Joon Guillen (sometime Fish Trio, Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, We Kick Ass for the Lord, and Outerhope) has found a new friend in the monome. People familiar with his reliability as a live instrumentalist would attest that a looper-sampler-sequencer thingamajig would be his last resort, but something in the Hong Kong air (which he has been breathing a couple of years now) has prompted this, shall we say, beautiful new “friendship.” He comes home to Manila every once in a while to meet up with friends and partay, and has come out in the open and reconfigured himself as ModuloGeek, armed with the lovely explosion of LEDs that you will see below:

Describe what the monome is and how you as ModuloGeek use it differently.

The monome is a grid of buttons with LED lights feedback. It’s just this little box that does nothing, in a sense that it wasn’t made with any particular purpose in mind. It is an open device where you can make applications that interface with it. The most interesting thing about it is that it spawned a community that is a cross-section of computer programmers, the DIY electronics crowd, musicians, experimentalists, and crazy brilliant people. There definitely is no shortage of monome resources (apps and such) there.

I can’t say I use the device differently than most people, which is for controlling many aspects of the music apps in my computer, but on a micro level my setup is unique just like each monome user’s also is. My main use for it is for performance, but it is also very handy during the composition and arrangement stage. Also, I keep changing my workflow to encourage fresh ideas in composition.

Did the device appeal to you more than forming a live HK band?

It’s actually the other way around: I became a monome user because I couldn’t join or form a live band! I was trying for some time, and, meanwhile, I always have this urge to make music and eventually perform them. Gradually, I realized that the easiest way to perform is to just do everything myself, and that was when I started to explore the realm of electronic music. I mean I have been making solo stuff even when I had bands [check out A Shortcut to Mushrooms], but it’s a traditional way of doing it, meaning I can’t do solo gigs with those songs.

Electronic music is different in such a way that anything goes, really. One is not limited to the sound of a guitar, for instance. Until now, the genre (if you call it that) overwhelms me with all the possibilities it offers. But still, as a player of instruments, I couldn’t call it a performance by just standing there and triggering loops and clips with the mouse clicks; I’d have to have a lot more control than that. So I have used and experimented with many different devices—MIDI controllers mostly—and eventually came across the monome and found that it gives the most control for live performance. And it wasn’t just the device itself that drew me in, it was also the community, with its open, share-alike philosophy and anything-is-possible mindset that I can strongly relate to.

As far as bands go, I am at present part of an electronic music trio called TKO. Weekend musicians for now, but will be gigging in HK in the near future.

Tell us about “The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship”: tracking it, sequencing it, and I guess the inspiration behind it.

Many many years ago, I got my very first standalone preamp. As a test, I recorded myself playing guitar, and I liked that recording so I kept it but never found a use for it until now. So I sampled from that, then the sample I kept playing in a loop, as a framework while I added in more instruments around it.

Towards the end of the song there was an inspired moment where I imagined an African children’s chorale singing the harmony in pentatonic. Unfortunately, I couldn’t hire any African children to sing for me so I settled for a synth sound instead [laughs].

The video is just me playing around with a monome app called Pages and I was using it simply to trigger clips in Ableton live, which I used to loop and create all the parts in the song. (Aldus Santos)

ModuloGeek’s material could be accessed here, as well as on Soundcloud and YouTube. He also participates in the Monome Commmunity Remix Project and was a part of the HAITI 2010 Benefit Album. Original source photos taken by Donna Macalino and Bong Rojales.