Kindred Is Here To Change Your Mind About Boybands

It was a Wednesday night in Quezon City. Traffic was slowly filling the avenues as the lights turned on at the top floor of Paper Lantern, a Chinese restaurant along Matalino Street, right across Teachers Village.

Inside the dimly lit restaurant, there was an event waiting to happen. It turns out the space was reserved for the first leg of Kindred’s tour. For those who haven’t heard of them yet, Kindred is a music collective-slash-label who formed around the early days of lockdown in the year 2020. It’s now the group’s mission to expand their community and move it beyond 2022.

On paper, it’s a supergroup, but Kindred doesn’t necessarily function as a supergroup, at least not one where the members are constantly one-upping each other. Rather, Kindred’s a communal activity growing from one live performance to the other.

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The group consists of members who have collaborated with each other in the past, including Fern., the solo singer-songwriter who’ve written hits in the past; Nouvul, the experimental R&B lone wolf who hopscotches from one skittering beat to the other; Dot.Jaime the electronic producer who has co-produced and written for several local R&B musicians from his bedroom in Iloilo to the big stages in Metro Manila; Cavill, the melody miner who started out as a crooner on Soundcloud; Slomo Says, the charismatic tall wunderkind waiting to unleash his raps to the world; Vinced, the rap-singer songwriter claiming to reach for the stars in one nocturnal track to the next; and Punzi, the jazzy-soul artist waiting to mesmerize audiences. 

The collective prior to this first leg plotted out all the necessary spaces that are pivotal to giving Kindred’s voice over the years. And it all started in the heart of Quezon City.

The group’s first leg had a semi-niche, pop-centric, internet-flavored curation, all handpicked by veteran producers and songwriters Jorge Wieneke, also known as Nouvul. The space, to Jorge, was an ode to the internet circa 2016. It was a matter of time until Nouvul was born. It was the same with the boyband, whose members have sharpened their skills while in retreat.

When I first entered the room inside the restaurant, I felt  the atmosphere was enveloping. I was sucked right into the group’s community aspect. Kicking off the show was a DJ set offering plugg, trap-hybrid-metal infused with soft singing, a precedent that would set in for the rest of the night. 

After a couple of impressive opening performances, Nouvul came out and was the first among the seven members performing individually. He had a long list of deep cuts, old favorites, and new demos to share for the curious audience. The solo performance, although short and sweet, was a testament of what’s to come. 

Shortly after Nouvul’s set, the floor was opened to unleash the beast that is the seven-man boyband. Introduced by Kindred’s resident hypeman and host Paolo: Fern, Cavill, Dot.Jaime, Punzi, Slomo Says, Vinced, Nouvul and Punzi came out to the floor. Symbolically, it was the arrival of something great. The choreography was the idea of the group’s resident manager Janine, who just happens to have both a theater background and marketing experience. She trained the boyband to look like they are the real deal. Kindred’s debut was nothing but a masterful display of what a boyband is, not just from the surface visually, but also sonically. 

I sat down with the group for this interview, and the members all gave insights and details about the tour, especially when it comes to experiences in adjusting to specific venues.

“Mararamdaman mo energetically ano yung ini-establish ng venue.” Jorge says, “For a specific venue, it’s sort of a portal for the people who go there, especially if you work with venues that encounter a lot of problems, mararamdaman mo rin na it also trickles down to the vibe of the people that work there. It’s safe to say na parang it’s not just as simple as saying it’s a space. Every space is a portal for different types of energies, different types of people. We need more of those venues that care, not just about the money, not just about the revenue. The longevity of their vision, the bigger their story is, because after us there’s going to be more and more generations that need spaces like these.” 

 

At the time of this writing, Kindred only had one single out. Word-of-mouth works in ways performers and audiences wouldn’t expect. From Paper Lantern to The Apartment in Poblaction to Dirty Kitchen in Mother Ignacia Avenue, to even The Nook in Alabang, each leg of Kindred’s tour had their own respective successes and trials.  

Moses Webb, also known as Slomo Says, mentioned that there’s consistent evaluation that comes after every show. If there was “afters,” then there’s an after-afters, where the group would collect themselves and see what the problems were, the improvements that could be made, and the lessons that they can own up to for the next show. It was an important process that would take more than just considerations and more of actual application to help elevate a performance and the community all at once.  

Kindred’s resident producer, DJ and marketing team member Jaime San Juan, also known as Dot.Jaime, thought as the tour went on that the shows would immediately write itself in terms of concept and execution. 

