PUSH IT ISSUE 2:
KAT ESTACIO
PUSH IT This is the second installation of a four part zine series. These independent publications are an attempt to help “fill the gaps” that are missing in the Canadian Music Centre’s archive (please see Issue 1: Pursuit Grooves to learn more). Kat Estacio and I ventured out to Sundridge, Ontario to visit New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA). We saw some incredible sound installations on exhibit, including a beautiful mycelium-based bio-sonification piece from Nanotopia. Afterwards, we went in search of sounds in nature. Using a handheld recorder and a hydrophone, Kat captured some delightful audio of a lively river. We delved into conversations about the idea of archiving sound works. Archivists and artists working in sound have historically documented works through audio recordings and sheet music and scores. These are naturally suitable, but some wonderings do come up: Who has access to documenting works in these traditional ways? And, what kind of sonic works get archived? Further, who and what defines which artists are worthy of sharing with future audiences? In today’s world with all its technological advancements in sound recording and music making, beyond audio, are there other ways we can archive sound works? Are there other ways to think about documentation of sonic creations? In addition to audio, how do we document works captured in the field with recorders? What about works composed on laptops in specialized software? How do we chronicle tracks composed of samples, sound bytes from other recordings or film? Further, how do we keep archives of artists and their intentions, their stories and who they are? How do we get to know the critical lens through which some may operate when creating music and sound art? I think it is important to have alternative ways of cataloguing sound works to maintain a certain level of accessibility to the public. Not everyone can read or play from sheet music and others have hearing loss. Having alternative ways of cataloguing sonic creations also enables an understanding of a breadth of narratives. I do enjoy listening to sound and music in isolation from everything else, but I also find inspiration when I know who is creating and why. I find a cataclysmic kind of motivation when I see artists at “work”. This zine series is a small and experimental attempt at creating another way of sparking excitement and ideas.
- april www.aliermo.com @2kulit2kuwit
Pantayo Images Courtesy of Kat Estactio linktr.ee/katestacio @toonganga on.cmccanada.org @cmcnational
All Photos of Kat Estacio by a.Aliermo October 2021
Kat Estacio I first met Kat Estacio almost a decade ago through the Kapisanan Philippine Art Centre. They were the in-house tech person. Since then, I have seen them grow into an experimental artist and musician. They play percussion instruments - - - Kulintang, Sarunay, Agung - - - from Mindinao, the Southern part of the Philippines. They perform on these beautiful instruments in their Filipinx Queer Pop Band Pantayo, as well as solo when they express themself though drones, meditative sounds or collage-like soundscapes. They are also deeply drawn to the life of water and incorporates field recordings into their compositions. I admire their work and the intentions they put into their sonic creations. I equally admire their drive and motivation to keep pushing themselves to continually experiment in sound and music.
“Kat Estacio is a Tkaronto-based creative working with sound and visuals, often focusing on collaborative and exploratory projects. They blend analog and acoustic elements with digital and electronic as a palette for self-expression. Informed by their lived experience as a diasporic queer woman of colour, Kat centres intentional and embodied remembering in creating for the senses. They are also a member of Pantayo, an all-women Filipino kulintang gong ensemble.”
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In Conversation
1. What instruments/gear do you use? What is your set up? I use Filipino gongs like kulintang, sarunay, agong, and gandingan, and other percussive bells and cymbals. Sometimes I would run a mic through a processor like the Organelle by Critter and Guitari or TC Helicon E1 and D1 Voicetone pedals when I want to manipulate the sound of the gongs and my voice. And when I want to use digital samples of my own gongs (they can be cumbersome to set up), I would load the samples into my Roland SPD-SX. I also have a Roland TR-8 drum machine that helps me visualize rhythms when I’m starting a piece. For field recordings, I use a Zoom H5 Handy Recorder. And I synthesize everything together through Ableton, my main DAW. I use variations of my setup depending on the space I’m at. When I’m at home, I’m usually composing on Ableton with a controller. When I’m at a bigger space, like at Studio RAW, I can play with the gongs and more electronics. BTW - Studio RAW is Raging Asian Womxn Taiko Drummers’ homebase where my band Pantayo is renting from and sharing space with.
