Written by Julia Harumi Kudo
One thing about Kuriso is that he enjoys pushing and shoving possibilities in the form of beats and mixes. His digital abyss is the ne plus ultra, treacherously endless, with tracks such as “LIVE: PUBLIC IMMOLATION OF A SEWERSLVT FAN AT AN UNDERGROUND RAVE IN THE PHILIPPINES” and “bukas palad”. In Kuriso’s new song “Break Ya Back Girl”, we get a slight manic gust of the Filipino musing “magbanat ng buto” in the most prismatic and irruptive rate of ear-defying ghetto tech genius. Here, Kuriso lives fast in drum-machine patterns and pixelation of arrangements as disorganization and punchy irony, while also exacting the necessity of an alternative understanding of agency in music experimentation. Evoking the body’s capacity to stretch out, exert, and endure, the song forms into a distinctly Filipino rhythmic sensibility, where the Bisaya footwork emerges as a dynamic repository of sonic textures: synth surges, animated vocal loops, and, most importantly, our need for speed.
Kuriso’s music glistens within that unstable hyperlocal territory. Its intuitive disorganization is not a failure of structure but a question of who gets to determine the structure in the first place. This may be what makes “Break Ya Back Girl” feel so specifically Filipino without needing to sound traditionally Filipino. Its Filipinoness is not located in an easily recognizable instrument, melody, or sample. It is in the pressure exerted on the body, in the speed at which that pressure is metabolized, and in the strange pleasure of refusing to remain where the rhythm initially places you. The song does not sway out of the ghetto or the hierarchy matrix. It stays there long enough to make the place move.
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