The fluorescent lights of a specific supermarket in Estancia Estates buzzed, casting a sterile glow over the meticulously arranged aisles. It was a Sunday afternoon, the air thick with multiple aisles of household needs — meat and vegetables, to kitchen cleaning items, up to the beauty section in the middle of the toiletries and toilettes. I was there, ostensibly for groceries, targeting a PHP 1,500 spending, but to make my chore a bit interesting, I tuned to the melancholic melodies of Dionela, a new discovery, his music streaming from my phone, a small island of calm amidst the consumerist chaos.
“Marilag” played, the familiar intro washing over me. But this time, something was different. I noticed the faint echo of an FM radio broadcast in the distance, a disembodied voice announcing the date: “September 20, 2005.” This unexpected intrusion, this ghost of a past broadcast, piqued my curiosity. Why this date? Was it a deliberate inclusion, a hidden message, or simply a sonic artifact, a byproduct of the lo-fi aesthetic that permeated his music? This seemingly insignificant detail, however, foreshadowed the disorienting experience that would soon unfold as I delved deeper into Dionela’s discography.
Dionela’s music, with its hazy textures and melancholic undertones, had quickly become the soundtrack to my life. It was the perfect accompaniment to my grocery shopping, the background music for my sacks of rice, the sonic balm for my anxieties with processed chicken and beef. Yet, as I delved deeper into his discography, a nagging unease began to surface.
The lyrics, while undeniably poetic, often felt… elusive. Lines like “D’Amalfi in a bar” and “Au in a Goose” floated by, intriguing yet ultimately meaningless. They were like cryptic messages in a bottle, beautiful in their obscurity, yet ultimately unsolvable. Was this intentional? Was Dionela deliberately aiming for ambiguity, inviting listeners to project their own interpretations onto his enigmatic verses?
This question, I realized, was the crux of my dilemma. Dionela’s music, with its emphasis on atmosphere and sonic texture, seemed to prioritize ambiance over narrative. The lo-fi aesthetic, with its intentional imperfections and grainy textures, created a sense of intimacy, a shared secret between the artist and the listener.
However, this emphasis on the sonic experience can sometimes overshadow the lyrical content. At its core, lo-fi is about finding beauty in the imperfect and unrefined. It is a counterpoint to the hyper-commercialized, overly produced content flooding mainstream media. Instead of striving for perfection, lo-fi embraces the raw, the unfinished, and the nostalgic.This emphasis on authenticity, on the imperfections of analog recording and the embrace of sonic imperfections, creates a sense of intimacy and authenticity. It invites the listener to “get closer,” to appreciate the nuances and subtleties of the sound.
While the lo-fi aesthetic champions the beauty of the imperfect, it should not come at the expense of the authenticity of the lyrical message. Furthermore, the listening experience was disjointed by my own tendency to mishear lyrics. I vividly remember mishearing the line “Ibigin ka’y drama sa teatrong upua’y limitado, Bawat kislap ng mata’y kawalan, oo” as “Ibigin kita’y drama sa upuang ginawa mo, bawat kislap ng mata mo ay ano?” This mishearing, while seemingly minor, significantly altered the meaning of the song for me, highlighting the importance of clear and concise lyricism in conveying the intended message.
In Dionela’s “Sining,” the phrases like “Pinasala’y ikinamada / mo Binibining may Salamangka” felt incongruous with the otherwise smooth flow of the music, as if a disaster should be manually organized by fictitious persona. The juxtaposition of the archaic ‘ikinamada’ with the modern, almost casual phrasing of ‘Binibining may Salamangka’ creates a sense of dissonance, undermining the intended emotional impact of the song. This disjointedness, further exacerbated by the occasional miss of the musical beat, hinders the listener’s ability to fully connect with the lyrical message. Moreover, the phrase “You’ve turned my limbics into a bouquet” felt not only grammatically and medically impossible (limbic system is a singular noun that controls (1) Behavior, (2) Emotion, (3) Motivations, and (4) Memory), but also metaphorically jarring, its attempt at poetic flourish coming across as pretentious and ultimately distracting.
