Jing Garcia: Bioman [October 17, 2004]

Jing Garcia started his career when he was still in college taking up Journalism at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila. While in college, he took a job as a part-time custodian of an underground record bar called A-to-Z Records in Anonas, Project 3. One of the owners, Ces Rodriguez, was the editor of the legendary music magazine Jingle Chordbook, where Jing also worked part-time reviewing vinyl records released by a variety of local and international music artists in the mid-80’s.

By 1988, Jing and his friend Magyar Tuazon came out with a twenty page Xeroxed-based fanzine to support Red Rocks, a hole-in-the-wall underground rock bar in Timog, Q.C., which eventulaly later became Club Dredd Lower Timog. The fanzine, under the guidance of Dyna Records premier art director the late Dodong Viray, was called Red Racket and featured the local alternative music at that time, as well as the alternative scene that went along with it.Completely exposed to the underground music circle of Manila, Jing Garcia went into music production; and along with close friends Dodong, ex-Betrayed lead vocalist Dominic Gamboa (now Papadom of Tropical Depression, and former Jingle editor Pocholo Concepcion, they established the Racket Music Group (RMG).

The latter two later dropped out to pursue other directions, but from then on, Jing started to learn producing music that led to recording albums for then popular alternative music artists like Color It Red, Alamid, Siakol, and Keltscross among countless others.

His inspiring approach in music production earned him a number of Gold and Platinum awards from the Philippines Association of Record Industries (PARI), as well as several citations for his endeavor, including three nominations from Awit Awards as a recording producer in a variety of categories back in the mid-90’s.

Despite his successful effort in music, Jing Garcia never left writing. As a hands-on recording producer inside the studio, and while touring around the country with the bands under RMG’s management, Jing continued contributing to various publications, which included The Manila Chronicle, Psi-com, and Volume Music Magazine.

Today, Jing Garcia is a weekly I.T. columnist for the Interactive section of the Manila Standard, a column he started in the daily broadsheet in the year 2000 for its lifestyle section. His studio experience for music creation through multimedia computer gave him ample opportunity to share his knowledge in a monthly column with e-Magazine but now continuing the same (aside from the usual CD reviews) with PULP, a popular music and lifestyle magazine. He is also a regular gadget reviewer and special features contributor for Speed: Technology for the fast-paced lifestyle, a monthly glossy lifestyle magazine on consumer technology and automotive.

Jing’s music group called Children of Cathode Ray which he helped start in 1989 is his creative outlet for sound art experimentation through analog and digital audio manipulation. After several clandestine recordings and performances at several underground rock clubs, universities, and art houses, including three of performances at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, he then went on to establish his own experimental project studio effort under the name Dominguez-Shimata.Colony by 1995. Established and award winning independent film director Tad Ermitaño still joins him in the Children of Cathode Ray to this day.

Schools Attended:

Lourdes School Q.C.; Collegio de San Juan de Letran; University of Santo Tomas

Current Affiliations:

The Manila Standard
PULP Music Magazine
SPEED: High-technology Magazine
REALTIME (Australian Art Magazine) INQ7.net's HackenSlash gaming website
RadyoCyberPinoy (an AM radio show on local I.T.) Diecastcars Collector Club of the Philippines
Information Technology Journalists Association of the
Philippines (ITJAP/CyberPress)

Releases as recording producer:

Color It Red – Hand Painted Sky (Alpha Records/1994)·
Siakol – Tayo na sa Paraiso (Alpha Records/1996)·
Keltscross – Revenge of the Fishlips (BMG Pilipinas/1995)·
Numeric Sampler 502 – Compilation Album (Alpha Records/1994)·
Numeric Sampler 504 – Compilation Album (Alpha Records/1996)

Releases as (the children of) Cathode Ray:

The Live Ones Volume 1 (GodStarMusic/2004)
More Live Ones (GodStarMusic/2005)

Releases as Dominguez-Shimata Colony:

