2025.09.05

Good afternoon, and thank you for being here.

Twelve years ago, in 2013, I entered the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv in Dahlem for the first time. I could not have imagined then that this archive would shape my life for more than a decade, or that I would one day stand here presenting a composition piece for the Hörraum.

Twelve years ago, I participated in a doctoral summer school at the Wissenschafts zu Kolleg, led by Professors Jürgen Osterhammel and Harry Liebersohn. That program brought me to Berlin and led to my first encounter with the Phonogramm-Archiv — an encounter that opened a path of research, collaboration, and eventually, artistic creations.

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During my PhD, I searched for the voices of nineteenth-century indigenous musicians from the Philippines. But what I found in the archives were only documents — written in the language of the colonizer. The musicians appeared only as traces: names in registers, signatures on forms. Their actual voices were absent.

That silence haunted me. After my PhD, I turned to sound archives, hoping to hear what paper could not carry. Later, I came to Berlin for a postdoc at Freie Universität and began the project Sonic Entanglements.

At first, the Phonogramm-Archiv felt closed to me. But I found my way into the Lautarchiv of Humboldt University, meeting its custodians and beginning new collaborations. Then, in 2019, when Albrecht Wiedmann became curator, the door to the Phonogramm-Archiv began to open. He supported my restitution work, and together we started imagining a composition for the then still-under-construction Hörraum.

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From the start, I asked myself: What does it mean for me, as a Filipino composer, to work with colonial sound archives?

Listening to the collections, I not only encountered Southeast Asian voices but also the anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and composers who had captured them — often reshaping those sounds for European concert halls.

For seven years, I have asked: How do I avoid repeating this loop of sonic extraction? I am Filipino, educated, and funded in Europe, presenting on European stages. How do I resist becoming one more hand in this chain?

This became more personal in 2019, when my father visited Europe for the first time. I showed him the places I had studied and lived. In that journey, he told me stories I had never heard before. I recorded them, and later I asked: What were the sounds of your childhood? What did you hear in your village?

That question opened another layer — an archaeology of memory through sound.

My father and I stand on opposite ends of the political spectrum. When I was a student joining anti–US imperialism demonstrations in the Philippines, he forbade me from taking part. But listening now across a century of recordings — soldiers’ voices, wartime memories, displaced communities — I can see our differences as part of larger historical loops. What once felt like irreconcilable conflict between us is also the imprint of intergenerational trauma, colonial violence, and the ways each generation resists in its own time.

I did not know then that these excavations would become a thread in Pagtatahip. The sounds of my father’s memories now intertwine with archival voices from Berlin. And yet, I realized I was holding the recorder just like the ethnomusicologists I had studied. That realization unsettled me.

It also clarified my research and artistic agenda. My work cannot be only about collecting. It must aim toward what I call sonic justice: reconnecting sounds with the communities from which they were taken, bringing them back into context. If colonialism extracted labor and culture to create value in Europe that does not give back to the source community, then my artistic labor must move in the opposite direction — to restore, to reconnect, to return.

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Through Sonic Entanglements and later the EU project DeCoSEAS, I worked with colleagues across Southeast Asia to link European archives with communities in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Laos.

In one of those meetings, in 2021, we found the Jeno Takaćs wax cylinders — recordings of Kalinga music made in 1933 by a Hungarian composer working in Manila. Earlier this year, thanks to Michael Hauske, they were digitized. They now hold a special role in Pagtatahip.

Last autumn, Albrecht and I returned to the idea we first spoke of in 2019. With his retirement approaching, we agreed: 2025 would be the year.

The title itself emerged during a philosophical winnowing with Patrick Flores, over tea at the Singapore National Gallery last January. After my endless prattle about a four-mic recording of my cousin’s pagtatahip in Pangasinan, Patrick exclaimed: Yan na ang title mo!

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The title Pagtatahip comes from the Tagalog word for winnowing rice — to sift, to let the grains rise, scatter, and settle again. This became the method of the piece.

Here in the Hörraum, sound does not come from a single stage. Rendered through wavefield synthesis, it surrounds and moves through you. There is no correct place to sit.

The piece gathers sonic grains: archival voices from the early 20th century, fragments of my father’s memories, lullabies and field recordings made by my brother Jay and myself. These voices span captivity, exile, displacement, and return. Together they create what I think of as pluritemporality — folding time rather than following a straight line.

Some recordings even begin with counting — traces of the colonial obsession with calibration, with universal time. In Pagtatahip, that time is interrupted. Loops stutter, voices return altered, rhythms refuse to resolve.

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Finally, I want to acknowledge those who made this piece possible.

First, I want to note that Pagtatahip is supported by the Philippine Guest of Honor program at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, who partnered in its production. To Patrick Flores, to Riya Brigino, Loen Vitto, and Oey Mirabueno. Their support made it possible for this composition to be audible today.

I also thank Albrecht Wiedmann. As curator of the Phonogramm-Archiv, Albrecht opened the archive and stood beside this project from the beginning. His retirement this year marks both an ending and a beginning.

Many thanks as well to Maurice Mengel, director of the Media Department here at Humboldt Forum. Being a few offices away meant that our lunches and coffee breaks became moments of inspiration: on music research, cultural heritage, aesthetics, and the politics of our time. We also commiserated on the growing burden of administration. Yet Maurice reminded me why we stay close to music: because it is joy and meaning itself. Once, when I told him this piece includes recordings of people counting, he shot back: “Did you also count?” My answer, you will hear later.

Fourth, I thank Nico Daleman. Working with him has been a gift. He is not only a sound designer with a profound grasp of spatialization, but also a sparring partner in sonic philosophy. Together we debated why this piece should be in 3D and not simply stereo. Those debates were always generative. My visions were not easy to translate into wavefield synthesis, but Nico’s audio mind is nimble. Often, he was already five steps ahead, finding the technical solution that carried the sonus in my head into this space.

And finally, I thank my brother Jay. Our collaboration began when I was eight and he was seven, when I asked him to be my electronic drum machine, playing pots and cans to my paper prompts. To carry that early play into this project — to journey with him back to our father’s village, to excavate our family’s sonic past together — has been profoundly moving. A piece that spans more than a century of recordings could only have been realized with the brain, the ears, and the heart of my brother.

Thank you for coming today to listen, and to sift, magtahip, um die Spreu vom Reis zu trennen. ☐