PUPIL: LIMITERS OF THE INFINITY POOL
Like a cassette on auto-reverse, reaching the end of a side, snapping audibly and with resolve. This is pretty much how Yan Yuzon, guitarist for Pupil, describes the sensation of consciously knowing when new material has to be written. He’s even looking further forward, suggesting that “the work for the next album passively begins now.” A band with Pupil’s creative capital does not need to stand on its toes. With the songwriting chops of its guitar players alone (not to mention the almost-illegal manner in which Wendell Garcia treats his drumkit), the band has got a pretty generous well to draw from. This is evident between the sonically ambitious Beautiful Machines (2005) and the more rhythmically muscular Wildlife (2007), where both musical and lyrical tendencies hardly get recycled (if at all). It’s not like the band needs to get debriefed on the “tricks” they used on previous efforts to be allowed to proceed; it’s not as though they need workshops in order to reinvent a wheel that’s far from broken. “[We just need to] not release an album for three years,” singer-guitarist Ely Buendia kids amid a small, curious crowd at Robot, at the listening party devoted to their new record, Limiters of the Infinity Pool. The always-colorful Yuzon adds, “It’s really just, mostly, going back to living your life: it’s watching the news; reading the tweets of the people you follow; raising your child, creating a child; it’s eating your food and shitting it out.”
If it’s CNN, Twitter, and proper digestion that produce pieces of the rigor, economy, and discipline of songs such as “TNT” and “Distortion,” then by God musicians should be heeding Yuzon’s simple advice. For Buendia, however, confronting this muse face-to-face is a thing of terror. “Para sa akin, the less I think about writing, the easier it comes. It comes in the most unexpected places,” the forty-year-old songwriter, still a force to reckon with despite the fashions and tastes of the times, confesses. I don’t know if this will make any sense, but I was listening to the record the nth time over, and thought: if there is a force jazz has to reckon with, it’s probably the architecture of good, structured “form” rock. Oh, faultless jazz, such boundlessness may titillate, but managing to break out within the shackles of form I find more impressive. And with form comes calculation, a science which, maneuvered well, would produce works human in their limitations but godly in their foresight. “Before we committed to anything,” Buendia shares, “each note had to be rehearsed and discussed. It took, like, a month of rehearsals before we even stepped into the studio [to record].”
It also helped that pre-prod for LOTIP consisted of a) a comfy new rehearsal space (Buendia’s new home studio) and b) the benefit of roadtest. This author first heard the sublime “Pusakal” at a Cebu mall performance; even without the frills of its studio-produced counterpart, the song shone, needless to say. “It came about because of the fact that the previous album [Wildlife] was created in three weeks, which gave it its own charm, but we felt we could do more by actually taking time—a lot of time—before recording,” the singer says, adding, “Road test helps a lot—you take out the extraneous stuff na ‘di kailangan ng songs.” And a song like “Pusakal,” glorious in its linearity in use of metaphor—the chase, the cornering, the capture, the surrender—does not need much for it to work. “Obese” employs this kind of linearity as well, but with consumption as its base construct—the weight (physical or otherwise), the restraint (nay, diet), the gluttony, the resulting catatonia—which finds its peak in “Nilamon ang kanyang pag-ibig, at walang itinira/Nguni ngayong sinisingil ka na, ‘di mo masikmura.” “Alam mo ‘yung mold ng Gingerbread Man—everything has to fit a certain mold before we track anything with Pat [Tirano],” Yuzon offers yet another image relating to form, and also, the importance of a producer’s work as a keeper somewhat of that form. “Pat was with us during pre-prod to make sure that his hand at producing and engineering the songs was one that was aware of what that mold was. Everything else that stems from that, embellishment na [sila], but the core of things has to be agreed on.”
That “core” and its attendant “embellishments” aside, LOTIP offers, musically speaking, what people have experienced (and have come to expect) in Pupil releases: highly imaginative and melodious guitar-playing, insane drumming, and—duh—songwriting that slays. And beyond these things the listener has grown to anticipate, the band pulls out hidden (and not-so-hidden) aces: an arrangement worthy of the dancefloor on “20/20,” a midtempo Dok Sergio tearjerker (“Pampalakas”), a Yuzon slack-rocker (“One-Two”), Wendell on vocal detail (“Morning Gift”), and Ely numbers that may not appear like singles in the trad-rock-radio sense but should be paid more attention to (“Distortion,” “The Low End,”). I could go on, but I know you know we all don’t need convincing. (Aldus Santos)
