BURNING CHROME | ‘Sorceress’ brings mythology, sexuality and heavy metal into the gallery

Katya Angara opened her second solo exhibition, “SORCERESS,” on Aug. 18 at The Crucible Gallery at SM Megamall, presenting drawings, paper works, assemblages and mixed-media pieces that move between the human body, animals, insects, feathers and other forms drawn from nature.

“SORCERESS” is on view through Aug. 30.

I wasn’t able to have an in-depth conversation with Katya about the works during the opening, so this is not meant to be a definitive interpretation of her practice. It is a reading of what I saw at the exhibition.

“SORCERESS” was described as a story of initiation, solitude and transformation, drawing, as stated in the exhibition description, from the writings of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. It presents the works as explorations of psychological and numinous realms, using myth and metaphor to examine existence, sexuality and the darker aspects of the self. The imagery makes those concerns fairly easy to recognize.

Katya’s female figures are rarely presented as conventional portraits or nudes. They are surrounded, interrupted or transformed by wings, feathers, insects, flowers, antlers and other forms from the natural world. In several pieces, the distinction between human and nonhuman becomes deliberately unclear. That recurring hybridity is one of the exhibition’s strongest characteristics.

The sorceress is not necessarily a single woman or character. She functions more like an archetype that takes different forms throughout the exhibition. The female body becomes a meeting point for animal, insect, plant and human characteristics, making transformation less a dramatic event than a continuing condition.

This continues what Katya has been doing in her art for years. Her practice has moved across drawing, paper art, black-and-white photography and mixed-media experimentation, with recurring interests in nature, sexuality, death, femininity and transformation. In “SORCERESS,” those interests appear to have been brought together into a more elaborate visual system.

The drawings are particularly striking for their obsessive attention to detail. Feathers, wings, insects and other structures are built through the accumulation of small marks. From a distance, the images can appear delicate; up close, they reveal an intricate density.

There is a useful tension between that delicacy and the more disturbing elements of the imagery. Some pieces incorporate claws, antlers, exposed bodies, tangled forms and intense red shapes that can suggest blood, flesh, wounds or flowers. The result is often beautiful without being entirely comfortable.

Much of the exhibition is dominated by black and white, giving the drawings a stark, almost graphic quality. Red appears as an intrusion, introducing something more physical and corporeal. Depending on the piece, it can suggest blood, sexuality, flesh or biological matter.

The exhibition statement explicitly connects black, red and white with an alchemical process of life, death and rebirth. That interpretation is supported by the imagery, although the pieces do not require the viewer to settle on one literal meaning for the colors.

The circular pieces are another important element. Their repeated feathers and organic forms create compositions that can resemble nests, eyes, cells, flowers or vortices. Instead of directing the eye toward a conventional narrative, the format encourages it to move around the image and repeatedly return to its center. That works particularly well with the exhibition’s stated interest in cycles and Jungian circumambulation.

The paper constructions take these ideas beyond drawing. One of the larger pieces consists of layered paper birds and feather-like forms projecting from the wall. The individual elements retain their graphic character while becoming a physical installation. Because they extend from the surface, they also cast shadows. That physical shadow becomes part of the piece. I’m not actually sure if it was deliberate, but it’s there.

Given the exhibition’s explicit interest in the shadow self, this is one of the places where the conceptual framework and material execution come together most effectively. The piece doesn’t merely depict a shadow; its construction produces one.

Katya’s use of paper also emphasizes the physical labor behind the imagery. At a time when elaborate fantasy images can be generated almost instantaneously with software, there is something distinctly analog about these pieces. The feathers have been drawn. The paper has been cut and assembled. Larger forms emerge through accumulation and repetition.

That does not make handmade work inherently superior to digital work, but here the labor contributes directly to the psychological quality of the images.

The visual language also brought back a specific cultural reference for me. During the opening, I remarked to Katya that some of the pieces reminded me of the old Heavy Metal magazine, particularly its combination of elaborate fantasy illustration, sexuality, grotesque anatomy and creatures somewhere between the beautiful and the disturbing.

Katya acknowledged the observation, and it turned out that she is actually into heavy metal, including Iron Maiden.

That exchange made the connection more interesting because the resemblance is not simply visual. Katya’s practice shares some of the older fantasy-art tradition’s willingness to place sexuality, mythology, monsters and elaborate illustration within the same imaginative space.

There was, appropriately enough, live rock music at the opening. Stephen Liu, lead of Rizal Underground and one of the veteran figures of Philippine rock, performed a number of rock classics during the evening. Stephen is also an old friend whom I have known since the mid-1980s, so his presence at an art opening brought together two parts of a cultural landscape that have long overlapped but are not always discussed together.

Buddy Trinidad was also there. Buddy is another friend from that older Philippine rock milieu and now a prominent pastry chef, although his history as a guitarist for pioneering punk band Betrayed remains an important part of his place in Philippine rock.

