Gold Soundz: Foaming at the Mouth with Diego Castillo
for Scout Magazine
I had no doubts that the door I stood in front of led to Diego Castillo’s flat. After all, the music playing on the other side was so loud, I heard it echoing through the apartment halls the moment I exited the elevator.
“That’s what billions of people complain about,” he said with a laugh after welcoming us. “You listen to The Shins, don’t you?”
The band playing isn’t actually The Shins, but a band called XTC, and with a mischievous glint in his eye, he tells us that he suspects that The Shins may have stolen a few tricks from them. He walks over to the turntable in his living room and drops the needle on a specific track of the record to prove his point. He speaks candidly and enthusiastically, as if he knows the bands by heart. After he excuses himself to have a cigarette on the balcony, we sit in his living room surrounded shelves packed with records and CDs. I realize that he speaks exactly like he does on his online radio show, Foaming at the Mouth, which is for all sorts of folks, from casual listeners to obsessive High Fidelity-level geeks. He takes free rein to play whatever he wants regardless of genre or age from his eclectic library of music. Over the course of a single show, you can hear him air staples from his personal indie rock canon, to old-school hip-hop and funk that he found in a secondhand record bin, and the latest upcoming local bands, along with his own banter. He may call it rambling, but what he says is fascinating, humorously irreverent, and ultimately engaging.
Then again, that should come as no surprise since he has been talking about music for years. Before Diego Castillo became the guitarist of Sandwich, one half of the DJ duo The Diegos, and the co-writer and co-director of Rakenrol with Quark Henares, he was a seventeen-year old kid who stayed at home with nothing to do on Saturday evenings but listening to records and an avid listener of the legendary and now-defunct radio station, NU107.
“I heard Myrene Academia, my bandmate in Sandwich and former announcer of Not Radio–which I must say was the best show ever on Philippine radio,–say that we could have heard the new Fugazi or L7 if only the Philippine mail didn’t steal her CDs.” He showed up at NU’s front doorstep eagerly with his own copies of those albums, eventually becoming one of the station’s own DJs as well.
It may have been years since that happened, but he’s still fueled by an enthusiasm to share music to whoever may be willing to listen. He chose the phrase “foaming at the mouth” because it refers to someone’s over-the-top appreciation about something, like a rabid dog. Putting up a Spotify playlist wasn’t enough for him, so he decided to talk about music and get nutty over it as well like he did in his days at the NU107 studio.
However, when it comes to Foaming at the Mouth, his recording process just involves him, his music library, and Garageband, from the comfort of his own flat. No frills, just talk and tracks. When he posted the first episode of Foaming at the Mouth, he expected around ten people to listen to it at the very most, out of the several Facebook friends he tagged. The show spread by word-of-mouth on the internet, and now it tops the indie and alternative charts of Mixcloud, such as his OPM special which reached over 1500 listens. Then again, the show isn’t about the numbers, but the music.
“Who even listens to anybody talk for three hours anymore?” he says in disbelief considering how people’s listening habits become more jagged and distracted straight in this day and age. After all, it’s one thing to listen to a radio show when you have no other choice while you’re in a car, but it’s another to listen while sitting in front of a computer with the internet’s wealth of songs to choose from. But still, people are listening, to which he says, “I’ll record and have world domination from home.”
The next step in his scheme is to hold Foaming at the Mouth live, whether through a web stream or an actual event where fans can go onstage. “I’ll say, ‘Here’s the new Spoon song, what do you think?’ at may tatawag. Yun na! May totoong discourse. It’s tangible na may kausap ako at the end of the line.” He wants to hear people tell him what they think about the music, which is why he encourages people to e-mail him. “I’m trying to tell kids that they don’t have to like the songs. The point is to have your own opinion of it.” Other than that, he’s planning to have an artist series separate to the show where he’ll have guest bands to play songs that have made an impact on them as musicians, such as what they’re listening to or what made them want to play music to begin with. It’s to get people to understand the impact of doing something as simple as saying why you like a song.
“To foster a community is my end goal,” he says, “If I’m able to share new music with some kid who happens to be in Davao and Cebu and get them interested in these weird bands, I’m happy.” After all, the music Diego Castillo plays on Foaming at the Mouth goes farther than his flat’s door, through the internet airwaves, and to the ears of kids who are hungry for new music beyond the standard radio thoroughfare. Those kids start talking about music and sharing it with others, and then some of those kids even go on to start their own bands who find new listeners, and so on and so forth. And the music plays on. That’s the way it ought to be, and that’s the way it’s going to stay.
Written by Mariah Reodica
Photos by Aly Cabral
