A Song For Friday: Pachyman
Pachyman delivers serious delight on his latest album. Also, stellar releases from Brooklyn Rider, Stereolab, Eric Arn, and Sarah Belle Reid.
Pachy Garcia, a Puerto Rican-born, Los Angeles-dwelling multi-instrumentalist and producer, has been diving deep into the world of reggae and dub as Pachyman since 2019’s In Dub. But I didn’t catch up with him until 2021, when he put out The Return Of…, which astonished with its “almost eerie fidelity to the original masters.” Importantly, I noted that Garcia’s “ultra-light touch” and “sense of play” kept it from being a rote exercise.
In 2023, he gave us Switched-On, which found him “branching out with more textures and tempos, making it feel even more his own thing…” Today, he followed that up with his fifth full-length, Another Place, which includes some of his finest reggae yet alongside tracks that show ever more of his talents, like the satisfying yet self-aware dance music purism of Hard To Part. Another sign of his expanding mastery is False Moves, which sees him using his playfulness to make essential connections between psychedelia, dub, and post-punk. A tight bass line joins with loose-limbed drums to form a foundation for him to scamper about, changing your impression of each instrument’s roles as he layers sardonic vocals and spacey guitar over them. Then, he starts larding on the dub effects with characteristic flair, everything echoing and clanging all over the place. The man knows what he’s doing!
When I saw Pachyman at this year’s IndiePlaza Festival, which took place on a frigid, wet day, his strength, resilience, and dedication to delivering joy came through loud and clear. As he flicked switches and pushed sliders, manipulating stems of instruments all of which he played and recorded himself, while the rain lashed the stage, it struck me that having this much fun is serious business. Missing Pachyman’s best album yet would be a false move indeed.
Listen to most of the songs for Friday here or below.
Brooklyn Rider - The Four Elements I’ve been a fan of this brilliant string quartet since at least 2011, when I encountered them at a marvelous concert in the now-lamented River To River series. Also lamentable is how poor I was as a reviewer back then, but the internet does not forget. Immediately apparent was how well-rounded they were, equally at home in compositions written hundreds of years ago or last week. They also have, in violinist Colin Jacobson, a built-in composer of no small stature.
To celebrate their 20th anniversary, Jacobson, along with Johnny Gandelsman (violin), Nicholas Cords (viola), and Michael Nicolas (cello), assembled this magnum opus release - you can get it as a four-LP box set - that hits all the marks they’re known for and then some. Kicking off with Jacobson’s folksy and evocative five-part piece, A Short While To Be Here, the collection includes classics from Dmitri Shostakovich (a furiously precise rendition of String Quartet No. 8) and Henri Dutilleux (Ainsi la Nuit, with each of the 12 tiny movements played with joy and attention to detail) to newer works like Osvaldo Golijov’s relentless and mysterious Tenebrae (2002) and Akshaya Tucker’s Hollow Flame (2022), a noble and devastating elegy for fire-ridden California. As curators and players, the members of Brooklyn Rider are at the top of their game on The Four Elements. The only difficulty is figuring out how I’m going to make room on my groaning shelves for that box set!
Stereolab - Instant Holograms On Metal Film The heyday of this legendary band was in the 1990s, when I obsessed over albums like Mars Audiac Quintet (1994) and Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996), reveling in their Krautrock meets James Brown grooves, sunny melodies, hypnotic guitars and keyboards, and a worldview that encompassed the made-up world of advertising and the all-too-real world of socialist activism. I got to see them live around that time, and it was a religious experience, an exercise in mesmerizing throb that has never quite left me. In the new decade, album titles like Sound-Dust and Not Music seemed to hint at a kind of enervation which was reflected in the music.
The tragic death of singer and multi-instrumentalist Mary Hansen in 2002 further punctured the bubble of delight that Stereolab promised at their best. I saw them in concert again just before their 2009 hiatus, and it was still great, but there was a void on stage where Mary used to stand. Founding members Laetitia Sadier and Tim Gane, along with longtime member Andy Ramsey and others, revived the band in 2019 for live performances and a delectable series of reissues.
Now, they have delivered their first album of new material in nearly 15 years, and it’s as near a return to form as anyone can expect. Over about an hour and 13 songs, all written by Sadier and Gane, Instant Holograms gives us everything we expect from Stereolab while maintaining a sense of freshness. Some of that may be due to the rhythmic acuity of the drums and synths of Cooper Crain from Bitchin Bajas, a band that picked up some of Stereolab’s ideas in 2010 and ran with them into ever more abstract and electronic directions. While there will always be something special about those ‘90s albums, it’s great to have something to point to as proof that they were not only of that time, but for all time. While the title seems to suggest that this version of Stereolab is once-removed from the original, these “Holograms” are the real thing.
Eric Arn - fixe Idee This long-running avant-garde guitarist calls his Instagram account “guitar_wrestler”, but on this new release, he and his acoustic instrument sound like they’re getting along beautifully. Maybe the wrestling happens before he presses “record,” as there is a definite degree of difficulty to these pieces. But the results are transporting and intriguing, from the sublime epic of Impromptu pour le fantôme, which opens the album, to the gnarled commentary of Ewigkeitsgasse, and many modes in between.
Sarah Belle Reid - Unwound Accidental Ornithology, Reid’s collaboration with Vinny Golia from earlier this year, was a series of “jousting improvisations based on the calls of imaginary birds.” This one-track album is a different animal altogether, with Reid using a Eurorack Modular Synthesizer, MaxMSP, and her voice for an exploratory live recording that seems to tell a dark tale. Since it was recorded in Arkansas, I’m seeing an old pickup truck speeding by fallow, wind-blown farmland. Then the aliens arrive, setting the old farmhouse ablaze. Or something like that - make up your own story!
From The Archives
Record Roundup: 2023 First Quarter Report, Pt. 2
Record Roundup: New Music Cavalcade
Information For 16 Strings