Clouds for breakfast
MANILA, Philippines — Last Aug. 8, at 8 p.m., the duo Breakfast Clouds launched their debut EP, “Treehouse,” with a livestream that seemed calibrated for quarantine. Members Pauline Rana and Ela Rivera sat at opposite ends of one another, their faces obscured from view, quietly working on some crafts as the music played. They weren’t actually together; their two video feeds were shown in split screen, separating them by a slice of shifting color. On the left, Pauline, who seemed to have filmed at nighttime, was kneading clay. On the right, Ela, the sunlight streaming through her window, was crocheting a pattern that read, “What does it mean to be human now?”
It was a scene that tapped into many of our corona-induced longings: the snug feeling of watching two people do simple things, their implied connection across time and space, their homey work stations and comfy clothes. The editing, too, had a sentimental charm. Doodles that mimed the lyrics were scrawled onscreen, and flickering light leaks washed over everything over in a sheen of nostalgia. And then there was the music: gentle and easy.
The three tracks of “Treehouse” are careful and detailed, but they also feel homespun and small, like childhood trinkets. Hazy harmonies float lightly over gleaming arrangements, the lyrics filled with oblique references to old conversations and favorite places. The EP is just 12 minutes long, but each song is liable to change shape, making repeat listens especially rewarding.
It isn’t surprising that “Treehouse” hits like this. It was recorded intermittently, starting in mid-2018. “Kami ni Ela, we’re both really busy people,” Pauline told me in a video conference. Usually, one member would call up the other whenever they wanted to jam, and they’d huddle in Ela’s house, accompanied by their producer Kevin Ingco. They’d work on songs little by little, taking long breaks to attend to personal responsibilities. Wedged between adulthood’s relentless series of demands, each session became a golden chance at escape. When it came time to decide whether or not they wanted to release the EP in the middle of a global crisis, they stuck to the same principle that guided them throughout its creation. “May gulo, pero gusto pa rin naman ng tao ng magagandang bagay,” Pauline said. “Let’s pause — here’s a thing. Hope it helps.”
Both Ela and Pauline agree that the music of Breakfast Clouds is simply a byproduct of their friendship. And it’s palpable in “Treehouse.” The lyrics are like snippets of a conversation between people familiar with one another’s neural pathways, people with their own private signals and jokes.
The first track, Spring Jump, spins with sharp flashes of meaning, like confessional lines excerpted from a screenplay. “The song is very intentional,” Ela told me. “You know when a really, really ‘real’ friend talks to you, and you tell yourself, ‘Oh, I really have to listen. I don’t wanna miss anything here.’ Spring Jump is like that for me.” Pauline, who wrote it, calls it her “attempt at psychogeography,” a way to remind herself of P. Tuazon Boulevard in Cubao. The area is important to the duo. The entirety of “Treehouse” was cut at Ela’s place, which was nearby. Back when they had just formed the band, they’d hang out in the Burger King at Manhattan Parkview. “I don’t know what’s with Cubao,” Ela said. “It feels so familiar, but at the same time, it constantly changes… I feel so safe there.” Pauline, whose thesis examined Cubao as a “transitory juncture,” relishes the feeling of being “camouflaged” in its streets.
“Treehouse” doesn’t put these stories front and center. Breakfast Clouds’ music, said Ela, is more inspired by “feelings we don’t have words for.” But she doesn’t intend for listeners to identify with those feelings either. “The atmosphere we wanna go for is not, ‘Hey, feel this.’ We’ll be like ‘Hey, this is how we feel, these are our memories. So how ‘bout you? What do these songs make you feel?’”
I told them about how “Peaches and Cream,” the second track on the EP, made me feel. With its twinkling synth, it sounds like a music box opening for the first time. It’s also redolent of summer, not in an explosive, poolside pop banger way, but subdued, languid: a summer alone with your daydreams. Written by Ela in 2017, it was the first song they worked on together. The synth parts, they said, require some concentration to play, but whenever they perform the song live, they find it deeply calming.
But while the soft glow of “Treehouse” makes it a great salve for our moment, Ela and Pauline know that the country’s disenfranchised need more concrete support. So they’ve offered 50 percent of the EP’s proceeds, up until a week after its release, to aid families in Nueva Ecija and Quezon through Amihan Women, an organization that advocates for agrarian reform and women’s rights. “Naisip namin, we’re gonna go for a women-oriented organization kasi it covers both children and families in general,” Pauline said.
A reminder of this scrolled across the screen throughout their livestream, the starkest evidence of COVID-19 and its effects. But the pandemic’s imprint was also apparent in the way the whole set-up acted as a simulation of intimacy. Snuggled up in their virtual treehouse, with the last song, Vividly, humming away, it became clear that Breakfast Clouds’ debut came at just the right time, just when we needed a space to gather and remember distant friends and places. Once it came to an end, Ela wrote in the comments section: “we’re all breathing at the same time isn’t that lovely.”
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Purchase "Treehouse" at breakfastclouds.bandcamp.com.