The New Republics EP (available on line/GodStarMusic/1997)
Skin Jobs EP (available on line/GodStarMusic/1999)
Transmissions freeEP (GodStarMusic/2003)
New Dawn Fades on a Digital Decade (GodStarMusic/2004)

Awards and citations:

PARI Gold Record Award (as album producer)Numeric Sampler 504 (1994)PARI Gold Record Award (as album producer) Siakol – Tayo na sa Paraiso (1995)
PARI Gold Record Award (as album producer)Color it Red – Hand Painted Sky (1995)
PARI Platinum Record Award (as album producer) Siakol – Tayo na sa Paraiso (1996)
PARI Platinum Record Award (as album producer) Color it Red – Hand Painted Sky (1996)
PARI Double Platinum Award (as album producer) Siakol – Tayo na sa Paraiso (1996)
SGHH Reader’s Poll Award for Best Compilation Album for 1995 – Numeric Sampler 502 (1996)
Awit Award Nominee in 1995 for: Producer of the Year; Inspirational Song of the Year; and Song of the Year.

Soundart Exhibitions and Live Perfomances with The Children of Cathode Ray (partial list):

Club Dredd, Lower Timog (1990-1992)
Cultural Center of the Philippines, A Roxlee short-film Retrospective (1993)
Cultural Center of the Philippines, a dance recital; directed by Al Santos (1994)
U.P. Faculty Center (1998)
Big Sky Mind, New Manila (November, 1999)
Big Sky Mind, New Manila (November, 2000)
Big Sky Mind, Cubao (January, 2004)
Music Museum (March, 2004)
The Library, Takeshimaya, Singapore (April, 2004)
The Substation, Singapore (April, 2004)
Multimedia Arts Asia Pacific (MAAP) – GRAVITY, National Institute of Education Art Gallery, Singapore (October 31 – November 2, 2004)

Details about Dominguez-Shimata.Colony from the liner notes of Transmission (2003 CD release):

This latest CD-sampler from The Dominguez-Shimata.Colony is a collection of recordings from the early years.Formed in 1995, The Dominguez-Shimata.Colony is a solo project-studio effort of mine as a creative musical outlet that spawned from my earlier experimental music group (Children of…) Cathode Ray, which I also help established way back in 1989.

The (Children of…) Cathode Ray was a collaborative attempt of a group of six enterprising bohemians who were hanging-out at Red Rocks (later Club Dredd) in Timog Avenue. Bred from a variety of musical and artistic genre, to create unstructured music out of found instruments, new media and various electronic sound sources, including (ambient) noise. It was a meaningful attempt to deconstruct musical theories and compositions that many of us are already familiar with.Transforming and synthesizing audio into sound art was an imaginative endeavor that eventually found significant live presentations inside universities, underground rock clubs, and art houses, not to mention three performances at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.The same inspired thought continues with my current project-studio conception.

Incidentally, the name Dominguez-Shimata.Colony is a bastardized reference to the futuristic conglomerate that appeared in Ridley Scott’s 1982 art-house sci-fi classic Blade Runner.

This collection of deconstructed and re-constructed audio synthesis entitled Transmissions is actually my third FREE CD-sampler, but my first for the millennium. In case you want more, check out the Numeric Sampler 502 and 507 CD’s that were released in the mid-90’s or visit www.childrenofcathoderay.com for free MP3 download.

from the RacketMusic Website:The Dominguez-Shimata.Colony

Elements of the name roughly came from the classic art-house sci-fi movie Blade Runner under the direction of Ridley Scott in 1982. The movie's entire cyberpunk aesthetics, years before it actually became a household term, was certainly the primal influence of the sole noise-maker and multi-awarded recording producer Jing Garcia (a.k.a. rabies) making it his cerebral metaphor.

The music is a cornucopia of three decades of electro-industrial rock, with sharp sci-fi edges, now known and also commonly misused, as cyberpunk - "...(it) serves as a prism to refract some of cyberculture's recurrent themes: the convergence of human and machine; the supersession of sensory experience by digital stimulation; the subcultural "misuse" of high technology in the service of perverse sensibilities or subersive ideologies; and a profound ambivalence, handed down from the sixties, toward computers as engines of liberation and tools of social control, reweavers of the social fabric shredded by industrial modernism and instruments of even greater atomization" (Mark Dery). Simply put- "guys in black leather who use synthesizers...and digital sampling" (Lewis Shiner).