Sari Ortiga, owner of The Crucible Gallery, was of course present. Sari has become a good friend of mine through the local art circle, and as far as I’m concerned, The Crucible has been supporting the alternative scene ever since Ben Cab did the Pinoy Rockstar portraits in the mid-1990s.

I am less interested in taking every Jungian, Campbellian or alchemical reference literally than in looking at how those ideas manifest materially. A woman merging with an insect is visually strange before anyone explains the symbolism. A cluster of feathers forming a circular vortex already suggests movement and repetition. A paper bird projecting a shadow onto the wall creates a relationship between presence and absence. The strongest moments come when those relationships are allowed to operate on their own.

That is also where the Heavy Metal connection becomes useful. The older fantasy-art tradition understood that bodies, monsters, sexuality and mythology could coexist without having to be made respectable or rationalized. Katya similarly allows the erotic, grotesque, natural and supernatural to occupy the same space.

For me, that is the more interesting way to approach “SORCERESS”: not simply as an occult-themed exhibition, but as another stage in Katya’s continuing exploration of the body, nature, sexuality, identity and transformation.

The mythology provides the vocabulary, but the physical pieces make the argument. Their strongest moments come from the collision of delicate craftsmanship with imagery that is simultaneously sensual, biological and slightly unsettling.

In an increasingly automated visual culture, there is also something stubbornly analog about Katya’s process. The repetition, irregularities and physical construction remain visible, giving the pieces a character that cannot be separated from how they were made.

“SORCERESS” ultimately presents the body as unstable and porous, capable of becoming something else. Katya uses drawing, paper and mixed media to make that instability visible.

Jing, Buddy, Katya, Stephen, Sari

“SORCERESS” by Katya Angara is on view through Aug. 30, 2026, at The Crucible Gallery, Level 4, Building A, SM Megamall.

BURNING CHROME | Somatodelic: 'Putting art back to its punk roots'

The word "punk" has long outgrown its association with distorted guitars, leather jackets and anti-establishment slogans. At its most fundamental, punk was never a musical genre. It was a method of working. It rejected the assumption that meaningful work required permission, expensive tools or institutional approval. It encouraged people to build their own instruments, publish their own ideas, organize their own communities and embrace mistakes as part of the creative process. Its greatest contribution was not a particular sound but a way of thinking that valued experimentation over expertise and curiosity over conformity.

That philosophy came unexpectedly to mind during the opening of Somatodelic, Tad Ermitaño's retrospective at the Ateneo Art Gallery. Bringing together several decades of work in sound art, experimental film, creative mechatronics and coding, the exhibition traces a practice that has consistently treated technology less as a tool than as a medium for investigating perception, interaction and embodied experience. In his remarks, Ermitaño spoke of putting art back to its punk roots—not as a reference to a historical music movement but as a call to encounter art directly, before theory, before explanation and before institutional mediation. The exhibition itself follows that proposition. Rather than asking viewers to decode concepts before engaging with the work, it encourages them to experience sound, movement, vibration and interaction physically, allowing interpretation to emerge afterwards. The accompanying exhibition text describes this as addressing the body first, treating it as an "antenna to disturbances in the environment." Rather than expecting viewers to absorb an artist's statement before encountering the work, Ermitaño reverses the sequence: sensation precedes explanation, allowing interpretation to emerge from direct physical experience instead of predetermined theory.

That attitude explains why Somatodelic feels remarkably fresh despite presenting works that span nearly two decades. The exhibition is not driven by novelty, nor does it attempt to impress audiences with technological sophistication. Instead, it presents machines that hum, resonate, rotate, delay, repeat and respond. Guided by algorithmic logic yet refusing mechanical predictability, they listen, react and perform, transforming electronic systems into experiences that are as physical as they are conceptual. As curator Ian Carlo Jaucian observes, Ermitaño's machines do not simply function; they perform. They generate conversations between systems that often appear to acquire lives of their own.

For me, the exhibition carried another layer of meaning. Watching visitors discover these works inside one of the country's leading museums inevitably brought back memories of a very different environment nearly four decades ago. Long before "creative technology," "media art," "maker culture" or artificial intelligence entered everyday vocabulary, a handful of artists in Manila were already experimenting with video feedback, analog synthesis, MIDI, sampling, found electronics, primitive computer graphics and improvised sound. Back then, these practices had no convenient labels. Artists simply worked across disciplines because the boundaries were irrelevant to the work itself. Children of Cathode Ray, the experimental sound art group that Tad and I co-founded in 1989, was never conceived as a band in the conventional sense. It functioned as an informal laboratory where ideas circulated freely between music, film, electronics, programming and visual art. As Tad pointed out in his reply to my congratulatory post on Facebbok, he himself recalled it as "the lab where we tried and applied everything we picked up: synthesis, MIDI, film editing, experimental music, sampling, 3D animation, video feedback."

