Sounding Together Thinking: Lani Maestro Speaking Digital Tagalog beside Poklong Anading +

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My window is open to receive this day, today. Outside, the trees are luminous, holding the sky in their leaves against the soft autumn breeze. They rise from the earth as they have for some hundred years. I planted bamboo in their midst a decade ago, and time has turned their stalks into sturdy immigrant trees adapting to a non-tropical terrain. Their fine elongated leaves create a soft sound of caress, especially now, when the wind comes intermittently to announce the change of season. My dwelling of stone is born of the same earth as these trees. People in the past have dug and sculpted granite from this land to make buildings for people and animals. Three hundred years of someone’s counting have shaped this world and I live with the murmur of its history—my breath synchronized with theirs. One day, I too will turn into dust and join this earth with my sound and song, my utterance and silence beside me. The trees go on living.

Bamboo—so round between the embrace of two hands. Its skin a textile crafted delicately by nature out of sun and monsoon. There are hundreds of its stalks, cut in the depths of a Dipolog forest by Bubuy and his clan. Cradled in a shipping container, they traversed the Philippine Sea to enact the space of Yola’s future dwelling outside of Manila. For a moment, they were housed in Bonifacio High Street at MO_Space to lend form to our installation, Digital Tagalog. Yola acknowledges the poetry of these trees so that we may use them as materials for art. Inside their stalks, the hollowing space of memory catches past and future so they are embodied in the present. Their sections cradle water, sound, food, and force so that we may be reminded of air in architecture and of breath that makes life and culture. These trees have taken up the beating of our heart and life’s pounding, and they lay there still, as witness. Bamboo—a receptacle that reciprocates to all who know that remembering has nothing to do with creating.

Agnes, Billy, Yola, Patrick, Poklong, and myself. We huddled together in this mound of earth to receive or to be the spectacle of a star-studded night sky. We sat still. Listening to each other’s rhythmic silence, our hands ease out to reach for instruments to play. The slow-breathing quietness making way for every sound as we come in and out to ride like a cloud on each other’s sounding… a slow circling of gong, discrete but distinct guitar plucking and strumming, then a soft, syncopated drumming. Our sounds wet with moistened earth. Someone calls out, “Vicente.” And even before the word, “who?” is uttered, someone breaks into song… “this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you”… We string along the lyrics to Don McLean’s “Vincent” (“Starry Starry Night,” a song for Vincent Van Gogh) and continue with gentle laughter. The pleasure of connectedness makes fluid a tender sound that is echoed by the summer breeze, the walking water, and the community of nocturnal life around us. Invisible. How to sound with the same gentleness as stars so we could ‘be with.’

In the act of playing the bamboo with Poklong—and the music we assembled in the studio (aptly designated as ‘found’ and ‘prepared’ sounds)—we felt we were in constant conversation. In the same breath, our performative gesture transported us, and we were lost in our own worlds. The idea of collaborators is displaced by the respect for independence, keeping one’s identity intact, our individuality as it was enacted there. Co-dependence too often can become criteria for an idealized union, a deception of symbiosis. Yet to let one be oneself and be lost in the universe could very well be a condition for love and a necessity in the acceptance of strangeness which makes for the discovery of our ‘difference.’

It is evening. Poklong and I spontaneously play the piano in the dark. The piano sits in the garage with a herd of temporarily unwanted things. We play appropriately, finding the best rhythm in the blind light and we make our way through broken keys. Perhaps we have some idea, or maybe not, but just the same we are pounding like mad. This beat-up box is resistant to whatever expectations we may have as it is missing its original parts. We give in and follow where our fingers take us: tapping, drumming even. It is no longer the musical instrument with its assigned name—piano. The music builds up and the intensity has a feeling of no holding back. We go astray. We stay together. We are crouching, our heads pulled down, devouring the sounding keys. Our hands play loud. We attract listening eyes blinking in the dark. Where is the attraction? I am thinking. Is it the sound of the intensity of our intention?

