Loot by Filastine

Outernational bass music nomad Filastine ups the ante with £00T. Fractured post-dubstep beat innovations support delicate string arrangements. Overdriven bass synths battle pentatonic gong patterns. Listen closely and listen loud.

Looting from the coffers of hip-hop, moombahton, dubstep and cumbia, Filastine keeps the bass pressure pumping and drums up front. But any similarity to club music genres ends quickly. While a growing tropical bass movement hypes a pan-global dance party, Filastine blazes a different path. Intricate polyrhythms, muted balkan trumpets, ephemeral soundscapes, and unique vocal contributions push this album off the known map into uncharted musical territory.

Introduction No Step will test your speakers for the album that follows. Gendjer2 and Colony Collapse are the fruit of a tight collaboration with Indonesian indy rapper Nova. She contributes lush 60’s R&B harmonies and megaphone-filtered rhymes. Filastine’s time in Asia also brings a featuring from Japan’s chief rap dadaist ECD. In Lost Report hear him shouting against nuclear contamination over a dirty bass hook and the stuttered clicks of a geiger counter. These onsite collaborations were recorded everywhere from ware- houses to rainforests, then painstakingly mixed over the course of 2011 in a rooftop studio in the muslim quarter of Barcelona, with breaks to participate in the Spanish uprisings of last year.

Throughout the album Filastine leverages rhythmic expertise that he’s gathered far and wide, from the tiny Moroccan village of Jajouka to the coke-fueled parades of Rio de Janeiro. Echoes of Filastine’s old marching band, the Infernal Noise Brigade, propel the drum corp juke of Circulate False Notes and the glitch-crunk of Skirmish. Even Filastine’s years as a taxi driver are audible in the field recordings of radio static, street noises and polyglot collages.

£00T comes with a grip of videos and graphics that riff on concepts from the Arab spring to ecological and financial collapse. With a CD design doubling as utopian money, the album launches alongside a currency for a near-future network of clandestine floating cities.

Grey Filastine is an electronic music composer and multimedia artist working to undermine borders. Spin magazine calls his music “bass music for crumbling urban futures,” and 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, design to express a radically different vision of the possible.

filastine.com