Queer diasporic Filipinx kulintang gong punks.
Those are a few words to introduce Toronto-based ensemble Pantayo, but their music is beyond labels or definitions.
It begins with kulintang, one of the world’s oldest music traditions played by Indigenous groups in the southern Philippines, and the kulintang instrument, which consists of melodic gongs arranged in a horizontal row.
The Pantayo quintet of multi-instrumentalists — Eirene Cloma, Michelle Cruz, Joanna Delos Reyes, Kat Estacio, and Katrin Estacio — creatively combines kulintang with vocals, drums, synths, and other instruments, reflecting their relationship to the tradition while exploring their own modern influences.
Sitting by the river at this year’s Calgary Folk Music Festival, the band notices the symmetry between the flowing water and their latest album, Ang Pagdaloy.
“Ang Pagdaloy means ‘to flow,’” says Kat Estacio. “We wanted to stick to a process of the path of least resistance, because in music you can overthink things. With this metal instrument that is not tuned — it’s tuned to itself — we wanted to create music that can also be played with a guitar and keyboard and drums and bass. The limitation of having the gongs keeps us all on our toes, and we see that as ‘What possibilities can we create within this realm of kulintang music?’”
Learning kulintang is what brought them together, but each member contributes their own individual style to the collective sound, experimenting with contemporary R&B, pop, punk, rock, electronic music, and even alt-country.
”I like our fluidity in being able to have a sound across multiple genres, and we all are in it together,” says Cloma. “Especially in the second album, it’s a bit more obvious that a lot of the songs sound very different in genre.”
Pantayo hit the ground running when their self-titled debut album, produced by Alaska B of Yamantaka // Sonic Titan, was one of 10 projects shortlisted for the 2020 Polaris Music Prize — an award given to the best Canadian album, based on artistic merit.
Their follow-up album, also produced by Alaska B, leads with an unyielding single that reclaims sexuality, desire, intimacy, and the freedom to experience them.
“With the visceral use of only gongs, drums and vocals, ‘One More Latch (Give It To ‘Ya)’ feels like an homage to women musicians in the 90s that wrote or performed songs about their own sexual desires (ie. TLC’s Creep and Janet Jackson’s That’s The Way Love Goes). Which for an all-women Filipina band near-explicitly, expressing sexual desire, is a point of subversion in itself,” comments Tricia Hagoriles, the filmmaker for their new music video.
The group’s intentional approach to music, culture, and community is all captured in the name — Pantayo.
Roughly translated from Tagalog, it means “for us” — derived from Filipino historian Zeus A. Salazar’s “Pantayo Pananaw” concept, which discusses the internal elements and relationships that define a culture.
“When we came across that, it kind of informed our steps in terms of how we accessed information about the gongs and which sources these pieces of information are coming from,” says Kat Estacio. “It resonated with us because we didn’t have a teacher, a starting off point where a teacher would direct us, so we had to direct ourselves.”
Besides traditional guros in the Philippines, the closest kulintang teachers are in the San Francisco area. When the group began learning to play kulintang, they relied on sheet music that had been created in the 1970s by Guro Aga Mayo Butocan.
“Those sheets have made their way to North America, to Turtle Island, with us, and we’re now taking what was studied in the ’70s and interpreting that in the 2020s. So it’s not linear to our journey, we’ve had to pull things from different directions,” says Kat Estacio.
Without a guide, the ambiguity in those pieces of sheet music leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Kulintang is primarily an oral tradition, so recognizing the rhythms and melodies proved to be challenging.
“There wasn’t a legend,” says Delos Reyes. “What does the staff mean? What do the numbers mean?”
The members of Pantayo are Filipino, but because they were not born in the southern Philippines among the kulintang tradition of the Maguindanao people, they’ve navigated cultural questions and concerns throughout their musical journey.
“That was a big process for the first album, reconciling and being honest and coming to terms with the idea that we are appropriating the cultures, because we’re not coming from where this tradition is from,” says Cruz. “It’s part of the Philippine culture on a bigger scale, but it was a process to be comfortable to just play the kulintang music that we do.”
Toronto is a long, long way from the Philippines and the origins of kulintang. To reconcile this distance of space and time, Pantayo stays connected with the tradition of kulintang while creating contemporary music that reflects their own influences and identities.
“We make it a point to check in with teachers now, even if physically we’re not in the Philippines,” says Kat Estacio. “What is our artistic license, and how do we give back to Maguindanao, kulintang, originators of this music tradition? It’s an ongoing process for us as a group.”
Even if it’s through 2 a.m. gong lessons over Zoom with Guro Aga Mayo-Butocan, they’ve been able to find some guidance from their teachers as they tackle those big questions.
“We had to reconcile that culture changes and it evolves. People might not play the kulintang the same way that folks in the Philippines played it 1,000 years ago,” says Cruz. “We are here, we aren’t there. We’re doing what we can to have a sense of home here. Music is kind of like that for us.”
Pantayo has been invited to travel and perform across Canada this year, from Calgary Folk Music Festival to Folk on the Rocks in Yellowknife, sharing their unique sound with new audiences.
“We’re so privileged and lucky this summer to be playing more festivals, being able to meet with more Filipino-Canadian communities,” says Delos Reyes. “The Filipino-Canadian is not a monolith — and it manifests in the very, very different sounds of music that we make, and the influences we grew up with.”
With the Pantayo project, these musicians have been able to create something that is truly “for us” — for themselves as queer diasporic Filipinx kulintang gong punks — but also “for us” in the wider sense of community — for their community of collaborators, for the Filipino community, and for the Canadian music community as a whole.
“The way that we approach kulintang music is the ethic of creating music together in a community,” says Kat Estacio. “To be in a group of people who are very intentional and insightful people, it allows me to have fun, it allows me to do things unapologetically. Permission to take space in this Canadian music landscape, to have a voice for people like us, for Filipinos, for children of immigrants.”
Now, they want to bring kulintang to the world. The band has been hosting hands-on workshops for students of all ages, and they’re currently developing a new online platform for accessible kulintang learning.
“We lovingly call it ‘KuliVersity’ and we created a curriculum of three different songs, because within the kulintang tradition, songs are actually categorized by song types, not song titles,” explains Katrin Estacio. “Song types give you a mood. When it’s played, when it’s appropriate to play, in which setting, that kind of vibe and context.”
Pantayo plans to launch the first semester of their digital KuliVersity this fall, teaching the kulintang instrument along with the traditions and culture of kulintang music.
“One of our hopes and dreams is for kulintang to be played like the guitar or piano in 20 years, where everyone knows about the kulintang and it’s not just this exotic instrument,” says Cruz. “We hope one day, everyone can learn about it or even play it.”
