Live in a city long enough and you get to see music history unfold in front of you. Think back. NU Rock 107, great purveyor of the hottest noise, seemed to pass its torch of championing promising talent to Jam 88.3. The nu metal renaissance of the aughts made a wave Pulp Magazine surfed for years. Then, the advent of bedroom beatmakers in the early 2010’s, which reared today’s finest producers. There was even a math rock moment, fuelled in no small part by toe’s fateful concert in Manila in 2013.
There is so much to know. A music scene sheds its skin many times through its great, long life. And one way to keep track of a music scene’s history is to arrange its life according to chapters, or in this case, sounds, genres, movements.
That’s Katipcore, in a nutshell — a sound, genre, movement. That’s the short answer. At least, that seemed the case when we think back to one of its first known recorded usages in a review by Elijah Pareño for The Flying Lugaw, a music journalism platform, of Devices’ 2018 EP “The Element of Surprise.” A comment in a post cites Arnald Paguio as the term’s origin.
“It came from a need, I guess, to make the conversation easier, when we’re talking about stuff,” Paguio says on the word “Katipcore.” The term sprung from conversations Paguio had at the time with Luis Montales (a.k.a. Pikunin) and Pareño. A tweet from Montales, ostensibly a product of these conversations, mentions Katipcore, and came out around the same time as the Devices piece. Another review of “The Element of Surprise” by Paguio would come out later on Vantage, the online magazine of Ateneo De Manila University’s student publication The Guidon, in 2019.
The term recently resurfaced, kind of by accident, in January this year through a tweet by user @chollibee, which referred to an “Ateneo Sound.” Discourse bubbled up from there, as it does. Katipcore is almost a meme at this point. In Pareño’s words, “It sounds very… you know who you’re pertaining to when you say Katipcore. You wince eh. (Laughs) Ano ‘yan? Ang polarizing niya eh. That’s what I like about it.”
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Any Name's Okay is the best band in a niche genre in which I call "Ateneo Sound", that is, bands that spurted alongside Katipunan circa 2015-2020 hubbing at Route 196, where they kinda sound the same.
— Joker Roy (@chollibee) January 22, 2023