That history matters because it challenges a common misconception about digital culture. There is a tendency to imagine that experimental technology in art began with high-speed internet, affordable microcontrollers or generative AI. Somatodelic quietly reminds us that artists such as Ermitaño had already been exploring many of the same questions decades earlier, using whatever tools happened to be available. The objective was never technological innovation for its own sake. Machines were stripped of their intended functions and rebuilt as instruments for investigating perception, behavior and human experience.

It is equally important not to romanticize this practice as something entirely unprecedented. Artists have been building works from discarded electronics, hacked consumer devices and self-built machines for decades. Nam June Paik transformed television sets into sculptural media and is widely regarded as the father of video art. Jean Tinguely built kinetic sculptures from industrial scrap that celebrated movement, malfunction and mechanical absurdity. Steina and Woody Vasulka treated electronic signals themselves as artistic material, constructing custom video systems long before digital media entered museums. Within the Philippine context, Lirio Salvador's Sandata series likewise demonstrated that bicycle parts, industrial scrap, stainless steel, electronic components and found objects could become both playable musical instruments and sculptural installations, blurring the boundaries between performance, sound and visual art.

What distinguishes Somatodelic is therefore not the use of discarded electronics or DIY engineering in itself. Those practices belong to a long international—and local—tradition of experimental media and sound art. What has changed is the level of recognition they now receive.

Ironically, contemporary culture now celebrates experimentation precisely because digital technology has become increasingly standardized. At a time when software ecosystems are tightly controlled, consumer electronics are sealed shut, and algorithms increasingly mediate creative production, works built from hacked circuits, improvised mechanisms and visible engineering remind audiences that technology can still be dismantled, questioned and reimagined.

For many years, machines assembled from salvaged electronics, improvised circuitry, kitchen utensils, electromagnets and inexpensive off-the-shelf electronic components, were often viewed as engineering experiments, hobbyist projects or underground cultural activity rather than contemporary art. Somatodelic demonstrates how that perception has evolved. The exhibition does not ask viewers to admire technical ingenuity alone. Instead, it presents these materials as a legitimate artistic vocabulary capable of exploring memory, labor, perception, history and the complex relationship between humans and technology. In that sense, the exhibition is less about validating DIY electronic art than acknowledging that artists working in this tradition have long deserved a place within the history of Philippine contemporary art.

While Lirio Salvador's Sandata transformed industrial scrap into expressive musical instruments rooted in performance, Ermitaño extends a parallel inquiry through cybernetic systems, computational behavior and interactive media. Their methods differ, but both demonstrate that discarded materials can become sophisticated artistic language when guided by a coherent conceptual vision rather than technological novelty.

This continuity becomes visible throughout the exhibition. Bell transforms ordinary household electricity into an immersive sound environment by allowing a suspended metal sheet to resonate with the alternating current flowing through the city itself. Hasa repurposes a bicycle into a manually powered sound instrument, recalling the disappearing trade of the neighborhood blade sharpener while turning repetitive labor into participatory performance. Twinning Machine, first acquired by the Ateneo Art Gallery in 2012, destabilizes the familiar logic of the mirror by fragmenting live video into delays, reversals and interruptions, forcing viewers to confront representations of themselves that refuse to obey real time. None of these works depends upon spectacle. Each begins with familiar materials and patiently reveals unexpected relationships hidden within them.

Perhaps this is where Ermitaño's idea of punk becomes most relevant. Punk has often been misunderstood as rebellion for its own sake, when in reality its most enduring legacy lies in its refusal to separate making from thinking. A homemade synthesizer, a photocopied fanzine, a hacked video camera or a kinetic sculpture assembled from discarded mechanical parts all emerge from the same impulse: to understand the world by taking it apart and putting it back together differently.

Somatodelic embodies precisely that ethic. The exhibition never romanticizes obsolete technology, nor does it celebrate innovation as an end in itself. Instead, it demonstrates that experimentation remains a cultural practice rather than a technological one. Silicon, code, bamboo, bicycle parts, electromagnets and analog circuitry become equal participants in a continuing investigation into how humans construct meaning through interaction with the material world. Even the most sophisticated digital systems ultimately remain rooted in ordinary physical materials. Every chip, screen and circuit begins as silicon, reminding us that contemporary technology is never detached from the material world from which it is built.

Seen from that perspective, Somatodelic is more than a retrospective of one artist's career. It is also an acknowledgment that a significant chapter in Philippine experimental media developed quietly outside mainstream institutions before eventually finding its place within them. What began in improvised studios, underground performances and collaborative laboratories has entered the museum without losing the curiosity that made it possible in the first place.

If putting art back to its punk roots means recovering the freedom to experiment with ordinary materials, discarded technologies and self-built systems without waiting for institutional approval, then Somatodelic suggests that the the institutions have finally begun catching up with practices that artists had been pursuing for decades without waiting for institutional approval.

Tad Ermitaño's Somatodelic is on view from august 5 to october 10, 2026 at the Ateneo Art Gallery.