“For me, I think that night, that also sent a message that we are trying to share also where every leg had a different curation-slash-genre also.” he says, “Since like Jorge was more of internet music, Obi was more jazz or soul, R&B, Vince was R&B and hip-hop, Moe was more like hip-hop or rap, and my leg was focused on dance na.”

One of the founding members, Fern Tan, also known as Fern. also shared his thoughts on how Kindred came to be during the tour. “It felt like blowing up was so manufactured that you’d be getting millions of streams. Parang it doesn’t feel right,” he admitted, “But for the first time in my whole career, it feels na parang I actually believe in Kindred. Like a hundred percent and I’m not second guessing. It feels like the people are also believing in it in a way that they feel like a part of it. It feels bigger than us.”  

The last leg of the tour, which was Tan’s tour at 19East in Sucat, was not just a homecoming. It was a culmination of the entire Switch tour. It was the boyband at full effect: no grandiose stage lights, only the purest of what a boyband is. The venue was much bigger than the first leg, much grander than the usual shows I’ve ever attended. But the boyband put on one hell of a show. 

In a room full of family and friends from the South, there were also attendees that came all the way from Olongapo and Quezon City to see it all happen in the flesh. According to Tan, it was an exciting moment to see friends from highschool, but more importantly it was the vibrant activity and community waiting to happen during the show. 

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>pKindred’s Beginnings>h2What started as a secret soundcloud of Tan turned into a full fledged production house. Kindred blossomed into a living, breathing product that’s looking to bypass the old, sickly traditions of the mainstream music industry. Where there are no boundaries and barriers, communities can happen anytime and everywhere. Wieneke, Tan and the other members of Kindred don’t have time to sugarcoat any of the underlying problems of the industry and what to do with it with the help of the community. >p“It’s always in the back of our heads that we wanted to create a label and also become community-oriented,” Wieneke says. “Lahat ng frustrations namin na naranasan namin sa eksena, we sort of wanted to address that. Like I don’t want to be cheesy and say, ‘Be the change,’ but just try to do it right.”>pWhat jumpstarted all of those ideas isn’t just the group’s undying passion in healthy collaborations and fruitful experiences in songwriting, but more of a matter of sharing the experience with different folks. The Kindred team was able to retreat to a farm in Laguna in 2021. During the interview, the group members unlocked several core memories during that retreat, including a semi-haunted kubo during several songwriting sessions, the tree where both San Juan and Sevalla sprained their feet and the belief that there were engkantos living there; and the house party-manifesting unreleased demos that had a Eureka moment in between.  >p“For me, it’s surreal. I had a hard time making music with people in the past,” Wieneke says, “Nag-click lang talaga kami lahat, and it’s part of it. It’s a journey, learning, and finding common ground in the intersections that allowed us to thrive as a unit. It’s very crazy how far we’ve come together as a unit. And we owe it to that being able to sort of like iron out our connection with each other and that farm was the start of it.”>pSan Juan also mentioned that the farm had separate studios where the boyband had their own space and where their creativity wouldn’t burn out at the same exact spot.  >p“On the first day, we were all aligned, we won’t work on previous stuff that we made before we went there. So the whole agenda was like, we’re all going to make new shit,” he says. “So there were like three stations of makeshift studios namin doon, so one was a kubo, one was an empty kitchen, and the pavilion. We wrote about 10 songs there.”  >p“We wrote about 30 songs, bruh,” Webb injects. The entire interview just began exploding with anecdotes of how some demos were left out of the mix. But as Wieneke mentioned, the standards have a ceiling and the members were all aiming to reach that ceiling.  >p“It was also good for us boyband-wise, pero it’s all different when you guys live in one area,” San Juan explains. “That really solidified and dealt with the personalities. Like that's where we adjusted ourselves with each other and how we worked together. It was nonstop creative energy. The moment we woke up, we made music agad. One of Obi’s verses there, actually he just straight up came from a nap and hopped on the beat agad.” >pSevalla shared that ever since the inception of Kindred, the current trajectory was all according to plan. Or rather, it grew into something they all feel like they never would have dreamed of in the first place.  >p“The label really started to grow exactly when it needed to, and exactly when it should have,” she says. “It was only towards the latter part of our second year that it started to make sense to really bring in of more of that creative aspect and really give the Kindred artists a platform to be themselves fully. And I think the value I would put into the whole group is that they are trying to break all of that music stuff from all of the traditional labels. That also inspired us in how the marketing and how the promotions of the boyband debut came to be. We wanted to do something that’s bigger than that.>p