{"id":2861,"date":"2022-07-18T18:31:26","date_gmt":"2022-07-18T21:31:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cstm-sctm.ca\/?p=2861"},"modified":"2023-01-24T15:30:16","modified_gmt":"2023-01-24T19:30:16","slug":"pantayo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cstm-sctm.ca\/fr\/pantayo\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWe\u2019re Just a Girl Band, Just Trying to Shine\u201d: Sonic Gatherings in Pantayo\u2019s Gong-Punk Kulintang Traditions"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Allison Sokil<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am sitting in the back of a streetcar on my way to see the 2020 Polaris Prize shortlisted quintet Pantayo and recording artist L CON perform at the Jam Factory in Toronto\u2019s East End. As we pass the Financial District, the buildings begin to thin, getting shorter and wider, stacks of rust-coloured bricks and blocks. Everything is a little quieter now, even with the hum of dinner traffic, commuters, and tourists heading to Leslieville and the Beaches. The evening is thick with the heat and humidity of a cement city in late summer. I wipe my brow and shift my weight as we cross the river and powdery pink clouds gather and settle behind me. I pull the cable at the station stop, crossing the street as soon as the streetcar sings farewell with its brisk dingding! <\/em><\/p>\n

The Jam Factory is on the second floor of a two-story historic building that originally housed the Shirriff marmalade factory during the early twentieth century. \u201cMerchants of Green Coffee\u201d and \u201cCaf\u00e9 & Jam Factory\u201d are painted in tall block letters on the street-facing wall. I recognize the poster for the show near the entrance and make a note of the performers in a little black notebook\u2013\u2013L CON, Pantayo, and LAL\u2013\u2013observing for the first time that this concert is a part of Venus Fest, a Toronto-based not-for-profit music festival and concert series working to \u201caddress historical marginalization and discrimination within the music industry while re-sounding the future.\u201d The bands are just finishing up a soundcheck as I reach the top of the stairs. I am early and the show is running late, which works in my favour, giving me a little time to catch up with the many familiar faces of artists and producers and friends in the room.<\/p>\n

As night falls and the heat simmers, the show begins with Pantayo\u2019s performance. Four instrumentalists and vocalists set up in the spotlight with a microphone in the centre of an impromptu stage against the back wall. Each member plays an instrument and sings; collaboration and community are central to the group with a Tagalog name that translates to \u201cfor us.\u201d The kulintang <\/em>instruments are aligned and centered at the front: the agung, <\/em>a metal kettle gong hung vertically and played with a mallet; the sarunay, <\/em>a struck metallophone with eight tuned metal plates strung together on a wooden rack, often used as a training instrument; and of course, the kulintang, <\/em>a name for the instrument, ensemble, and genre, featuring a set of horizontal pot gongs pitched from lowest (left) to highest (right). The bass and synth player grounds the sound with pop cues and electronic timbres, complementing the percussive gongs and individual voices. Each part blends and breathes to create that sense and space and heat of collective music-making as communal practice. The sound is collaborative and referential in nature, each voice integral to inspiring and sustaining the next, and the next. As Kat later explains, \u201cthe nature of kulintang <\/em>music [is] as a centrepiece for community gathering.\u201d Gathering frames and shapes their performance, extending to embrace the night.<\/p>\n

The intimacy of gathering imbues Pantayo\u2019s sound and ethos<\/em>. According to the Oxford English Dictionary <\/em>\u201cto gather\u201d means to unite, to bring together, to assemble in one place, to collect. From the Maguindanaon and T\u2019boli peoples of the southern Philippines to the diasporic kulintang <\/em>ensembles and artists in North America and beyond, Pantayo, as a collective of queer, diasporic musicians, gathers the multiple threads of kulintang <\/em>traditions in the loose bounds of Canada and, specifically, the Indigenous lands of Tkaranto. This community gathering becomes a project of the self and the sonic. Kat describes kulintang <\/em>as primarily \u201can oral tradition, passed down from teacher to student and through families.\u201d She continues, \u201cas immigrants and diasporic Filipinos, we didn\u2019t necessarily have an immediate teacher, an in-person teacher, when we started our journey playing kulintang.<\/em>\u201d Despite this absence, Kat, in Tom Tom <\/em>magazine, explains how, \u201clearning about kulintang <\/em>affirms what we already know in our bodies: music traditions are part of our DNA and that our desire to express ourselves through music is very closely related to our cultural identity\u201d (2020). To learn these traditions, the group turned to the \u201cwritten word\u201d: musical transcriptions, preserved archives, and contemporary recordings. Thus, Pantayo navigated \u201cthe process of playing the traditional aspects of the music through learning transcription of an oral tradition.\u201d<\/p>\n