Full disclosure: All news articles published on the TechSabado website are written by human journalists, unless otherwise specified. Final text editing is also performed by human editors, with artificial intelligence (AI) used only to assist with additional grammar and style guide corrections.. ————————————————————————- TEN YEARS OF TECHSABADO! PLEASE LIKE our FACEBOOK PAGE and SUBSCRIBE to OUR YOUTUBE & SPOTIFY channels. WATCH TECHSABADO ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL: WE ARE ALSO ON SPOTIFY WATCH OUR OTHER YOUTUBE CHANNELS: PLEASE LIKE our FACEBOOK PAGE and SUBSCRIBE to OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL.

TRANSMISSION | Romeo Lee: From Manila's underground to above ground

Romeo Lee’s LEEBRING GAS, a one-man show held at The Crucible Gallery at SM Megamall from April 28 to May 10, 2026, was a welcome reminder that some artists remain difficult to separate from the cultural history that produced them.

I have known Romeo for a very long time, and our friendship has always revolved around a shared passion for music, art and the strange, often wonderful things that turn up in thrift shops and ukay-ukay. That common interest has provided plenty of opportunities to talk about records, obscure artists, old objects and whatever else happens to catch our attention. It also means I have seen Lee not simply as the underground rockstar in his own right and lowbrow artist whose name has become familiar within Manila's alternative scene, but as a friend who has remained deeply engaged with the things he's into.

When it comes to his art, Lee's paintings are populated by strange figures, animals, distorted human forms and imagined creatures. Some are humorous, some unsettling, and others seem to exist somewhere between the two. There are also recognizable cultural and political references, but they are placed within the same unusual world as Lee’s invented characters.

That mixture gives the exhibition its particular character. Lee does not appear interested in separating the serious from the ridiculous. Political figures can exist alongside monsters; ordinary domestic objects can appear in improbable settings; cartoon-like imagery can sit beside scenes that suggest something darker. The viewer is left to negotiate those contradictions rather than being given a single interpretation.

There is also something distinctly personal about the recurring creatures and figures. They seem less like illustrations of an established mythology than inhabitants of a visual universe that Lee has been building over time. Some recall folklore, comic-book monsters or underground graphic culture, but they remain recognizably his.

His use of intense colors adds to the immediacy of the paintings, while the exaggerated forms give the works a quality that is difficult to confuse with more conventional contemporary painting. The images can be playful without being merely decorative, and grotesque without becoming purely sinister.

That balance is important because humor has always been part of the vocabulary of underground culture. It can make serious subjects less predictable and allow artists to approach power, social conventions and cultural expectations without adopting the solemnity normally associated with political or socially engaged art.

Some of Lee’s works directly engage with political imagery. Rather than presenting political personalities in the familiar language of official portraiture, he places them within the same bizarre environment inhabited by his creatures. The effect is satirical without requiring a lengthy political explanation. People associated with power become part of a larger, absurd human landscape.

For anyone familiar with Lee’s history, these works also make sense as part of a broader lifetime spent outside cultural convention. But it would be reductive to say that everything in the exhibition is simply an expression of punk. Lee’s visual work has its own identity, and his paintings should not have to depend on his musical history to justify themselves.

What his history does provide is context. Lee came of age in a period when Manila's alt scene was still being formed, when music, visual art, independent publishing and other forms of cultural activity often existed in overlapping circles. The boundaries between disciplines were considerably less important than the desire to create something outside the mainstream.

Decades later, those boundaries remain fluid in Lee’s work.

That makes LEEBRING GAS more than a nostalgia trip for people who remember the early Manila punk scene. It is a current exhibition by an artist who happens to have been part of that history from its early days.

There is value in seeing that continuity. Much of alt culture eventually becomes history, with its former rebels turned into names, photographs and anecdotes. Lee remains a practicing artist, and the paintings demonstrate that his creative life did not end when the original underground scene became part of the cultural record.

For me, that is the more interesting aspect of the exhibition. Romeo Lee does not need to be preserved as a relic of Philippine punk. His work is still moving, changing and producing its own strange visual world. 

In an art environment that can sometimes become overly concerned with credentials, theoretical positioning and institutional approval, there is something refreshing about an artist who has spent decades making work without appearing particularly concerned about fitting neatly into somebody else’s category. LEEBRING GAS reflects that history without being trapped by it.

He still frequently jams with local alternative bands, bringing his trademark no-holds-barred, electrified Mick Jagger-esque moves to the stage, which earned him the nickname “Wild Thing.” He has also been singing the same song for decades, a signature routine that has become part of his enduring presence in Manila’s alternative music scene.

That combination of music, art and sheer persistence is what makes Romeo Lee more than a figure from Manila’s underground past. He is still painting, still turning up at gigs and still doing things his own way. For those of us who have known him for years and shared his passion for music, art and the odd ukay-ukay treasures, there is something reassuring about that continuity.

After all these years, Romeo Lee remains Wild Thing — and, yes, he is still singing that same damn song.

TRANSMISSION | No future sa pader pa rin, mga ulol!

