Manila's crwn Spent Five Years on His Debut Album, Then Built a Label So No One Else Had To

King Puentespina spent part of his album research seeking out a tree. Not sampling it, not sketching it: finding it. He drove out to Baler, Aurora, hunting for a Balete, the gnarled, root-cascading tree known across Filipino folklore as the dwelling place of spirits. "I've always been captivated by the Balete tree, so as part of my album research, I made it a mission to seek one out," he says. He found one at the Millennium Tree, a centuries-old specimen, and decided that's what he wanted Séance to be: something built to outlast whoever made it.

That album took him roughly five years to finish. Puentespina, who makes music as crwn, has been a working name in Manila's electronic scene since 2013. He and singer Jess Connelly released "How I Love", and a run of projects followed: the beat tape Orchid and a collaboration called Labyrinth with August Wahh. What he hadn't done, nearly a decade in, was put out a debut album. Séance finally arrived on 11 May 2024, and it says something about how he'd spent the wait that the record isn't a solo statement at all: ten featured artists, stitched into a single collage of drum and bass, UK garage and house. One of them is Nadine Lustre, one of the most recognizable names in Philippine pop, turning up on a dance record from an independent Manila producer like it was the obvious thing to do.

A label built to slow things down, not speed them up

The gap between Orchid and Séance is also the story of Pool Records, the label Puentespina co-founded with Ada Laud, Alex Coloquio and Mike Parker. It started almost by accident: he'd relocated from Manila to La Union, the country's surf capital, and the creative-direction work he, Parker and Laud did together around Orchid turned into something they wanted to keep doing for other people. "We want to focus on the artist's experience as well, pushing forward artists wellness and growth in all aspects," Laud has said of the label's mission, a deliberately unglamorous way to describe a record label: less about shipping singles on schedule, more about making sure the artist on the other end of the contract isn't burning out to hit it.

You can see what that looks like in practice in Pool's 2021 project with Curtismith, the rapper. Rather than just put his album out, the label and Curtismith built Museo, a multi-sensory exhibition at Pinto Art Museum: seventeen visual artists, Puentespina among them, each responding to a lyric from the record, hung in the Pinto Academy auditorium with noise-cancelling headphones so visitors could hear the line that inspired the painting in front of them. It ran by appointment only, twenty people per slot, from 13 July to 1 August 2021. As record-label marketing goes, it's a strange and genuinely generous idea: spend the budget on seventeen other artists' work instead of another single.

Making the audience feel what the artist felt

That instinct runs through Séance too. Puentespina has talked about wanting listeners to inhabit the collaborator's half of each track rather than just hear his production underneath them: "We want the audience to experience whatever the artist is experiencing. Sort of like closing a circle between you and me." It's why the album reads less like a producer's victory lap than a record of ten separate working relationships: Jess Connelly and August Wahh again, Jolianne, Olympia, Six The Northstar, Jason Dhakal, Loner, Tala and Curtismith, each built out over however long that pairing needed. JP Del Mundo handled mixing and mastering across the record; Ram Alonzo co-produced two tracks.

Pool Records, five years after it started as a handful of friends helping each other finish a beat tape, now sits inside a release co-credited to Sony Music Entertainment, the kind of validation an independent Manila label doesn't get by rushing out product. Séance launched on 11 May with a live show in Makati, "The Gathering," where Puentespina performed the record with every one of its collaborators in the room. Five years for one album is not a pace most labels would defend. For Pool Records, it's the point.

Cover photo: Renzo Navarro, via The New Hue PH.