As an experimental studio band operated and maintained by Children of Cathode Ray co-founder, the music D-S.C produces combines distorted audio sampling from media-ridden western culture with touches of dark elements taking its cues from early industrial bands, and heavily influenced by groups like the Velvet Underground, Joy Division, and the pop-extremities of Psychic TV.

Though Jing Garcia's D-S.C is definitely not into live performances, he occasionally spreads his sound art by invitation. Subsequently, two of D-S.C's studio efforts can be heard on the CD format of the Numeric-Sampler 507 album-- two other songs included in the Numeric-Sampler 502, Edit and Inc., was actually done by the D-S.C. A collection of its later projects and works from the pre-Cathode Ray days can also be acquired (by request) on cassette, minidisc or CD.

From the liner notes of THE CHILDREN OF CATHODE RAY:

The Live Ones: Volume 1

The original 1989 lineup of The Children of Cathode Ray consisted of Blums Borres, Tad Ermitaño, Jing Garcia, Regiben Romana, and Magyar Tuason, with Peter Marquez pitching in as tech and gaffer. The band is a closed but metastable collective, with a 15-year history sporadic dormancy interleaved with sudden bursts of activity.
Various combinations of its set of 6 members have disappeared (sometimes for years) only to rejoin as casually as they dropped out. The band is and was a catchall for the members' interests in music, sound, experimental film, lighting, poetry, graphic arts, and technological deconstruction.

A Cathode Ray piece might have radios and 4-second cassette-tape loops feeding into a mix filled with drums and electronic percussion, effected guitars, synthesized pads and passionate raving in an invented language, which would in turn be augmented visually by video feedback, projections of exposed Super-8 abraded with a variety of kitchen implements, or VHS spliced on a pair of consumer VCRs. In its present incarnation, the band consists of Tad Ermitaño and Jing Garcia orchestrating sound and video live out of computers. However, instead of music being composed to add mood to pre-existing visuals (as happens in film), or video being composed to back up pre-existing music (as happens in rock/electronica), Cathode Ray's methods give equal primacy to sound and imagery. A looping image might inspire a certain timbre or rhythm, which calls up an accompaniment in the lower registers, which in turn provokes a decrease in the image's luminance, and so on.

The question naturally arises as to the value of a CD that captures only the audio element of these performances. But, while it is true that this must be an incomplete record of what the band creates and created, the members believe that the sonic element is solid enough to stand on its own as music (or at least as interestingly organized sound).

From the racketmusic website:

This band was established way back in 1989 by graphic artist Magyar Tuason and recording producer Jing Garcia (a.k.a. rabies). At first, they called themselves The Cathode Ray Idols initiate while driving in the middle of the night in suburban Manila; upon seeing the transmission tower of television giant ABS-CBN along Tomas Morato.

Eventually, they change it to Children of Cathode Ray to pay tribute to that boob tube that has influenced almost everyone on this planet. The inclusion of four other members, namely Blums Borres, also a computer graphics artist and 3D animator, experimental film maker and video directors Tad Ermitano and Regi Romana, with Peter Marquez doing the visual presentations completed the line-up of the band. It was an unlikely team-up because of the members widely diverse influences in music and arts, but the same middle-class angst and their fondness for popular culture kept them tightly together.

In the early years, the band did few but memorable performances in Manila. Three of these were held at Club Dredd while it was still located on lower Timog Ave., and the other three were performed at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, making them one of the few experimental bands to play in such places.

A lot of their recordings were unreleased and only the tune Diagrams made it to the market. It was included in the Gold Record Awardee Numeric-Sampler 502 in 1995. Two other songs (Edit and Inc.) on that CD was labeled under the bands name, but was actually done by Jing Garcia’s solo effort as Dominguez-Shimata.Colony.