Baker Artist Portfolios

I am a multi-instrumentalist and composer who was born in Quezon City, Philippines. When I was seven, my family moved to Baltimore, Maryland. Initially, visual art was my practice, but I ended up switching to music after ending my short college stint. I hired a music theory tutor for a year, and took an additional 2 years of theory at a community college afterwards. 

Over the years, I have contributed to many different musical projects, locally and abroad. I have a handful of long time collaborators, some of whom I have been working with for over 20 years. These projects have allowed me to tour throughout the United States and Europe. One project was awarded a grant through the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts, which allowed me to hire students from the Peabody Institute to perform a song cycle I wrote for an art opening. We were able to record and later perform it at a music festival. Outside of these works, I have written music for film, theater and dance productions, art installations, and have been a member of live DIY theater ensembles. In 2019, I was a finalist for Baltimore’s Baker Artist Award, in the music discipline. 

I also have a variety of ever evolving solo projects. Although my initial art practice was put aside for music, I find it returning and influencing how these projects sound. Ghost Life was an eleven-piece ensemble made up of mostly small handheld percussive sounds. I was gravitating towards ensemble music, both western and eastern, and was interested in fusing that idea with pop music. I wanted the small percussion sounds to have an influence on the structure of the songs, based on their combined ebbs and flows. For these performances I made tables for some of the percussionists to perform on, giving the live performances a communal Southeast Asian ensemble look. I also made two virutal performance videos because I believe the visual elements of the performance adds another layer to the compositions. While working on the Ghost Life project, an image of a band playing in the dark emerged as an idea. This was the beginning of the Ceremony Drum project. I imagined a pop band in the dark, where the “front person” was hidden from the audience. This was a response against the mainstream fascination with lead singers and American Idol type of celebrity. In this group, the drummer played only one drum and would stand in front, while all other musicians sat behind him. The only thing left for the audience to watch would be the repetitive and hypnotizing motion of the drummer’s movement. After that project, I felt the need to explore solo performance, but based it on Southeast Asian street performers who usually play with drum machines. I started writing songs under the title “Sunset at Owl’s Head.” Instead of drum machines, I used backing tracks that were influenced by the layers of strings and percussion found in Bollywood music. 

Music has been a moving target for me. As these solo projects continue to evolve, I've been trying to keep the different solo projects separate. However I found myself constantly experimenting outside the self imposed boundaries and have been accumulating little piles here and there. Figuring out where the pieces should go, I found that the different projects are also starting to bleed together. So I decided to start releasing music in little compilations of complimentary pieces. I found this way of working more freeing and exciting and allows for more experimentation. I have come to believe (after much confusion about why I feel the need to work in so many different sound worlds) that if you take 2 different starting points and work on them to try to make them the best you can, the disparate origins of the ideas do start to converge as it gets closer to the core of your personal creative self. 

I continue to live and work in Baltimore, with my partner and one of my long time collaborators, Wheatie Mattiasich. In 2023 we released a collaborative record, titled “Old Glow” which was spotlighted on NPR. In 2023, I've also worked on a second collaboration with the international group Officer!, and a third collaboration with visual and video artist, Zoe Friedman. I also have an ongoing new project with some long time collaborators, Jeff Mcgrath and Emmanuel Nicolaidis, both of whom I've worked on many projects over the past two decades.