Spain
Filastine & Nova make music to undermine borders, combining 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.
Filastine is the handle of Barcelona-based composer and video artist Grey Filastine. Filastine studied percussion with 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. But Nova’s musical roots go deeper than hip-hop, she was raised singing pentecostal spirituals with her priest grandfather, reciting Quran in religious school, and studied Javanese gamelan percussion.
Filastine & Nova are foremost performing artists, and have appeared at music festivals such as Sonar (ES), Les Vieilles Charrues (FR), Fusion (DE), and in cultural spaces like London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, MONA Tasmania, and the Société Des Arts Technologiques in Montreal.
In 2019 the duo founded the Arka Kinari, a cultural platform and live performance atop an ancient steel sailing ship, abandoning conventional venus, the music industry, and touring by airplane, to start living as if fossil capitalism has already ended.
https://filastine.com/