GIANT PANDA GUERILLA DUB SQUAD TEARS DOWN MUSICAL WALLS AT CHOCONUT INN

Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad, titularly large and not to be confused with dubstep (dub is a genre unto itself), is a psychedelic Americana reggae five-piece out of Rochester, New York.

Their sound spans from the head-nodding, easygoing chug of reggae facilitating lazy afternoons (In These Times), to the warm, open, and inviting laze of the bonafide country confessional ballad (Country), to somewhere neither here nor there, a zone of electronic buzziness underlying the twisting braid of a combined, genre-less sound that’s exploiting everything it can, every cranny of folk and dub (Steady). Also, they jam. They’re very much a jam band. They’re diverse, to say the least.

When I asked the band how they see themselves utilizing genre, they responded collectively that they “would more describe what we are doing as purposefully avoiding genres and their given stereotypes. We play music because we love it, and that happens to include many different types of music.”

A band that has been playing as many as one hundred touring gigs a year for more than ten years- from the U.S. to Canada, to Jamaica- is bound to create their own terms of what music can sound like: a vocabulary that is beyond what is dictated by the charts, and is more from the band members’ hearts, to put it cheesily. The constantly touring jam band, defended from the booby traps of pop formula, develops a sound that is shaped not by ideas and markets, but by raw experience- each notion as free, accidental, and purely physically oriented in time and space as a lighter that has been lost between the cushions of a friend’s couch.

Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad is coming to play at the Choconut Inn at 10 Quaker Lake Rd., in Friendsville, PA on October 2nd at 7pm with fellow reggae-toned group Preach Freedom. When I asked GPGDS how they ended up connecting with Preach Freedom, they said: “[We] personally had been hearing through some sort of grapevine that Preach really enjoyed our music (this was literally years ago). We recently just played a show together in Erie… We had a wonderful time with those guys; they are incredible musicians and we look forward to hanging again.”

Doesn’t that sound cool? Musicians hanging with other musicians. It makes me think of the Greek gods depicted as colorful, endearing cartoons in the Disney movie Hercules, doing magical things on top of a mountain of clouds and controlling all of human fate from a separate, mythical world. Luckily, jam bands are known to be chill. So you don’t have to be intimidated by the casual and glamorous lifestyles of musicians. Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad are coming to hang with Preach, and us: an ethereal time for all.

Tickets are $15 plus a $3 service charge online, and are also available at Music City, located at 3100 Vestal Parkway East, or at The Choconut Inn.