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2. What guides your creative process? What is important to you when putting work out into the world? I like to have some sort of target aural “aesthetic” when I create - it acts as a guide for the creation process. I draw from references that exist in the real world, whether that’s the rhythm of flowing water, or a beat from a track that I’m really into, or the timbre of a person’s voice in a song or traditional chant. I think having that connection to the physical world is important to my process. I think the line between reference and inspiration can be blurry, and it’s in my recreation of that reference that I get to apply my own flavour, so to speak. During times when I don’t have a clear direction, I would pick one instrument and start jamming an idea on it. That means sometimes I start with a wall of recorded sound first and then cut it up into samples, other times it’s a riff that I play on kulintang, and other times it could be a 4-bar drum loop. I find that this changes over time as I learn to surrender more to flow. Another factor that informs my process is having a creative partner. I enjoy working on collaborations because there’s this shared humanity, and there’s usually a common interest that serves as a jumping off point. When working with collaborators I usually like to ask what feelings they want to evoke with a particular work, and I aim to match that with the sounds I create.
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3. Please tell us about your track Lingap. For this track, I collaborated with Dale Bazar, a kulintang musician based in Manila who studied under the guidance of maestra Aga Mayo Butocan. Dale is also a fellow community organizer and culture producer with WSK Festival in the Philippines. The track is commissioned for an online radio show by Nusasonic, an aggregate working group consisting of different organizations that focus on experimental sound and music cultures in Southeast Asia. Lingap means compassionate care in Tagalog. The specific episode that Lingap is part of had the theme of highlighting women’s labour, the struggle of the poor and the working class, food insecurity, and the resilience of artist communities. I took inspiration from the time when banana ketchup was invented (by Maria Orosa in 1940s Philippines) and used the rhythm of a morse code as foundation to build the track. I started with a bell-chime synth sound to spell out “kumain k n b” (“have you eaten?” in Tagalog) rhythmically in morse code. This message is code for how me and my beloveds show their care, by asking if we have nourished ourselves with food. The notes I used are based on the tuning of my kulintang, which are then accompanied by some ambient pad sounds and drum loops. Afterwards Dale added more badass kulintang rhythms, melodies on a Philippine nose flute and some fat beats. Our guiding principle is 8+5: using the 8 gongs of Maguindanaon kulintang from Mindanao and 5 for the pentatonic scale of Kalinga music from Northern Luzon. Together it is 13, the number of the divine feminine, an invitation to turn towards our caring nature and to nourish ourselves and our community. A reminder that to care for each other is revolutionary, that there is strength in togetherness, and what is fed and cared for is what flourishes. 5
Above: Lingap Next page: Water Sites
4. Please tell us about your track Water Sites. Water Sites is an audio story that I worked on with Elysse Cloma, a Filipinx-Canadian musician based on Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh territory (Vancouver). In this project, we were able to remotely collaborate with each other and the waters of our respective localities. Elysse and I came across the work of Filipina-American composer, percussionist and sound artist Susie Ibarra and climate scientist Michele Koppes called Water Rhythms. From their work we were both inspired by the use of field recordings of water to tell a story. I think at first we wanted to record water sounds from as many sources as we can, to create some kind of audio collage. But with the short amount of time we were given to create this piece, we instead focused on recording water from two different sites each. Every water site then has an accompanying story that explores memory, dis/ connection and how water has been present in our lives as diasporic Filipinxs. Our dream for future iterations of this work is to take field recordings from more water sites and splice them into samples, and incorporate music to build a composition that is more rhythmic, percussive, and perhaps more ambient and experimental than its current form.
