It took years of learning and experimentation to produce the eight songs on Pantayo's debut album. While it was in many ways the culmination of the Toronto kulintang gong ensemble's melding of their traditional Filipino roots with western pop and R&B, the record — which ranked 10th on Exclaim!'s list of the best albums of 2020 — also froze in time what had previously been a continuous flow of creativity.
"Before that, we spent a long time on the stage, figuring out what works and what doesn't," says Kat Estacio. "Now, there is this physical thing that people can refer to for all eternity. That kind of slots us into a certain box." (Full disclosure: Kat Estacio is Exclaim! Magazine's Layout Editor.)
Rather than subvert those expectations with a hard musical pivot, their followup, Ang Pagdaloy, expands Pantayo's musical universe. The album, whose title translates to "the flow," moves from the hard, percussive R&B of opener "One More Latch (Give It to 'Ya)" to the sprawling musique concrète of closer "Bastá" in under 30 minutes. "Our mindset has shifted," says Michelle Cruz of the band's sonic evolution. "The music had grown because we'd grown and changed as well."
After studying kulintang music individually, the group — which now consists of Cruz, siblings Kat and Katrina Estacio, Eirene Cloma, and Joanna Delos Reyes — formed in 2012. At first they stuck with traditional kulintang songs and didn't write their own music until a few years later. By the time they recorded their debut album with Yamantaka // Sonic Titan's Alaska B as producer and "creative partner," the group had already turned heads with their unique blend of traditional and modern sounds.
The group once again tapped Alaska B to record Ang Pagdaloy. Estacio recalls asking Alaska if she thought something as adventurous as "Bastá" could exist under the Pantayo umbrella. Alaska responded that, since each song is its own branch of the Pantayo universe, anything that they come up with could exist in that reality. "In order to really make something that I personally like, you can't really think about how others are going to feel about it," reflects Cruz.
Because their gongs aren't tuned to any particular note, they are inevitably the building block for any new song. Generally a collaborative and consensus-based process, the entire writing and recording process for Ang Pagdaloy is described by both Cruz and the Estacios as a process of refinement, stripping music and lyrical ideas to their simplest form. "We're not going to reach perfection because there's no such thing," says Katrina. But the group constantly asks themselves, "How do we feel about this?" Says Cruz: "If we love it, if we like it, if we roll with it, it moves us, it rocks us, and makes us feel a certain way — that's the music we want to put out."
That included jettisoning the majority of the songs that had vocals "because they weren't gelling," says Estacio. Only three of Ang Pagdaloy's remaining tracks include lyrics. "That was a process of letting go, of going with the flow."
Where Pantayo once saw a box that they had been put in, they now see a magician's hat, with the group pulling out everything from the hard funk of "One More Latch" to the gong-infused old-school country of "Mali."
The result is an album of sonic outliers bound together by Pantayo's desire to bridge their shared cultures. "What we've seen in the three years since our first record is that there is space for people like us, queer Filipinos living in Canada," says Estacio. "There is space for this kind of music to live and to thrive, and we can dream about it thriving as well."
"Before that, we spent a long time on the stage, figuring out what works and what doesn't," says Kat Estacio. "Now, there is this physical thing that people can refer to for all eternity. That kind of slots us into a certain box." (Full disclosure: Kat Estacio is Exclaim! Magazine's Layout Editor.)
Rather than subvert those expectations with a hard musical pivot, their followup, Ang Pagdaloy, expands Pantayo's musical universe. The album, whose title translates to "the flow," moves from the hard, percussive R&B of opener "One More Latch (Give It to 'Ya)" to the sprawling musique concrète of closer "Bastá" in under 30 minutes. "Our mindset has shifted," says Michelle Cruz of the band's sonic evolution. "The music had grown because we'd grown and changed as well."
After studying kulintang music individually, the group — which now consists of Cruz, siblings Kat and Katrina Estacio, Eirene Cloma, and Joanna Delos Reyes — formed in 2012. At first they stuck with traditional kulintang songs and didn't write their own music until a few years later. By the time they recorded their debut album with Yamantaka // Sonic Titan's Alaska B as producer and "creative partner," the group had already turned heads with their unique blend of traditional and modern sounds.
The group once again tapped Alaska B to record Ang Pagdaloy. Estacio recalls asking Alaska if she thought something as adventurous as "Bastá" could exist under the Pantayo umbrella. Alaska responded that, since each song is its own branch of the Pantayo universe, anything that they come up with could exist in that reality. "In order to really make something that I personally like, you can't really think about how others are going to feel about it," reflects Cruz.
Because their gongs aren't tuned to any particular note, they are inevitably the building block for any new song. Generally a collaborative and consensus-based process, the entire writing and recording process for Ang Pagdaloy is described by both Cruz and the Estacios as a process of refinement, stripping music and lyrical ideas to their simplest form. "We're not going to reach perfection because there's no such thing," says Katrina. But the group constantly asks themselves, "How do we feel about this?" Says Cruz: "If we love it, if we like it, if we roll with it, it moves us, it rocks us, and makes us feel a certain way — that's the music we want to put out."
That included jettisoning the majority of the songs that had vocals "because they weren't gelling," says Estacio. Only three of Ang Pagdaloy's remaining tracks include lyrics. "That was a process of letting go, of going with the flow."
Where Pantayo once saw a box that they had been put in, they now see a magician's hat, with the group pulling out everything from the hard funk of "One More Latch" to the gong-infused old-school country of "Mali."
The result is an album of sonic outliers bound together by Pantayo's desire to bridge their shared cultures. "What we've seen in the three years since our first record is that there is space for people like us, queer Filipinos living in Canada," says Estacio. "There is space for this kind of music to live and to thrive, and we can dream about it thriving as well."