The poster looked exactly the way a TRC reunion poster should look. Chaotic, confrontational, and entirely unconcerned with contemporary ideas of branding. It belonged to a tradition that emerged from photocopied flyers, dubbed cassettes, hand-drawn artwork, and a music scene that developed largely outside the attention of mainstream media.

On June 6, at Dapo Restaurant & Bar in Quezon City, TRC Night: The Big BadAss Embly! brought together Betrayed, Deceased, G.I. & The Idiots, I.O.V., Philippine Violators, Private Stock, R.D.A., Throw, Urban Bandits, and Wuds, with support from Dead Sperm and N4S. Organized by Ray Decay of Deceased and hosted by Paulo Tamayo Legaspi of Pinoy Rock Radio Online, the event reunited a substantial part of the Twisted Red Cross family nearly four decades after the label helped define the first wave of Philippine punk music.

For younger audiences, the names on the poster may have appeared as relics from another era. For those who lived through the scene, however, they represented a period when participation required effort. Discovering music was not a matter of typing a title into a search box. It involved traveling across the city, talking to people, searching through cassette racks, and spending afternoons in places where information circulated through conversation rather than algorithms.

Twisted Red Cross was the brainchild of Tommy Tanchanco, but it quickly became more than a record label. It evolved into one of the key connections within Manila's underground music network. Bands, artists, writers, photographers, promoters, and audiences all passed through its orbit at a time when independent culture had to build its own support structures.

For many Manila punks, one of the most important destinations was Tandem along Recto Avenue in the university belt. More than a mall, Tandem functioned as a meeting point for several overlapping subcultures. Shops such as High Adventure, Khumbmela, and Shambhu stocked TRC cassette releases, imported records, punk shirts, patches, studs, and other items that were difficult to find elsewhere. The mall became a place where people exchanged information about bands, gigs, recordings, and whatever else was happening in the underground.

The search for music often extended beyond official releases. A2Z's bootlegged alternative recordings circulated heavily through the same ecosystem. For many young listeners, those tapes provided an introduction to bands that were otherwise unavailable in local record stores. Joy Division, The Cure, Bauhaus, Dead Kennedys, Circle Jerks, G.B.H., and countless others entered collections through dubbed cassettes passed from one listener to another. The quality of the recordings was often questionable, but accessibility mattered more than fidelity.

Across the street stood Luciano's and other specialty shops, particularly those clustered around the Quiapo underpass, where custom footwear reflected the influence of post-punk, new wave, goth, industrial, and alternative fashion. Taken together, the area functioned as a physical network long before the term became associated with technology. Music, style, ideas, and friendships circulated through these spaces in ways that are difficult to reproduce in a digital environment.

Information circulated through publications as well. Jingle music magazine remained one of the country's most influential music publications, while Herald X documented developments within the underground itself. Bands, reviews, scene news, photographs, and opinions moved through their pages, creating a record of a culture that might otherwise have existed only through memory.

>> Here's something I wrote in 2006 about the local punk scene: As it was, when it was: The new album on Pinoy underground 80s and the great rock ‘n roll swindle <<<

Then there was Katrina's.

Owned by relatives of Jingle writer and photographer Didits Gonzales, Katrina's operated for only a relatively brief period, yet its importance far exceeded its lifespan. On weekdays the place was an ihaw-ihaw beer garden but during weekends it became one of the few venues where the punk community could gather consistently. Bands developed there. Audiences developed there. Friendships, collaborations, rivalries, and stories emerged there. Like many influential underground spaces, its significance became fully apparent only after it disappeared.

What stands out when remembering that period is how tangible everything felt. Music occupied physical space. Information had geography. Participation required presence. Scenes were built through repeated encounters in record stores, rehearsal rooms, venues, and street corners rather than through notifications and recommendation feeds.

The local punk scene emerged during the final years of the Marcos dictatorship and at the height of the Cold War, but it would be inaccurate to portray the entire community as a political movement. Many participants were not particularly interested in politics. A large portion of the scene consisted of street punks in the most literal sense of the term. They were there for the music, the energy, the drinking, the drugs, the friendships, and the sense of belonging that the community provided.

The scene was never ideologically uniform. Some participants were deeply interested in political issues. Others were not. Some arrived through activism. Others arrived through records, fashion, or curiosity. What united them was not a shared political program but a shared attraction to music that felt more immediate, more aggressive, and more honest than what was available elsewhere.

At the same time, the bands themselves often reflected the conditions surrounding them. Songs frequently addressed corruption, authority, militarism, social hypocrisy, inequality, and frustration with institutions. Politics entered the scene through lyrics, attitudes, and lived experience rather than through formal doctrine. A person could spend an entire evening avoiding political discussions and still find themselves singing along to songs shaped by political realities.

The Pinoy version of punk never attempted to reproduce foreign scenes exactly. It absorbed local influences and local frustrations. The result was rough, direct, and often unapologetically aggressive. Technical perfection was rarely the objective. What mattered was intensity. The bands approached their material with a sense of urgency that reflected the environments from which they emerged.