5. Please tell us about your other project Pantayo. What I love about being a member of Pantayo is the collective experience of learning about our culture and expressing that through the music we create together. We are a group of queer Filipinx-Canadian women who play kulintang music infused with pop sensibilities. Each member has their own taste in music. And when we create, we are able to draw from a wide range of influences and combine that with kulintang. For example, in one song we were inspired by vocal melodies of a pop r&b song from the 2000s and then we paired it with a bassy gong rhythm that we learned from a traditional kulintang piece. Another song has a kulintang riff that acts as the main melody of a song which is also played on bellchime synths. We then combined it with electronic/dance music production, and finished it off with a rap verse. We also like to compose vocals and kulintang rhythms in call-andresponse as if they are having a conversation with each other, since kulintang is traditionally played in a community setting.
Despite releasing a record in 2020, we haven’t been able to perform much during the pandemic. Only recently were we able to get back into rehearsal mode to prepare for a few outdoor shows in September. We are also writing some new songs and hoping to get back into the recording studio later in the fall.
6. Do you have any upcoming projects you would like to tell us about? I’m starting to put together a live set for the Music Gallery’s X Avant Festival in October, and it will be my first show for a live in-person audience since I played in Manila in February 2020! The festival theme this year is “with you in mind,” where artists can come together to celebrate and discover new work, and each other. My set is going to be part of an 8-hour event exploring the healing nature of drone and sustained tone across cultures. I will process kulintang and water sounds through electronics, and use field recordings of water. I’m also excited to share that there will be a collaborative aspect to my performance: a portion of my set will overlap with and be in response to sustained tones of other Toronto-based musicans. The directive: don’t drop the drone! Maybe I’ll also include snippets of digital video for projection as part of the set, but I’m still finalizing my setup! I’m also recording a voice actor and doing some sound design for an app and animated web series called How To Get A Girl Pregnant. It’s a project by writer Karleen Pendleton Jiménez and animator Barb Taylor, and it is about a butch Chicana lesbian’s fertility journey in trying to conceive. It’s an interesting project because almost everybody on the team that I’m working with is exploring new territories in their respective disciplines. For my role, it is well beyond what I’m familiar with in terms of working with sound, so it is a great learning opportunity. 5
In the new year, I’m also contributing to an experimental music project where participating musicians will only be given key elements to compose a piece as opposed to being given a fully fleshed out score. This project brings together five musicians from different genres and musical education backgrounds to explore ways of creating without having to use western classical terms to communicate ideas. I’m thrilled to be able to dream and play in this way and to create something without the expectation of having a final product like a record or a performance. This is not sound or music related, but I’m also excited to participate in Dis/Play, a public art project that shines a light on folks with disability telling their own stories, woven into a multi-media display. I will be working with the project lead Ophira Calof to get these stories projected onto exterior building walls in the streets of Toronto later this fall. I’m also looking forward to working with April Aliermo again for Simula, her new sound project, where her composition reflects the process of birth through an eight channel sound installation and accompanying generative visual. April is composing the piece with electromagnetic sounds from a hospital and the sounds from three different births. I will be providing audio tech support, operating generative visuals created by Sahar Homami, and projection tech support in setting up a multi-media installation.
7. Is there anything else you would like to share about your work? Mentoring under a sound artist is also something that I’m currently exploring. I’m drawn to the visceral experience of sound through the physical body and through material objects. I want to explore my curiosity in playing my instruments outside their prescribed way, to see how formless and experiential learning could help me rediscover and understand music and sound in a different way. And so learning more about how other sound artists go about it, what their technical setup is like, how their practice evolved to what it is now, etc - that’s what I wish to do to further my sound art practice. I’m working on a grant application so that I could do this sometime next year in the spring. I’d like to wrap up by expressing my gratitude for being able to articulate my ideas and feelings though different art disciplines. I’m also incredibly honoured to meet beings that I learn so much from and get inspired by - I think having this continued exchange expands my perspective and enriches my limited human experience. And I am ready for what’s coming next!