5 Questions with CORIN
Corin Ileto (CORIN) is a Filipina-Australian producer, composer and performer working in performance art, sound design, theatre and club spaces. In her compositions, traditional forms merge with hyper-digital sounds to create new imaginary realms.
Drawing from a background in classical piano, her live performances encompass technical configurations executed with equal parts emotion and cold precision. CORIN is also a regular monthly host on NTS Radio
NO.1
How was Araw conceptualised? What planted the seed for its beginning?
I had some sketches from two years ago that I forgot about for a while. I came across it earlier this year and thought it would be nice to flesh out the ideas and make it into a proper release, so I ended up reconceptualising and re-recording the whole thing. It’s nice when you stumble across drafts from the past—sometimes they are (unwitting) seeds for future projects.
NO.2
There’s a certain feeling of being (softly) haunted in the compositions throughout Araw—to me, a departure from your previous work, which is a bit more high-intensity. Can you speak more to that?
A lot of my work tends be pretty future oriented—both conceptually and in the sounds I gravitate towards. For Araw I wanted to create something that had more warmth and a sense of nostalgia through the instrumentation I used and tonal treatment.
I lost my mother to cancer just over a decade ago so this release was a way of emoting feelings of grief and loss in a way which I haven’t explored as much in previous works. I see it is a pause in the trajectory of my other musical works.
There is definitely a sense of haunting especially in [the track] ‘Elegy’—which felt like a funerary dirge to me because of the slow moving drone and string arrangement. But the heaviness is always lifted by moments of warmth which I imagined visually as a glimpse of the sun peaking through the fog.
NO.3
In your longform Liminal interview a few years ago, you said you studied classical music at university, and then taught yourself electronic music a few years later. And now you’re a full-time musician. I’m curious because the two are such different worlds: each environment is ruled by certain institutions, and comes with different baggage. What is your process of coping with these environments in which your work exists in and between?
I guess learning music in an institutional setting instilled me with a sense of discipline, especially with classical music where you’re expected to learn [from] a certain canon of music, and practice for long hours in order to ascertain some level of perfection.
I still try to maintain that sense of discipline, treating music just like any other job I’ve had. Although a lot of my experience making music post-university has been about undoing a lot of that training so I can free up my brain to think more broadly about musical processes and influences which sit outside that sphere. And also reflecting on how much of that education was deeply rooted in western modes of thinking.
I’m really grateful for the freedom that comes with being an electronic producer and being able to conceptualise my ideas from scratch. There are formulas and genres obviously, but it’s not as stringent.
The electronic music world does come with its own set of challenges. When I started releasing music back in 2015, the local music scene was nowhere near as diverse as it is now, so I’m glad to have been a part of that and witness that change happen slowly over time. There’s also the challenge of having to constantly churn out new material, perform and tour.
NO.4
So ‘araw’ means ‘sun’ in Tagalog. How do you think you incorporate your cultural and artistic identities in a way that makes sense to you as a musician and a person in the world?
Over the past couple of years I’ve been collaborating with Club Ate, a Sydney-based collective which transforms Filipino mythology in order to explore ideas of queerness and diaspora and to create a form of ‘future folklore’. One of their projects which I composed the soundtrack for, ‘Ex Nilalang: from Creature ~ from Creation’, takes the mythological idea of the ‘Skyworld’ and turns it into a virtual realm. I like the idea of transforming existing mythology—particularly in a digital space—as a way of exploring diasporic identity, and the liminal spaces we inhabit. I feel like I still have a lot to explore in this direction, especially in my own music. I’m currently researching traditional tuning systems and learning how I can incorporate this into future work.
With Araw, I think it is reflective of my identity in the sense that it is connected to my own personal story of losing my mother. She was a strong link to my cultural identity: always bringing me closer to the Philippines, whether that be through music or food. So losing her also led to me feeling like I had lost other aspects of myself, or at least the potential to continue to discover [more of] it. So maybe it’s not about reclaiming or reconnecting to any part of my identity but exploring the disconnection, loss and grief imparted by that experience. This release is a way of acknowledging my ancestral language.
NO.5
Who or what inspired you while in the process of making Araw?
Being out in nature really inspired a lot of the music. I think the organic quality of some of the sounds is reflective of this. The album artwork designed by Wei Huang was inspired by some pictures I took of branch and root formations out in the rainforest in Worimi country last year. It’s really beautiful and visually encapsulates the music perfectly.
The process of making this release was also purely personal. I make a lot of club-oriented drum heavy music, but when I’m at home I listen to a lot of ambient music. Similarly, I find it quite therapeutic to compose droney, repetitive, melodic driven music at home as it eases my mind. So it’s not surprising that I would gravitate towards making these kinds of sounds, especially during lockdown (which was when I made most of this release).
Corin’s latest release Araw, or ‘sun’ in Tagalog, is a set of five extended compositions that experiment with notions of textural ambience. What differs Araw from Corin’s recent work is the noticeable paring back of those rhythmic pronouncements. Though the sonic intensity has lessened in one sense, the textural detail that remains is just as striking as before.
These impeccable constructions reveal a side of Corin’s composition and production abilities often hinted at in her prior work, though less often deployed. These are elegiac pieces—truly, titled as ’Elegy’, ‘Ghost Dance’, ‘Nadir’—but they are vital and dynamic with an animated energy that is hard to come by in works of ambience trading in this kind of palette.
Listen to ‘Solis’ below: