DESCRIPTION:
a massive musical jam during Subflex at B-side featuring Noli Aurillo on acoustic guitar, Shant Verdun on flute, Punnu Wasu on harmonium, Cj Wasu on tabla, Bent Lynchpin (Malek Lopez, Caliph8, Mark Zero and Fred Sandoval) and Tad Ermitaño doing live visuals.


Subflex
February 1, 2012
B-side, the collective, Makati, Philippines


video documentation by Erick Calilan


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"Subflex: Manila's best kept musical secret"
by Tad Ermitaño
InterAksyon, February 8, 2012


Wednesday is the week's dead night in the world of bars and clubs. Music joints and drinking holes: the favored haunts of Lautrec and Hokusai. What they called the ukiyo, the floating world, in old Tokyo. Ukiyo the raucous party time netherworld of fleeting pleasures. Thin Wednesday, smack in the middle of the week, when everyone else is in the middle of the crush of job and deadlines, is when the bars are ghost towns, pale and echoey revenants of their fat party fratboy selves. It's a cheap night: nothing much is at stake. Wednesday is a night when somebody could take a shit in the middle of the bar without causing a major dip in the night's profits.

By the same token it's also the best night for unpopular pursuits: poetry, jazz, noise. Astronomy lectures. Experimental anything. Note that the case of jazz demonstrates that "unpopular" doesn't necessarily mean bad or amateurish. Jazz musicians are dextrous, and highly technical practitioners, specialists of complex harmonies and syncopated time signatures. Jazz is the definitive example of excellence in the shadows.

Subflex, the musical performance concert series organized and presided over by Caliph8 (aka Arvin Nogueras, a wildly talented samplist/DJ) is another such example. It takes place around 11 o'clock every first Wednesday at B-Side, a club in The Collective, a converted warehouse housing a motley collection of independent shops, galleries, and small restaurants on the corner of Malugay and South Super. Subflex essentially showcases jams/improvisations between musicians from different (often wildly different) musical backgrounds. The encounters are not prefaced by any rehearsals. Sometimes they mark the first time some of the musicians will have played together. All of the participants will, however, have been selected or invited by Caliph8, guided by gut feel. The selection process winds up selecting both virtuosos like Caliph, who can basically jam with anyone, as well as people whose playing styles are a bit less flexible, like the noise artist Inconnu ictu. Inconnu ictu literally plays noise, a mix of raw electronic textures and frequencies which have no key and no beat, but which apparently have jammable structure. However, the musicians assembled last February 1, were decidedly of the first kind.

In one corner were the oldskool virtuosi: equipped almost entirely with acoustic instruments. Rocker, longhair, ethnic vibe. Shant Verdun on guitar, flute, percussion, and a small electronic keyboard. CJ Wasu on tabla. CJ's brother Punnu Wasu on vocals, mandolin and harmonium, and Noli Aurillo (possibly the best guitarist in the archipelago) on acoustic guitar.

While in the opposite corner were the predominantly younger, predominantly short-haired representatives for electronica: Berklee-trained composer and synthesist Malek Lopez on a vintage analog synth, Mark Zero on bass, Fred Sandoval on guitar and laptop, and of course Caliph8 on samplers. I did visuals on Caliph's invitation.

The inventor of ambient music Brian Eno has said that the human ability to control nature (demonstrated by technology and engineering) has obscured the importance and power of that other great human ability, the ability to surrender. This is the ability showcased in Subflex on those ghostly Wednesdays. The musicians surrender like birds to a common, overarching flow. Contributions enter the flow and swirl around in it, sometimes growing into its driving impulse. That night marked a masterful demonstration of what it truly means to surrender to the music. I think there were about three jams, each about a half hour long. The digital sampler is maybe three decades old. The flute's age is measured in millennia. Each improvisation was a mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic display of emotion and technique. The tabla interlocking with effected drum samples. Analog synth lines against guitar. The purity of a flute against a net of distortion. Things got jazzy, incantatory, funky, sparse, soulful, harsh, sweet, and all sorts places in between before the last jam ended in a controlled sonic tornado sometime around three in the morning.

Don't kid yourself. Real stuff, as in real, brilliant, irreproducible encounters with the unknown, really happens, some of it even on Wednesdays. So stay awake, and keep your eyes open. ( http://www.interaksyon.com/infotech/subflex-manila%E2%80%99s-best-kept-musical-secret )



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