Looking back from 2026, one detail felt unexpectedly familiar. When Private Stock played "Future Generation," the song sounded as relevant as ever. The generation that built the original scene grew up amid Cold War anxieties, political instability, and economic uncertainty. Today's concerns are different in form but no less persistent. Geopolitical tensions continue to rise, conflicts remain active across multiple regions, climate change is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore, and economic insecurity remains a fact of life for many people.

Perhaps that continuity explains why many veterans of the original scene remain attentive to what is happening around them. Not because they all became politically active, but because decades of experience make recurring patterns difficult to ignore. When Urban Bandits blasted the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" that night, the song felt less like a nostalgic cover than a reminder that skepticism toward authority rarely goes out of style, regardless of the decade or the politicians involved.

What became apparent as the evening progressed was that age had altered appearances far more than it had altered temperament. Some musicians were now grandparents. Most carried the physical evidence of four decades of living. Yet the energy remained recognizable. Philippine punk was never built around technical perfection or virtuosity. What mattered was commitment. The songs were delivered with the same sense of urgency that made them effective in the first place.

In that sense, the contribution of that night's impresario extended beyond organizing a reunion. Bringing together such a significant portion of the TRC community meant reconnecting people whose paths had diverged over decades. The event functioned not simply as a concert but as an act of preservation, allowing stories, memories, and histories—often passed down orally—to be experienced collectively once again.

For many of the people who gathered that night, the reunion was also a reunion of places. Tandem no longer occupies the position it once held within Manila's alternative culture. Katrina's survives primarily through stories, photographs, and memory. The cassette economy that connected musicians and audiences has long since disappeared. Much of the physical infrastructure that sustained the original scene no longer exists in the form people remember.

What endured were the relationships formed inside those spaces. The reunion demonstrated that communities often outlast the technologies, venues, and institutions that initially brought them together. The significance of the gathering was not that it recreated the past. That would have been impossible. The Manila that produced the original TRC scene no longer exists.

The significance of the 80s local punk scene extended beyond punk itself. Long before alternative music exploded into the mainstream during the 1990s, the underground had already established many of the networks, attitudes, and practices that made that explosion possible. Independent releases, small venues, campus scenes, fanzines, and the belief that bands could build an audience without waiting for industry approval were all part of a culture that punk helped nurture. The sound of 1990s Pinoy alternative rock may have been different, but much of its DNA could be traced back to the communities that gathered around TRC and the broader underground movement.

After reading this, you may come away with a different perspective on that night. This one is mine. So: Pak U, sori, goodbye!

>> Here's something I wrote in 2006 about the local punk scene: As it was, when it was: The new album on Pinoy underground 80s and the great rock ‘n roll swindle <<<

>> Here's something I wrote in 2006 about the local punk scene: As it was, when it was: The new album on Pinoy underground 80s and the great rock ‘n roll swindle <<<

TRANSMISSION | Sound Art: Signal with a peculiar audience

Sound art did not begin as a discipline. It emerged from a breakdown in how sound was understood and controlled. Early 20th-century industrialization had already transformed the acoustic environment before anyone attempted to theorize it. Factories, engines and dense urban life introduced continuous, mechanical noise that could not be contained within traditional musical frameworks. When Luigi Russolo proposed that noise should be considered music, he was not expanding the boundaries of composition so much as acknowledging that those boundaries had already collapsed.

This shift continued with John Cage, who reframed listening itself. His work demonstrated that silence is never empty; it is filled with ambient, environmental and bodily sound. The implication was structural: sound does not require intention to exist as experience. It requires attention. With Pierre Schaeffer, this shift took on a technical foundation through the development of musique concrète, a method that treated recorded sound as raw material rather than as a representation of performance. Tape recording allowed sound to be detached from its source, cut, looped and reorganized. A train, a voice or a machine was no longer tied to its origin. It became an object that could be manipulated, repeated and abstracted. In this process, sound ceased to be event-based and became material.

By the time Max Neuhaus began placing sound into public environments, the transition was complete. Sound no longer needed a stage, a performer or a defined audience. It could exist as part of the environment, encountered incidentally rather than consumed deliberately. This marked a fundamental reorientation: sound was no longer something performed in time but something embedded in space.

This distinction separates sound art from music in operational terms. Music is structured temporally; it unfolds with a beginning, middle and end, and typically assumes an audience that has chosen to listen. It relies on composition, whether tonal, rhythmic or conceptual, and is framed as something to be performed or played back. Sound art operates spatially; it exists continuously within an environment and often does not require an intentional listener. It is encountered rather than attended to. The emphasis shifts from composition to perception, from production to condition.

The question then follows: is sound art still music, or is it simply sound or noise under a different label? The answer depends less on form and more on framing. Sound art can include musical elements, but it does not require them. It does not depend on melody, harmony or rhythm, nor does it need to resolve into recognizable structure. What it shares with music is the use of sound as material. What separates it is its refusal to organize that material according to musical expectations.

