Filastine & Nova are a multimedia duo working to undermine borders. Their music collides electronic beat production with dense layers of voice, concréte sounds, analogue synths and strings. Spin magazine calls it “bass music for crumbling urban futures,” and Pitchfork says “they sound less like `world’ music and more like music from another world.” Another world is exactly what they aim to create, using sound, video, design, and dance to express a radically different vision of the possible.
Filastine is the handle of Barcelona-based composer and video artist Grey Filastine. A former taxi driver from the United States, Filastine studied percussion with the coke-fueled carnival batucadas of Brazil and mystical brotherhoods in Morocco. In 1999 he founded the Infernal Noise Brigade marching band, putting these rhythms to use in a live soundtrack for the Seattle WTO revolt and the globalization protests that followed. DJ/Rupture discovered and released Filastine’s premiere album, Burn It! (2006), launching a decade of critically-acclaimed albums and world tours. One of those tours brought him to Jakarta where he met vocalist Nova Ruth, rhyming in Indonesia’s seminal rap group Twin Sista. Nova’s deep musical roots add much to Filastine’s sound; she was raised singing pentecostal spirituals with her priest grandfather, reciting Quran, and playing Javanese gamelan percussion. Beyond music, Nova’s continues her “day job” building networks among Southeast Asia’s video activists and hackers.
Together they create unique and fearless interventions: an official mixtape for The Act of Killing documentary, a sound swarm at the Paris Climate Summit, a performance in the Calais Jungle migrant camp. Their latest effort, Abandon, is a video series profiling dances of emancipation from work, filmed in locations from coal mines in Borneo to office cubicles in America. The songs of Abandon and a grip of other new tracks will come out this year on the duo’s first full album together, Drapetomania, colliding psychedelic trap, tropical post-folk and a punk ethos into a compelling audio thesis.
Filastine & Nova are foremost performing artists, their live show is where sound, image, and ideas are embodied. They’ve toured the five continents, appearing at festivals such as Sonar (ES), Downtown Cairo Arts (EG), Decibel (US), Les Vieilles Charrues (FR), Foreign Affairs (DE), Mona Foma (AU). For the new Drapetomania performance the duo are working with a guest dancer and cinematic multi-screen visuals to conjure an emergency exit from the anthropocene. Expect to find them anywhere, turning friction into beauty.
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