Wind chimes, garden times
The group Pantayo consists of five Filipinx women exploring their traditional roots in Kulintang music and contemporary electronic sounds. I first learned of this group when my friend from Vancouver asked if I had heard of them upon moving to Toronto. I said no, but I soon came to befriend one of the musicians, Eirene, by chance through the community of friends I had made in the city. One summer weekend, when visiting my cousins in Montreal, I escaped the family home in the suburbs to venture out in the city. Learning I was in the city, Eirene invited me to the Slut Island Festival where her group was playing alongside other QTBIPOC (Queer and Trans Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) musicians.
I’ve always been intimidated by Montreal. I’ve never felt cool enough for it. Somehow the ironic haircuts of the cute artists, the smoothness of the French and the alluring underground culture made me feel I could never be a part of it all. This is irrational of course, but nonetheless… So I was comfortable hiding in the suburbs with my family on the warmest weekend of the summer. They had a pool, I could stay cool that way. So when Eirene, invited me to this event, I was hesitant but felt I should get myself out to explore the city and make my way to the venue to support a friend. Hopefully the venue would have air conditioning or at least a fog machine that may hide my lone, sweaty body.
In the unwavering heat, I heard the melodic and percussive sounds of gongs chiming together while electronic synths played alongside. In my ear, inexperienced with the historical and cultural persuasions of music from The Philippines, Kulintang music sounded like wind chimes in a garden, where I was transported even in the muggy heat of the dark nightclub. Bees buzzed past pollinators, thin-stemmed wild flowers occasionally blew precariously, and the dinging of the wind chime grounded me. As a person on my own journey in understanding diaspora, I appreciated the way these women worked together to ground themselves through sound.
Diaspora to me means the erosion and rebuilding of memory in material ways when living away from a homeland. The erosion is inevitable, but the rebuilding is what you make of that erosion. It’s what you hold onto so dearly as an agent of your own identity. In community, it’s what you hold onto together. From an empowerment point of view, I look at those who don’t have access to their homelands regularly as active agents in their identity building. It is also how we choose to mix the cultures that we have access to in our current locales. I see that in Pantayo’s work and also in mine in the way that we choose to make reference to home in our art.
Next week, I’ll post the final blog on my current musical inspirations. Stay tuned!
