Episode 54

FOREVER WAITING...
[created for the Words on Music course with Kate Molleson and Peter Meanwell at the Darmstadt Summer Course 2023]

A tram ride to Darmstadt’s Lichtenbergschule turns into a journey of reflecting how passports control one’s mobility. An encounter with Filipino visitors, weekly protests at Luisenplatz on Iran’s atrocities, and flipping passport pages disrupt a daily life of church bells, audible traffic lights, and utility shortwave transmissions – Cedrik Fermont likewise tells stories that challenge assumptions about how we know the world. The tram ride stops midway, migrants reach the border. They are left waiting if they can pass through...

Languyin mo ang ilog;
Magilas ang kabayong hubad!
Naghihintay sa wala.

(Swim by the river;
The naked stallion shows off!
Waiting for nothing.)

Credits:

Cedrik Fermont – narration
Juro Kim Feliz – Tagalog haiku

Additional recordings:
Frau Leben Freiheit protest on 16 August 2023 at Luisenplatz, Darmstadt
conversation with anonymous Filipino couple

ewig warten… (forever waiting…) [2023]

Episode 55 | softer•ish (soft II )

UNTIL DUSK
Juro Kim Feliz
stereo acousmatic work, composed 2018. For "Sound Photography," a global collaborative project by Cities and Memory (http://citiesandmemory.com/sound-photography). Photography by Giulia Biasibetti.

N.B. Listen in stereo!


Composer's notes:

Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to create a series of sculptures, Marc Didou’s idea of resignation to shun away the creator’s subjectivity renders stillness as a proactive exercise of agency. Within spliced planes and pixilated surfaces to render a perception of flatness, Giulia Biasibetti’s photograph of Didou’s “Échos” in Turin, Italy emanate vibrations transcending the photograph’s two-dimensional space. First presented in Cities and Memory's "Sound Photography" (2018), "Hanggang sa Takipsilim" (Until Dusk) responds to this particular photograph with recorded Philippine indigenous instruments and narrated histories to challenge the flatness of time and space. Crude methods of microsampling—manually pixelating and splicing recordings into shreds—paved the way for stitching and creating tapestries of rough textures, glitches, and echoing vibrations. Similar to the avoidance of automating such processes, the political voices of the diaspora lean towards negating Didou's "resignation-as-creation”—actors and historical agents can never passively stand still in creating ongoing histories. Ironically, Didou’s open-mouthed sculpture stretches one’s imagination as if one calls out echoes of pasts, presents, and futures within intermingling spaces. In this regard, "Hanggang sa Takipsilim" juxtaposes recordings of indigenous instruments by Jayson Palolan with an excerpt of Hannah Leah Guanlao’s “Choose Your Own Perspective” (2016) to capture a Filipino-Canadian millennial’s response to present-day historical revisionism surrounding the brutal dictatorship of Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos during the 1970s-1980s.

“Sometimes, it feels like our struggle is hopeless.
Halos araw-araw, naririnig ko na lang na may isa na naman sa atin ang kinuha sa gabi.”
[Almost everyday, I just hear that one of us was abducted once again during the night].

- Choose Your Own Perspective, Hannah Guanlao (2016). English translation by the composer. Used with permission.

Hanggang sa Takipsilim [2018]

Music and lyrics by Juro Kim Feliz

Recorded at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Nebraska City, NE during an artist residency in July-August 2019

Produced by Juro Kim Feliz
Mixing by Marie-Luise Calvero at mu-waves, Freiburg, Germany
Mastering by Sebastián Gómez Mancheno at mu-waves, Freiburg, Germany

Cover art by Yuna Kim
Photography by Prince Requino

Performers:
Grumpy Kitty Boy - vocals, keyboards, programming

Special thanks to the following: Carolyn Fe ("Bad Puppy Mummy"), "Raccoon," Eric Alper, Holly McAdams Olson, Sara Ammon, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts (Nebraska City, NE).

=========

“But who am I? I'll never know!”

Going through the school of hard knocks, Grumpy Kitty Boy seems to suffer from amnesia. He dreamily sings about things that don't make sense: words and pictures in the night sky, zodiac signs, shattered TV screens, horizon lines, bus rides. However, his ramblings shine in a different light when he actually pretends not to see reality in front of him. It turned out not to be a case of amnesia—Grumpy Kitty Boy rather prefers avoidance from past lives that continue to control his future.

“Blue Eyes” paves the way for Grumpy Kitty Boy's debut EP “Show Me The Kibbles,” a mishmash of songs that introduces us to glimpses of his life and character. EP release on February 26, 2021!

===

BLUE EYES
Grumpy Kitty Boy

Circles marking all the words
And pictures in the night sky
Hoping that I'd remember
Thin lines tracing zodiac signs
Where headlines fail to bring light
Dreaming that I’ll recover

But who am I?
I’ll never know
Even when the lights spell it out
People might go blind
With blue eyes
That lure me to my destiny
I’ll pretend that I don’t see

Shattered, broken TV screens
With flashes of your past lives
Deleting what you could have archived
Vague signs of horizon lines
Where bus rides kill your dreams for life
Feeling that I could have logged out

But who am I?
I’ll never know
Even when the lights spell it out
People might go blind
With blue eyes
That lure me to my destiny
I’ll pretend that I don’t see

But who am I?
I fail to know
Even when the sounds fade them out
People just scroll down
With blue eyes
That lure me to my destiny
I'll pretend that I don't see
I'll pretend that I don't see

© 2019 Juro Kim Feliz (SOCAN). All rights reserved.

Show Me The Kibbles

Buy in Bandcamp!

Blue Eyes

Grumpy Kitty Boy roams the streets of Toronto and Manila in his grumpy dreams. He likes singing badly and loves his kitty treats—irony and cynicism in glittery candy wrappings—but dislikes dry kibbles with a passion! He writes poetry when he's at his saddest, and writes songs when he's at his grumpiest. With Bad Puppy Mummy in close watch, he is kept company by a family of animals in the wild, including Raccoon, Pet Monkey, Canada Goose, and others.

Grumpy Kitty Boy is a singer-songwriter project of Toronto-based composer Juro Kim Feliz. Grumpy Kitty Boy artwork is provided courtesy of Korean visual artist Yuna Kim.

Blue Eyes

Grumpy Kitty Boy

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