Manila’s underground has spent the last few years quietly growing into one of Southeast Asia’s most interesting house music scenes, and Pamcy is one of its most charming exports. The Manila-based producer makes her debut with Sauce Aisle, a three-track Deep House EP for Jun Kamoda’s Jun Records (catalogue number JUN012), arriving with premieres from DJ Mag and Mixmag Asia already under its belt. It’s a record of modest ambitions and considerable personality—groove-first, sample-laden house that wears its DIY production values proudly.
The culinary conceit is right there in the tracklist. Oyster Sauce (3:30) opens with a fat, four-to-the-floor kick and swung, lo-fi percussion, the bassline thick and slightly sticky as it rolls beneath a bed of dusty pads and detuned stabs. It’s unhurried and warm, the kind of opener that locks a groove in place and simply lets it breathe, and the whole thing feels like it was recorded in a kitchen rather than a studio—in the best possible way.
Fish Sauce is saltier. The hats are tighter and the percussion more insistent, a funkier bassline propelling the track forward beneath chopped vocal samples that duck and weave around the beat. It’s the EP’s most overtly dancy moment. Closer Sweet Soy Sauce (6:00) is the deepest and longest of the three, syrup-slow pads and a rolling, rounded bassline that settle into a blissful, heads-down groove and stay there, patient and unhurried to the last.
Sauce Aisle doesn’t reinvent Deep House, and it doesn’t need to. What it offers is something rarer: a debut with real character, unafraid of its own charm and confident in its grooves. If the rest of Manila’s new wave sounds half as good as this, the city’s scene is in very good health indeed.