This process of pedagogical gathering and collecting was, at times, heavily mediated and dislocated, as the materials were \u201cfiltered three times\u2013\u2013or even more. The person who transcribed it is one filter, the person who edits it and then publishes it [are two more].\u201d Though these texts and archives remain indispensable for many diasporic musicians\u2013\u2013Kat emphasizes that Pantayo was only \u201cable to get these resources from the internet and also from personal connections in the Filipino community in North America\u201d\u2013\u2013an absence remains in the fragmentation of this gathering process. They missed that which exists beyond documentation and the text: the context<\/em>. She continues, \u201cit doesn\u2019t come with the history that comes with learning from a teacher, or from a family member.\u201d This displacement in turn affects the sound, a sentiment exhibited in Pantayo\u2019s unique conceptualization of \u201ckulintang <\/em>music as an instrumentation that we can combine [with] pop music structures.\u201d As the members continue to learn about kulintang <\/em>traditions and make new connections with teachers and ensembles in Southeast Asia and North America, the band is collaboratively and transnationally building new contexts across multiple communities, emphasizing the processual and evolving nature of traditional music-making. Thus, they continue to gather \u201cmore of the history, more of why the tuning sounds this way, why the patterns of pieces sound like this, why the flow is a certain way\u201d as they go. Pantayo, as a sonic gathering point and queer autopoietic \u201caudio diary,\u201d becomes a curation of the sounds they grew up with, the sounds they love today, the sounds that they want to learn more about in the future, as they continue to create and perform together.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Fig. 1: The five members of Pantayo sitting near their instruments.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Gathering for Pantayo, \u201cfor us,\u201d thus, also involves a form of queer diasporic world-building, a way of seeking out and defining material embodiments and disparate homeland connections in and through particular sonic practices and paths that diverge from the linearity of strict \u201ctraditional\u201d or \u201cpop\u201d genre-based confines. These \u201cqueer orientations\u201d (Ahmed 2006) allow a musical community to come together, to take a breath, to recover and create an \u201cotherwise,\u201d so beautifully articulated by Crawley as that which \u201cbespeaks the ongoingness of possibility, of things existing other than what is given, what is known, what is grasped\u201d (2016, 24). Pantayo encourages expansiveness in their possibilities of being and sounding; a proximity shaped by navigations of queerness, diaspora-ness, Filipina-ness, Canadian-ness, kulintang <\/em>traditional sounds, and tempered by the North American music industries. Queerness becomes a sonic articulation of individual and collective movement through this evolving and shifting contemporary sound-space. As an aesthetic and embodiment, Pantayo\u2019s queerness is, therefore, multifaceted. Eirene reflects on \u201chow being an all-woman ensemble is queering kulintang, <\/em>in a way,\u201d as kulintang <\/em>music-making in North America remains \u201can activity performed only by men\u201d (Balmes 2018, 139). Kat notes that Pantayo\u2019s collaborative work involves \u201ca vision to make sure that we work with queer folks [\u2026] because we don\u2019t have to explain a lot of things that are part of our experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n

In terms of musical performance, Pantayo proposes that, \u201cthere\u2019s also a little bit of queering in that\u2013\u2013because traditionally kulintang <\/em>music is played sitting down outside in the rice fields\u2013\u2013we bring [this music] on stage, we bring it to churches, any kind of venue\u2013\u2013a garage, a bar.\u201d \u201cWhere we take the physical instruments into physical spaces also has something to do with [a queer] approach,\u201d considers Kat. This transient spatiality mirrors each band member\u2019s individual negotiation of queer diasporic life on Turtle Island and beyond. Jo points to this relational embodiment as a processual expansion of \u201cwhat is perceived as Filipino music.\u201d Pantayo\u2019s contribution is, thus, additive, amplifying \u201cthe many possibilities of ways that Filipino-ness can be experienced and expressed through music and art.\u201d Through their sonic world-building, Pantayo asks us, their listeners, their extended community, to \u201cthink about what creating \u2018Canadian\u2019 music is,\u201d and to contend with what \u201ctraditional music\u201d could be and sound like. There is a stunning resonance between queerness and tradition encapsulated in the theorizing and sonic expressions of Pantayo\u2019s work. As Mu\u00f1oz avers, \u201cqueerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future\u201d (2009, 1). Traditions parallel this temporal imaginativeness, as sounds and practices \u201cwhich appear or claim to be old [but] are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented\u201d (2012, 1).<\/p>\n

This inventiveness is sonically imbued in Pantayo\u2019s musical composition and performance as a way of sounding out the stories that they need and want to tell. After almost eight years of workshopping the materials that they had gathered and shared with their communities, Pantayo\u2019s self-titled debut album, produced by Alaska B, confidently announces \u201cHeto Na,\u201d which roughly translates to, \u201cHere we go!\u201d As the third track on their album, \u201cHeto Na<\/a>\u201d is equally anthemic and atonal, with danceable polyrhythms, gong-punk girl-band vocals, and electronic glitches and synths. A reinterpretation of the OPM (Original Pilipino Music) disco records from the 1970s, \u201cHeto Na\u201d asks its listeners to \u201cown up to that funky shit\u201d and dance. A reminder that remains particularly poignant as we collectively navigate a pandemic-altered world.<\/p>\n

\u201cTaranta,\u201d the song featured in their stunning 2020 Polaris Prize short film<\/a>, created by award-winning filmmaker Tricia Hagoriles, declares: \u201cwe\u2019re not world-star \/ cuz we are world class sisters \/ gonna confront the system with our feet worn \/ listen to the beat of these instruments \/ sound of our resistance \/ we won\u2019t be your enemy \/ but if you fuck up here we go. Jo notes that although the album is not all \u201cthis is our refusal of the system, of the man,\u201d it is still powerful \u201cfor us to be taking up this indie rock spaces\u2026it\u2019s a step [\u2026] We want to take up that space, and just be, and make music.\u201d A song charged with sonic and lyrical ferocity, \u201cTaranta\u201d is an album point that allows the listener to gather strength through the lines, \u201cNatataranta, huwag mataranta \/ Natataranta, hoy umayos ka!\u201d [\u201cPanicking, don\u2019t panic \/ Panicking, get a hold of yourself!\u201d]. Thinking about the prominent placement and rock timbre of kulintang <\/em>in this track, I hear a resonance between its sound and Kat\u2019s description of \u201cthe kulintang <\/em>riffs as kind of in place of a lead guitar riff in the song structure.\u201d<\/p>\n