go-to costumes: a hot dog suit that slips on easily over street clothes. It might be a foray into baking scary treats? Early this month, we got new neighbors who came to our door and gave us a plate of Halloween sweets, including a delicious cherry hand pie in the shape of a skull. Maybe I just need to help my husband carve our yearly pumpkin. I don't mind clawing the seedy guts out with my bare hands!
But I can't be complacent about having holiday spirit. Spirit is not necessarily a renewable resource—I learned that after 2020. It's not a perennial, it's an annual, and must be planted at regular intervals. It has to be maintained and cultivated. I'll do better next Halloween, and in the meantime, it's not too late for me to get hype for Thanksgiving. I'll be blaring airhorns, hollering about gratitude, and seeking at least one non-janky Autumn Leaf Garland for the dining table. And I figured this all out because I allowed myself to relax and enjoy the heady vibes of the Pachyman concert. That's the power of dub.