It is in 6 AM, and Mg assists me to set up the sound recorder in Dwight’s aquarium of waking cicadas. Baobab, the dog, makes a barking sound in the background. It feels sympathetic to the cicada’s finite cry with its intermittent plea for exit. These sounds animate the morning light, casting shadows of leaves against the wall. After breakfast, Mg gives me a harmonica. I play. She taps on the piano keys. We get our cue from Hazel sweeping the leaves outside with her walis. Mg plays only the right half of the keyboard, then the pedals. Mawen makes a sound of burning with holy beads rubbed between her palms. In the living room, I hear the motorized buzz of a wasp and I follow it towards the garden… the turning wheels of David’s cycling on a stationary bike make a meditative drone. Later, in the gallery, our intimate production evolves into an exhibition, and the gallery becomes public space once again. Mawen makes piercing, circling lines with her bowl. Poklong is sounding the bamboo with wooden sticks. Each occasion offers a new sounding: Maki, Melo, and Mg give a techno-hand to computer sound files and re-install new poetry to already assigned names… tamis anghang / bachchoy / sapatos ni d / cacaolabaw / kesong itim / pandesukal / sige na nga / laugh me loud / a bowl of moon… Lila comes up to me and proposes a new configuration for the cushions on the floor.

I am thinking of José Maceda, composer and ethnomusicologist. His music has been called ‘avant-garde,’ yet it is surely non-western in its non-linearity. It feels to me like a beautiful elaboration of our ethno-culture’s life with nature. Maceda’s extensive knowledge of Philippine and Asian ethnic cultures was nourished by passion and generosity in sharing our musical diversity as Filipinos. At a time when thinking of the self in terms of ‘nationhood’ was a subject for intense reflection, his ‘archive’ seems to have evolved from an act of self-reconstitution, in which preservation persists as a positive resistance to our deepening, colonized subjectivity. My initial interest in sharing with Poklong came from a personal desire to discover more of the debut of my artistic ‘influence.’ The arrival of Maceda’s Ugnayan and its call for musical togetherness rattled my adolescent mind and forged the idea of ‘world’ as one that was creatively all-embracing.

At the UP College of Music, Dayang and her assistants graciously received us to let us discover and listen to what feels indeed like a living treasure. Poklong and I perused with wonder and amazement. Maceda’s  journey into himself through others. Together, we voyaged to island regions of time and space as we cupped our hand to our ears, receiving ‘other’ cultures—ours / not ours. We would smile together or simply nod our heads downward towards our interiority. I listen to an Ayta man singing and write my ears’ thoughts… This voice trembling inside but soaring in its lament… a plucking of vocal strings rousing spirit… the depth of emotion in a voice that tears; a semblance of a sound that I have known to be—pain or love… but, it goes ripping, building up as rounded notes, horizontal in its movement, toward emptiness and fullness… a voice, a form of such resonance. How to decipher these words of a dialect—not mine, so concrete like leaves on a tree. I feel. I don’t look for meaning. I feel my body’s recollection of being.

We abandoned the structure of our plan as the materials refused to go ‘our way.’ Instead, we listen and we abide, keeping everything intact. The bamboo rests horizontally in the gallery with other elements of the installation. The odour of its origin lingers. The boxed speakers distributed in the space, together, in between, are with, and of, everything else. The rest of the wood are arranged as anyone sees fit. The suspended process of building with its traces of labour and human contact. The circumstance is transformed into an aesthetic. A solitary space that will make listening possible. The adjacent small room echoes with earth-coloured lights from small computers. Our recorded sounds nestle in files to be summoned by the viewer’s tapping, singly or collectively. Like the bamboo nearby, the laptops sit with silent reverberation. Their own contemporary form is one that waits to be animated from sleep if one so chooses. Digital Tagalog. It is. No representation. No metaphor. The word ‘abandon’ becomes key as a way of being present. We are skateboarding our way along passages unknown, but we are gliding intuitively, musically.

Surrender. In the moment of letting go, where deconstruction happens before construction, we picked up sticks and played with the carpenter… Alvin, JR, PJ, and Lucas. As I write, I keep listening to our recordings. I am engulfed by the layers of sound that came from our bodies, several hours replete of playing, of sounding, of receiving and of giving back to and from the vibrations of the bamboo. I am in awe at the possibility of finding rhythm and harmony when playing in conversation with an-other, where no rules are defined or instructions given. It is here where I am convinced of an autonomy that is simultaneously mindful of community. The blossoming of beautiful music from within that makes possible the sensuality of care. The letting-go throws away all fear that accompanies the desire of wanting to make good art or wanting to be a good artist. It is just playing and being there to receive what comes… and the joy of what is drawn out…

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The + : Enteng Viray, Yola Perez-Johnson, Mawen Ong, Mg Oh, Ringo Bunoan, Dayang Yraola, Agnes Arellano, Billy Bonnevie, Alvin Zafra, JR, PJ, Lucas, Lila Bunoan, MM Yu, Baobab, Melo Robato, Maki Ong, Dwight Ong, David Ong, Patrick Johnson. Thank you to Poklong Anading for accompanying me while expertly gliding his skateboard. Thank you to Stephen Horne and Erín Moure for reading.