Grey Filastine
Barcelona
Note: Filastine is still creating music, art and ideas, but has escaped from the commercial music industry. This account is now an archive. Bio below-
Grey Filastine is a multimedia artist dedicated to undermining borders. His music collides electronic beat production with dense layers of voice, concréte sounds, and strings. Pitchfork says it “sounds less like `world’ music and more like music from another world.” Another world is exactly what he aims to create, using sound, video, and dance to express a radically different vision of the possible.
Filastine’s higher education is limited to driving a taxi in the United States, where he also founded the Infernal Noise Brigade marching band to live score the 1999 revolt against the WTO in Seattle. In 2006 DJ/Rupture released Filastine’s premiere album, Burn It!, which relocated him to Barcelona and launched a decade of releases and tours. His latest AV effort, Abandon, is a video series profiling dances of emancipation, filmed in locations from coal mines in Borneo to office cubicles in America.
Filastine is foremost a performing artist, where sound, image, and ideas are embodied. He is constantly on tour, appearing at festivals like Sonar (ES), Sydney Festival (AU), Downtown Cairo Arts (EG), Decibel (US), Foreign Affairs (DE) and Mutek Tokyo (JP). But Filastine’s work sometimes doesn’t fit any stage or category, his off-piste interventions include an official mixtape for The Act of Killing documentary, a Sound Swarm at the Paris Climate Summit, or a concert in the Calais Jungle migrant camp.
“the prototype of globalized urban sound” -Prefix Mag
“the soundtrack to a rising heat humidity index” -Spin
“Deftly collaged cuts melding throbbing bass synths and ricocheting 808s with concréte sounds and live instruments” -The Wire
“a hybrid electronic sound that could be described as worldbeat for the dubstep generation – and the result is a lot better than it sounds” -MTV Iggy
“Filled with both jagged edges and moments of sad sweetness...sure to win fans across multiple scenes”-XLR8R
“visceral, disorienting exotica” -The Stranger
“live stage show couples virtuoso live drumming and electronic grooves with a visual spectacle that holds crowds spellbound” -San Francisco Bay Guardian
“Makes Skrillex sound as conventional as Taylor Swift” -Evansville Courier
“An uncompromising, unfettered alternative soundtrack to Life On Earth” -Discontent
Filastine’s tracks
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