Pagtatahip - Winnowing

The artist and composer meLê yamomo draws from a constellation of sonic sources. Archival recordings—of a Malay soldier held in a WWI German camp intoning loss in captivity; of indigenous Kalinga soundscapes captured by early twentieth-century European composers amidst the aesthetic fervor of musical Orientalism; of a Filipino librarian in 1920s Berlin voicing anti-colonial poetry; and of a Javanese dancer on European tour cantillating the Panji epics—resound from Berlin’s Phonogrammarchiv and Lautarchiv as living traces on exile. These spectral voices intermingle with contemporary field recordings by meLê and his brother Jay—lullabies, intimate murmurs between father and son, and echoes from a Southeast Asian village once called home. Together, they form an entanglement of dislocation and return, where the sonic debris of colonial encounter intertwines with familial memory, inviting a listening across an entire century.

The title Pagtatahip—a Tagalog word for the traditional act of winnowing rice—offers a guiding metaphor. To sift is to separate, but also to circulate: to let histories rise, scatter, and settle anew. This becomes both the conceptual and compositional ethos of the piece.

concept und composition: meLê yamomo

spatial sound design: Nico Daleman

Curation and dramaturgy: Jay Yamomo

meLê yamomo has lived in Lucena City, Los Baños, Manila, Seoul, Bangkok, Warwick, and Munich, and currently resides between Amsterdam and Berlin. He is an Assistant Professor of New Dramaturgies, Media Cultures, Artistic Research, and Decoloniality at the University of Amsterdam, a member of the Amsterdam Young Academy, and author of Sounding Modernities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). He is the project leader and principal investigator of the EU-JPICH project Decolonizing Southeast Asian Archives (DeCoSEAS), and the Dutch Research Council project »Sonic Entanglements«. meLê is the fourth winner of the Open Ear Award, the most prestigious composer prize in the Netherlands, and one of the 2020 KNAW Early Career Awardees, by the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a resident artist at Theater Ballhaus Naunynstrasse where his creations Echoing Europe, sonus, and Forces of Overtones are on repertoire. meLê curates the Decolonial Frequences Festival and hosts/produces the Sonic Entanglements podcast. In his works as artist-scholar, meLê engages the topics of sonic migrations, queer aesthetics, and post/de-colonial acoustemologies.