trē

trē seguritan abalos is a Filipina-American sound artist whose improvisations diverge into soundscapes inflected with flutes, field recordings, and text.

Collaborating frequently across forms and spaces, trē’s interests revolve around unraveling or reimagining place / placelessness, belonging and embodiment.

A child of Filipino immigrants, trē moved to Pittsburgh in 2016 from San Jose, CA, to study flute with Alberto Almarza and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2018 trē traveled on a research scholarship to Argentina to study roles and meanings of música folclórica in nation-building and indigenous communities.

Following undergraduate studies trē became a performer of improvised music, often with flutes — inflected by studying Japanese shakuhachi with devon osamu tipp — sometimes processed through electronics, as well as with field recordings and text through analog sampler.

As a cultural organizer trē often co-facilitates Open Improvisation Lab, a fortnightly improvised music jam session free & open to the public held by the Pittsburgh Sound Preserve. trē also curates & organizes unmade place, a series of improvised sound + text experiments featuring local musicians and poets/writers in DIY creative spaces from The Big Idea Bookstore to Telephone, Abolition Coffee, and Jerry’s Bar & Grille.

Collaborations include a soundtrack for silent film restored by Pittsburgh Sound + Image, live soundscapes for Pittsburgh’s Asian/American artist collective JADED, a residency as improvised duo GLO-TREE with GNM (guitar) playing ambient music for Signal Sauna, and a score written & performed with David Bernabo for Beate Kuhn’s sculpture exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art.

In 2025 trē created a text score at the “Resynthesizing the Traditional” artistic research lab at CTM Festival in Berlin hosted by Stas Shärifullá and Susie Ibarra. Called “a tune you almost remember: text score as poetics / playful research between memory & forgetting, composing & improvisation,” the text score premiered at Radialsystem.

Recordings of trē’s playing include: “A Place I Recognized” (Habitat Sounds), a solo EP of sound collages with flutes and field recordings; “GLO-TREE” (self-released) of ambient improvised music with GNM (guitar) and Herman “Soy Sos” Pearl (sound design, electronics); “Musically Yours: A Tribute to Sam Rivers” (Fleur Records), “Three Waves” (Ongoing Box) with David Bernabo; and “Sounds of Khūrākī: Live Performances” with Aaron Basskin for RealTime Arts’ theatrical portraits of Afghan women. Future releases include a duo record with electronics by Adam Kantz.

In 2023 trē attended Susie Ibarra and Jake Landau’s first Rhythm in Nature Residency at PS21 in Chatham, New York, field recording and premiering Susie Ibarra’s Four Meditations on Impermanence in an improvising orchestra featuring Tashi Dorji and Phyllis Chen.

trē has performed improvised music in spaces from Telephone and The Government Center to Bantha Tea Bar, The Space Upstairs, Seafoam, Fungus Books, The Big Idea Bookstore, Bottom Feeder Books, Collision, Certain Death ii, Brillobox, Bunker Projects, Stage MK, Mixtape, Scoot’s Garage / Pierogi Palace, Poetry Lounge, Club Pittsburgh, Creative Coffee, Bottlerocket, Spirit Lodge, City of Asylum, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, the Miller Institute of Contemporary Art, Sculpture Court and Hall of Sculpture at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Children’s Museum, and the Mattress Factory.