Good news: Ethnofolk music icon Grace Nono has a new album out: Dalit: Ballads on Love, Loss And Finding Heart Again (Tao Music, 2009). As is the case with all of her albums, Dalit is classy, haunting and, with Bob Aves as her main musical collaborator, passion guitar-driven.

Now fully armed with a Master's in Philippine Studies from University of the Philippines, and with a newly-published monumental book, Shared Voice: Chanted and Spoken Narratives from the Philippines (Anvil/ Fundacion Santiago, 2008), Grace is getting ready to level up yet again. After doing some concerts in Singapore, she'll be off to New York University in September to get her Ph.D in ethnomusicology.

SPOT.ph chatted with Grace Nono about her music, art, the academe, love and its laments.

Tell us about your new album.

Dalit is a collection of Visayan songs. Not old, from around the 1940s. Some of them might have been recorded before. They were learned by the singers of that time and they sang these songs in their own way. May nababago. Ganyan naman ang oral tradition, it's dynamic. So if you compare these versions with what came before, there would be a difference. May mga natanggal, may nalimutan, may nadagdag.

For example, one song in the album ("Kamingaw sa Payag") I got from two sources. Then I combined the two versions to create a composite version.

Who did you learn these songs from?

I learned from three people: Ralph Valle, who's our neighbor in Bunawan, Agusan del Sur; Lordina Potenciano, who's from the town of La Paz; and Francisco Awitin, a medicine man-singer in Camiguin Island, which is my mother's island. Lordina is a baylan (indigenous priestess-healer) but also a singer. It's ironic; she's Manobo but she knows all these Visayan songs, kasi nga during the war, I guess this was the second world war, many people from the Visayas migrated to Mindanao, this story coming from the point of view of the people in Agusan. Maraming nagsidatingan from different places and they brought their songs along with them. Natutunan ng mga taga-Agusan. Si Lordina, even before she became a shaman, 'eto na ang mga kinakanta niya. It's ironic that I would learn Visayan songs from a Manobo baylan.

But do you speak Visayan? Of course, I can speak Visayan. I grew up in Agusan and in Agusan, lingua franca is Cebuano-Visayan: there's Ilonggo, Kinira-ya, etc.

But are the songs written in some ancient form of Visayan?
No, they're colloquial, conversational. There's poetry in it. This is really the language of the folk.