{"id":18664,"date":"2020-05-08T15:48:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-08T19:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/panm360.com\/interviews-panm360\/pantayo-les-championnes-du-kulintang\/"},"modified":"2020-05-09T18:58:42","modified_gmt":"2020-05-09T22:58:42","slug":"pantayo-les-championnes-du-kulintang","status":"publish","type":"interviews","link":"https:\/\/panm360.com\/en\/interviews-panm360\/pantayo-les-championnes-du-kulintang\/","title":{"rendered":"Pantayo: Kulintang connectors"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Photo credit: Sarah Bo<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The foundation of Pantayo\u2019s sound is kulintang, which is, as band member Kat Estacio explains, \u201ca group-based form of atonal metal percussion and drum music that originated in Southeast Asia, and the specific tradition that we borrow from and are inspired by is from the Maguindanao and T’boli tribes from the southern part of what is now known as the Philippines.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The one reference point most new listeners might have for kulintang is Indonesian gamelan, a similar metallophonic music, its rich clangour familiar to anyone who\u2019s seen the famous anime film Akira<\/em>. There are pronounced distinctions, however.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cKulintang is a community ensemble, meant to bring people together \u2013 in ceremonies, weddings, and so on \u2013 and is used for relaxation after a long work day,\u201d says Estacio. \u201cFrom what I know, gamelan is more like an orchestra, played in courts for the enjoyment of royalty. With this in mind, it makes sense to me that kulintang instruments are tuned to each other, and the tunings depend on the maker. There is no one way to play kulintang \u2013 innovation, interpretation, and playing according to how you feel is encouraged. It also makes sense that anybody, regardless of class or social role, can just pick up and learn kulintang.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c1960s psychedelic music popularized the gamelan,\u201d adds Jo Delos Reyes. \u201cIt was through the Western lens of the exoticization of the \u2018orient\u2019 that the gamelan became more highly researched. Gamelan has more standardized tuning, whereas kulintang does not follow specific tuning. The tuning depends on the making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis resulted in a really interesting and sometimes challenging songwriting experience for us, as we tried to write with tuned instruments. It made us reimagine new ways of approaching how we use kulintang-ensemble instruments in our arrangements.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo credit: Sarah Bo<\/em><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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Kulintang, it\u2019s vital to note, is originally women\u2019s music. \u201cThis was a tidbit that we didn\u2019t know initially,\u201d says Estacio.\u201cWe learned about it as part of our ongoing decolonization work, to inform ourselves of the context that kulintang music comes from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat I learned from one kulintang teacher, Titania Buchholdt, is that since the Maguindanao culture is a mix of indigenous and Muslim cultures, some if not most of them follow a rule where a woman isn\u2019t able to travel without being accompanied by a man from her family \u2013 husband, brother, father, uncle, son. This resulted in Maguindanao Kulintang teachers in North America, and in some cases in Manila, to be mostly men.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \u201cHowever, we also remember women, queer, and two-spirit people\u2019s important roles in a lot of Indigenous cultures. They are birth workers, mothers, healers, priestesses, musicians, performers, and occupy a variety of other roles that are central to their respective communities. It is no surprise to me to now make the connection that women are at the centre of kulintang music traditions too.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPantayo has nurtured us in many tender and constructive ways that enabled our personal growth,\u201d adds Michelle Cruz. \u201cBeing an all-women band certainly contributes to that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs women,\u201d Estacio continues, \u201cI also think that playing a percussion instrument is so empowering and an important addition to the narrative of what women’s roles are, in labour and in music. At the end of the day, playing gongs, just like any percussion instrument, is very cathartic!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Alaska B with Pantayo\u2019s Kat Estacio and Jo Delos Reyes<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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Assembled bit by bit over the course of several years, Pantayo<\/em> (on the label Telephone Explosion) acts as a record of its own creation, an \u201caudio diary\u201d, as the band puts it, of their collective evolution. Essential to that process was producer Alaska B, leader of Yamantaka \/\/ Sonic Titan. She\u2019d worked with Pantayo since 2014 on various projects, including the score for the award-winning video-game Severed<\/em><\/a> in 2016, and YT\/\/ST\u2019s 2018 album Dirt<\/em><\/a>. Pantayo\u2019s Delos Reyes also sings in YT\/\/ST.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPrior to this album project,\u201d recalls Kat Estacio, \u201cwe were only playing live shows and offering our KuliVersity music and cultural workshops on how we learned, and play, kulintang. Alaska offered a perspective that having an album works like an archive, so that there\u2019s a record of kulintang music played by queer diasporic women in Toronto in 2020.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt ended up being outside the scale of most projects I’ve worked on,\u201d Alaska B recalls, \u201cas it was spread over many years of on-and-off work. At the beginning, they had envisioned it as taking the gongs to outer space. I remember Michelle sending me a message using alien and ghost emojis to describe her ideas, so we tried to work some very electronic ideas into their very not-electronic gongs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI tried to keep the focus on the dynamism of live performance by wrapping their performances in electronic layers, instead of trying to build a base layer and inserting the gongs on top, so many of the gong elements were recorded first, and then built on top of, months after.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs it was the band\u2019s first shot at making a record, we honestly did not have a clear direction, and Alaska helped us navigate this,\u201d says Cruz. \u201cShe encouraged us to really dig and find our way. She warned us that it would be a tough grind. She didn\u2019t sugar-coat anything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAlaska ingrained in us a type of work ethic,\u201d says Estacio, \u201cto get to know our instruments so well that we could fall in love with them over and over again. I think this is one of the reasons why each song in the album sounds so different. This collection of songs is a way for us to present the different explorations we\u2019ve allowed ourselves to go through during this process.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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