Trē Seguritan Abalos

Life Flight

Bio: Trē Seguritan Abalos ("tree") is a Filipina-American sound artist improvising with flutes, field recordings, and text. Currently based in Pittsburgh, PA, Trē often co-facilitates Open Improvisation Lab held by the Pittsburgh Sound Preserve and curates Unmade Place, a series of shows of improvised sound and text. Trē's collaborations range from ambient duo GLO-TREE with guitarist GNM, to projects with electronic musicians David Bernabo, BusCates, Hellcat Sneer, and Adam Kantz, to spaces with Asian/American creatives and organizers of JADED. 

Website:  tresoundartist.com

Statement:  I created this soundtrack in April 2021 during a season of hibernation, which led to a discovery of free improvisation as a way to resurrect the expressive voice I'd lost as a flutist after over a decade of Western classical training. Beyond college eurhythmics I had no training in improvisation, no knowledge of mixing or mastering even as a thing to know. The recordings were taken with a Zoom recorder my dad had given me, then layered via Audacity without effects or alteration. 

Free improvisation can be described as having too many options, so many that paradoxically it's limiting. Creating a soundtrack for a vast, mostly empty sky felt like this. With visuals mostly of slow, clear space, I needed a framework and built one from my few strengths as a classical flutist: bright sound and lyricism. Beyond immersion in Western classical music, I believe the soundtrack was also influenced by my childhood growing up to video game music by composers such as Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu. 

The playing is raw, nearly as raw as I felt at the time — ignorant of live music in the city around me, invisible to these scenes, and hoping to build a creative career out of Patreon. The playing betrays this naivete, near-recklessness, of someone who has nothing to lose — a privilege of invisibility. Three years later I've found spaces that have kept me actively performing, collaborating, and organizing shows. Listening back to this soundtrack, it's easy to hear I had a different voice before my voice was deemed worth listening to by anyone beyond immediate community. There's a lot of nostalgia for this voice, a voice steeped in wistfulness, obscurity, yet urgency — the urgency of fierce ambition. If I were to create a soundtrack in 2024, it might seem more polished but it maybe wouldn't match the spirit of this scene from Jim Vecchi's film.