Saturday, April 27, 2019; 8PM
Free pre-show chat at 7:15PM
The Annex (823 Seymour Street, 2nd Floor)

Pantayo is an all-women lo-fi R&B gong punk collective based in Toronto. The group combines percussive metallophones and drums from kulintang traditions of the Southern Philippines and synth-based electro grooves, to create a sound shaped by their experiences as Diasporic Filipinas.

“…nuanced and layered…acknowledging origins and composing conscientiously are integral to how Pantayo makes music.” – CBC

Vancouver-based ensemble Gamelan Bike Bike draws its musical inspiration from Bali, Indonesia and its raw materials from the scrap metal bins of Vancouver. In 2012, instrument maker George Rahi collected over 100 discarded bicycle frames to build the instruments. The colorful metal scraps, configured into a series of metallophone instruments, created a platform for new experimental gamelan music on the West Coast. In 2017, the ensemble released Hi-Ten, a collection of original music with the Indonesia-based art collective and label Insitu Recordings. The ensemble currently hosts guest teacher and composer I Putu Gede Sukaryana (aka Balot) from Bali.

Where are we going? Always home. (Novalis)

“Always home”, an expanded family, a large family of creative energies and people articulating and sharing diverse cultural backgrounds, aesthetics, technologies and practices. We see now more than ever – and also because of strong resistance to this kind of expansions (“invasions”) – the emergence of various kinds of diasporic cultural spaces and perspectives, new model of inclusion and diversity.

Pantayo is a member of this big family, and as such, embodies an active role and a creative effort in reshaping dialogues and discourse beyond the avant-gardes, it live and grows in an exponentially pluralistic society in which multiple cultures fertilize each other with a unique and specific character: a strong reciprocal confrontation of traditions and perceptions characterized by constant appropriation, migration, overlapping and mixing. Though, long and convoluted phrases like these are still unable to convey the special quality of their sounds and music. So I’m happy you are all here tonight to both witness and support this exciting ensemble.

We wish to be able to expand further in welcoming more and more creative minds in our communities to foster a generative process that may lead towards the foundation and support of a meaningful social function of music and sound practices in contemporary society, while fostering a higher level of communication and information in local-global creative environments, understood as liminal spaces for intercultural research, dialogue and cooperation.

We need to really take care of our home, Novalis’ and everyone else’s, when sonic gifts are generous and abundant, when, sharing these gifts, together we foster originality in the form of sonic actions, and seek processes that do not isolate art from life but instead wish to influence life and our poietic visions.

– Giorgio Magnanensi

Photo: Pantayo, by Yannick Anton.