RAINY NIGHT MUSIC FROM TATARAN ISLAND: PALA'WAN BÄGIT RECORDINGS

Drawn from the personal field recordings of French linguist and anthropologist Nicole Revel, whose decades of work helped document and preserve the oral traditions of the Pala'wan people, this transmission gathers intimate performances of bägit recorded on Tataran Island, Palawan around 1999. Bägit is an intimate musical tradition of the indigenous Pala'wan, performed on the two-stringed kudyapi and shaped by the natural world, with melodies that evoke birds, insects, flowing water, and other voices of the forest.

Heard after dark, as this music was meant to be, these recordings drift through a steady curtain of tropical rain. Among them is a breathtaking performance by a thirteen-year-old girl. Together they offer a rare glimpse into one of Palawan's most delicate musical traditions—unhurried, deeply rooted, and inseparable from the sounds of the forest after sunset.