Noise, in this context, is not the opposite of music but one of its raw states. Sound art does not attempt to clean or discipline noise into acceptable form. It allows noise to remain unstable, contextual and often unresolved. If music historically sought to control sound, sound art often exposes what happens when that control is removed or fails. It is not anti-music, but it is post-musical. It treats music as one possible subset of a broader sonic field rather than the default framework.

In practice, sound artists construct systems rather than compositions. They design installations where sound interacts with architecture, creating environments that alter how space is experienced. They engage in field recording, capturing environmental sound not as documentation but as material for recontextualization. They build electronic systems using modular synthesis, feedback loops or algorithmic processes that generate or transform sound dynamically. Increasingly, they incorporate sensors, networks and computational systems that respond to data or human presence. The work is not defined by its output alone but by the conditions under which sound is produced and perceived.

This orientation has had a measurable impact on technological development. Techniques pioneered in experimental sound practices — tape manipulation, sampling, spatial audio and generative systems — have been absorbed into mainstream tools and industries. Digital audio workstations, immersive audio environments and interactive media systems all carry traces of these earlier experiments. Sound art has functioned, often indirectly, as a research layer for media technology, testing possibilities that are later formalized into products and platforms.

Culturally, sound art challenges established hierarchies between what is considered signal and what is dismissed as noise. It destabilizes the assumption that only structured, intentional sound is meaningful. Listening becomes an active process rather than passive reception. Environments are no longer neutral backdrops but dynamic fields of sonic information. The distinction between foreground and background begins to erode.

The political dimension follows from this. Sound is not distributed evenly. Access to quiet, exposure to noise and control over sonic environments are shaped by economic and social structures. Urban planning, labor conditions and surveillance technologies all produce uneven acoustic realities. Some populations live within constant mechanical noise, while others are insulated from it. Some voices are amplified, while others are suppressed or ignored. Sound art, particularly in its more critical forms, exposes these imbalances. It uses sound not only as material but as evidence.

Contemporary practitioners extend these concerns through different approaches. Ryoji Ikeda reduces sound to data, focusing on frequency, precision and the limits of human perception. His work operates at the threshold where sound becomes almost purely informational. Janet Cardiff constructs audio walks that integrate narrative with physical space, blurring distinctions between recorded and real environments. Both approaches, while distinct, are concerned with how perception is structured and how listeners navigate complex sonic fields.

In the Philippines, sound art does not exist as a stable institutional category. There is no sustained infrastructure to support it as a formal discipline, and it rarely appears as a standalone field in mainstream art institutions. Instead, it persists through fragments — scenes, collectives and individuals working across boundaries.

Practitioners such as Diego Mapa operate between electronic music and sound-based experimentation, often blurring distinctions between performance and installation. Tengal Drilon, through WSK, helped establish a critical platform where digital art, sound and network culture intersect. Marco Ortiga has worked across kinetic media art and sonic practice, contributing to the broader experimental ecosystem where sound intersects with moving image and installation.

The late Lirio Salvador, through his pioneering band Elemento, situates sound within ritual, indigenous instrumentation and embodied performance, embedding sonic practice in cultural memory rather than formal abstraction. This introduces a parallel lineage — one that does not emerge from Western experimentalism but from localized, performative and communal sound practices.

More recent and hybrid formations continue this fragmentation. Somatosonic (Tad Ermitaño, Christina Dy & Marco Ortiga) explores immersive, body-oriented sonic environments, often merging installation with physiological perception. Jon Romero works within electronic and noise frameworks that emphasize process and system over composition. Children of Cathode Ray (CoCr), arguably one of the earliest sound art groups in the country,  operates at the intersection of analog media, signal decay and audiovisual experimentation, treating obsolete technologies as active sonic agents. While CoCr member, autoceremony, extends this into a stripped, process-driven form, where repetition, interference and minimal structure foreground listening as an unstable act.

These practices do not cohere into a single movement. They are distributed, often temporary and frequently undocumented. Independent spaces, short-lived exhibitions and underground events provide intermittent visibility, but there is no continuous institutional support. As a result, sound art in the Philippines behaves less like a defined field and more like a set of recurring disruptions within other disciplines.

This lack of containment produces a different operational logic. Without strong institutional framing, sound art is not confined to galleries in any stable sense. It appears where it can — within music scenes, performance contexts, media art programs and informal networks. It is embedded rather than isolated.

The question of whether sound art is confined to art houses reflects a broader contradiction. Historically, galleries and museums have served as primary sites because they provide controlled environments for spatial and perceptual work. However, the methods and insights of sound art have already diffused into other domains. Endless YouTube ambient drone videos, game design, film sound, urban acoustics and interface design all incorporate principles that emerged from experimental sound practices. Interactive environments, generative audio systems and spatial sound design reflect a shift toward treating sound as environmental and systemic rather than purely compositional.

At the same time, contemporary technological systems increasingly function as listening infrastructures. Devices capture, process and respond to sound continuously, often without explicit user awareness. In this context, the logic of sound art — its focus on environment, perception and systems — has been absorbed into everyday life, but stripped of its critical intent. Where sound art exposes conditions, technological systems tend to operationalize them.

