Wednesday, October 22 @ 5:00 – 6:15pm
Elvehjem L160
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Grey Filastine is an electronic music composer, percussionist, 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, often combined with video, design, or dance, to express a radically different vision of the possible.
A former taxi driver from the United States, Filastine studied music directly from the masters, playing with carnival batucadas in Brazil, folk musicians in North India, batá drummers in Cuba, and sufibrotherhoods in Morocco. In 1999 he founded the Infernal Noise Brigade marching band, putting these rhythms to use in the streets to disrupt the Seattle WTO meeting and the globalization protests that followed. DJ/Rupture discovered and released Filastine’s premiere electronic album, Burn It! (2006), followed by a decade of critically-acclaimed vinyl and CD releases.
Filastine has shared his live audiovisual performances at festivals such as Sonar (ES), Downtown Cairo Arts (EG), Decibel (JP), Les Vieilles Charrues (FR), Foreign Affairs (DE), Holland Festival (NL), Indonesia Dance Festival (ID), and Mona Foma (AU). His video work has been supported and awarded by the Film Maker Support from the Kindle Foundation (The Miner, 2015), Aide à la création Multimédia Expérimentale from Arcadi (4RRAY, 2014), and the Southeast Asia Environmental Media Prize from the United Nations (Colony Collapse, 2012).
Filastine has composed soundtracks for dance, film and installations, including the Disobedient Objects exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2014), the large-scale theatrical production Manifesta for Tarrega Festival (2015), the duration dance/installation piece Xhe for Esplanade Singapore and Live Works Sydney (2018), the dance and full-dome projection performance Liminality at the SAT Montreal and the Wales Millenium Center (2019), the documentary film Idrissa (2019), and most recently composed the opera Ali (2024) which tells the true story of a migrant’s journey from the horn of Africa to the heart of Europe, and premiered at La Monnaie, Brussels.
Frequently working off the map of the culture industries, Filastine also creates projects that defy category or commercialization: an official mixtape for The Act of Killing documentary (2014), a sound swarm at the Paris Climate Summit (2015), a performance in the Calais Jungle migrant camp (2015). His latest effort is Arka Kinari, a 70-ton sailing ship that transforms into a floating stage, launched in 2019 and currently touring the Indonesian archipelago by wind. Arka Kinari is both message and method, warning remote coastal communities about climate change from a floating theater powered entirely by renewable energy. arkakinari.org