All posts filed under: Music & Arts

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The Smudges Stay: Lee Cundañgan’s Hand-Painted Christmas Cards, Imperfections Included

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Look closely inside some of Lee Cundañgan’s Christmas cards and you’ll spot faint smudges, the kind a print shop would wipe away before anything ships. She won’t clean them. “I refuse,” she says. To her, those marks show that a real person painted the card by hand, with paint that didn’t always go where she wanted it to. That stubbornness runs through every card in the five-design sets she’s selling this Christmas. So does a more pressing reason for selling them this year. Four Cards That Weren’t Supposed to Be a Business Cundañgan calls herself an artist, storyteller, and educator, and a “professional raketera,” Filipino slang for someone who juggles several gigs at once. Painting is one of them. Last Christmas, when she was just starting out as a painter, she made four cards for fun and didn’t think much of them. Then the compliments started coming in, a lot of them. Two close friends told her the cards deserved a proper run the following year. This year, she listened. Five Designs, Each One Built …

Promotional banner for Nicole Asensio's September 19 performance, Songwriter, at 78 Salcedo in Makati.

Nicole Asensio Finally Lets You Hear the Songs She Never Finished

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Nicole Asensio has spent two decades being introduced by other people’s expectations. She fronted the all-girl rock band General Luna before launching a solo career and releasing her debut album, Schizoprano, in 2015. Since then, the Filipino singer-songwriter has built a career across genres that rarely share a bill — Rock, Jazz, Classical, Soul, Blues — earning a reputation as a multi-awarded performer and recording artist over two decades and 16 countries. On September 19, she’s setting all of that aside for one night. Songwriter, a special performance at 78 Salcedo in Makati’s Salcedo Village, strips the sets and the stagecraft down to something closer to the source: 20 songs, drawn from hundreds Asensio has written over the years, performed the way they first existed — as pen, paper, and not much else. Two Sets, Two Versions of the Same Songwriter The evening splits into two halves. The first, “Pen to Performance,” takes ten songs Asensio has released over the past decade and reworks them into a stripped-down, more intimate form than the recorded versions …