Sound art is not confined to a medium, a venue or a clearly defined discipline. It operates as an approach to sound that prioritizes context, perception and the structures that shape listening. Its historical trajectory reflects a movement away from sound as an object toward sound as a condition. Its contemporary presence is diffuse, embedded across cultural and technological systems that shape how sound is produced, distributed and experienced.

BURNING CHROME | SW: Ghost signals and the voices that won’t fade

by Jing Garcia -- because the mind is a terrible thing to taste.

Originally posted on: techsabado.com/2025/12/06/burning-chrome-sw-ghost-signals-and-the-voices-that-wont-fade/

There was a time when the world didn’t tune in through fiber-optic cables or endless social media feeds, but through the static-soaked hiss of shortwave radio. Out in the provinces, DX’ers hunched over their sets; at sea, sailors leaned toward their receivers; even border guards paused to catch a drifting broadcast. Everyone twisted those stubborn dials, chasing a faint voice skipping across the ionosphere, carrying news, music, or a piece of someone else’s night from thousands of miles away.

In today’s hyper-digital Philippines, shortwave feels like an antique. But listen closely — those ghost signals still crackle on the dial, carrying voices of propaganda, resistance, and survival.

Shortwave wasn’t meant to be revolutionary. In the early 20th century, engineers dismissed frequencies above 1.5 megahertz as “useless.” They thought long waves were the future. But Marconi and other radio pioneers discovered that the Earth’s charged atmosphere could bend and bounce signals across oceans.

By the 1920s, experiments from Cornwall to Manila revealed that a modest transmitter could leapfrog continents. A global communications medium was born — not through grand design but by listening to the sky itself.

The Philippines and the shortwave age

For the Philippines, shortwave meant something bigger: connection. Manila became a listening post, both as a colony and later as an independent republic. Before satellites, before cable TV, the archipelago’s gateway to the wider world was often through the hum of shortwave bands.

I remember tuning in to shortwave radio on my old Sanyo boombox inside my small cave of a room at our QC home in the late ’70s through the mid-’80s. I’d collect those coveted QSL cards from distant stations in Europe and South America, each one confirming that their signal had somehow reached me. That same Sanyo became my lifeline to international news — especially BBC London and NHK Japan — during the coup d’état in the capital, and again in 1990 when a powerful earthquake struck Luzon and the power went out.

Radyo Pilipinas, the government’s voice to the world, began broadcasting internationally in 1933. Its transmitters in Malolos and Quezon City beamed Filipino news, music, and culture into Asia and the Middle East. Overseas workers — long before they were called OFWs — could tune in from foreign lands and hear voices from home.

During the Marcos dictatorship, shortwave played a darker, double role. The regime used Radyo Pilipinas as a propaganda tool. At the same time, Filipinos secretly tuned in to the BBC, Voice of America, or Radio Australia for unfiltered reports about the unfolding crisis at home. Shortwave was the VPN of its day — a way to bypass censorship when information itself was a battleground.

Globally, shortwave reached its brutal peak during war. In World War II, soldiers on both sides huddled around radios. The BBC’s Empire Service brought courage to occupied Europe, while Japan’s Radio Tokyo broadcast English-language propaganda aimed at Allied troops in the Pacific.

Then came the Cold War. The Soviet Union and the United States escalated into a broadcasting arms race. Moscow’s booming transmitters hurled Communist rhetoric across continents. Washington countered with the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty, feeding uncensored news into the Eastern bloc.

Numbers stations added a layer of paranoia — eerie voices reading endless strings of digits, believed to be coded instructions for spies. Even today, hobbyists swear they can still hear them on certain bands, like ghosts that refuse to fade.

The SWL subculture

The rise of the SWL — shortwave listener — was inevitable. Here in the Philippines, university students and hobbyists spent nights spinning dials, trying to pull in faint signals from Berlin or Buenos Aires. They called themselves DXers, always chasing the farthest signal. Like me, they mailed out QSL reception reports, hoping for that prized card in return — tangible proof that a voice from the other side of the world had briefly found its way home.

A decent Sony or Grundig set was the passport. With nothing but wire strung across a bamboo pole, a DXer in Quezon City could log the BBC in London or a clandestine broadcast from Taiwan. In a nation of islands, where isolation was a given, shortwave offered the thrill of belonging to a global conversation.

But technology never stands still. By the 1990s, the internet and satellite television began dismantling shortwave’s dominance. Streaming killed the static. Governments decided it was cheaper to push podcasts than to power up massive transmitters that guzzled electricity.

Deutsche Welle, Radio Canada International, and many others signed off for good. Even the BBC scaled back, cutting entire regions from its once-global footprint. For a while, shortwave seemed doomed to vanish into nostalgia, like vinyl or Betamax.

Originally posted on: techsabado.com/2025/12/06/burning-chrome-sw-ghost-signals-and-the-voices-that-wont-fade/