This elusiveness, while perhaps intentional, can be frustrating for listeners. In a world saturated with information and instant gratification, the demand for immediate comprehension and clear meaning is strong. Dionela’s music, with its emphasis on ambiguity and the subjective interpretation, can challenge this expectation, potentially alienating listeners who crave a more direct and accessible form of communication. “Oksihina,” in particular, became a personal pet peeve. Aside from gender-bending the Tagalog word for the Oxygen, the song title has been stylized in a Filipino slang that can be mistaken as a Japanese loan word. In my mind I asked, “If the muse is Oksihina, then what is the persona – a Carbon Dioxide?” The lyrics, we felt, were fragments of thought, poetic musings that lacked a cohesive narrative. They were beautiful, yes, but ultimately frustrating in their ambiguity. Also, the deliberate insertion of the bridge to mask it as a hidden message is only a reversed typeset of the first stanza from his lesser famous song “Musika”. It may be amusing to the other listeners (and can highly be mistaken as a regional language), but what is the intent of inserting a totally different concept and not even a tangent with the muse being the reason of existing? Am I missing the point? Am I too caught up in the search for meaning, for a clear and concise narrative, to appreciate the beauty of the ambiguity?
Perhaps this was the point. Maybe Dionela was not concerned in telling stories in as much as he was interested in creating moods, in evoking emotions. Maybe the music was not about conveying a specific message; it was about creating an atmosphere, an emotional landscape for the listener to explore. The “meaning” was not in the lyrics themselves, but in the quirks between the notes, in the way the music interacted with the listener’s own internal world. These lyrical oddities, while perhaps intentional, served to disrupt the flow of the music and hindered my emotional connection with the song. It felt as if Dionela was more concerned with impressing the listener with his gimmicky vocabulary and hipstery-malalim-na-tagalog allusions than with conveying a genuine, authentic message. These seemingly random and often obscure references served only to distract and frustrate. They felt like buzzwords, designed to impress rather than to communicate. I found myself constantly searching for hidden meanings, trying to decipher the cryptic messages, but ultimately feeling more lost than enlightened.
Dionela’s linguistic gymnastics, reminiscent of Facebook and TikTok influencers using deep words and non-vernacular vocabulary to seemingly uplift the authenticity of the work, ultimately backfired. The artificial mix of old Filipino words with a totally new slang, coupled with the misalignment of lyrics with the musical beat, created a sense of dissonance that disrupted the intended emotional impact. This “brain rot pattern,” as I have come to call it, was further glazed with a low fidelity tune that becomes relaxing and numbing between the left and right ears, subliminally making you ignore the poetics of the craft. After all, lo-fi is supposed to vibe and not critic.
After picking that 5-kilogram sack of Jasmine Rice, I went straight to the cashier. The musical experience mirrored my tape receipt. The spending of PHP 3,343.18 doubled the initial budget, driven by a strange impulse fueled by the same kind of “lo-fi” experience – the soothing background music, the dim lighting, the effortless flow of the shopping cart. I emerged from the supermarket with a mountain of unnecessary items – a surplus of paper towels, a collection of hair ornaments I did not need, and, most tragically, no broccoli for my planned stir-fry. My Sunday experience mirrored the effect of Dionela’s music – a pleasant, even enjoyable experience, ultimately leading to a sense of disconnect from my original purpose and a slight feeling of regret.
Perhaps we are in a dystopic social media phase where we must re-engage with an art that numbs us from the realities of the world. The allure of the lo-fi aesthetic, with its promise of authenticity and intimacy, can inadvertently mask a deeper engagement with the art itself. In the pursuit of creating a “mood,” we may be inadvertently sacrificing the power of storytelling, the ability of art to challenge, to provoke, to truly resonate with the human experience.
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