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Well-travelled Filastine melds beats and politics
By Martin Turenne, August 20, 2009
For a couple of reasons, the recently reopened Rickshaw Theatre seems like the ideal place to host a show by Barcelona's Filastine. First, there's the venue's previous incarnations as a movie house and then as an after-hours spot for '90s-era ravers—a history reflected in Filastine's show, which marries hectic pan-global dance music to projections of documentary footage shot during his international travels.
Then there's the fact that the Rickshaw is located in the Downtown Eastside, a world away from the vulgar excess of the Granville strip. Having performed in warehouse squats all over Europe, at street festivals in Indonesia, and on a barge stationed in the Mississippi River, the Los Angeles–born, Barcelona-based beatmaker says he feels at home in places where most house and techno producers might fear to tread.
“In travelling much of the developing world, you start to realize that the only people that can afford to go to a nightclub are the rich brats and the foreigners,” says the producer, reached on tour in Reno, Nevada. “Those definitely aren't my people.”
Filastine's people tend to be those who, like him, feel pretty strongly about social justice and torrid beats. On this year's Dirty Bomb , released on DJ/rupture's Soot Records, the producer offers a travelogue of his past three years on the road, refracting a dozen or more forms of ethnic street music through his persistently scorching production methods. Recorded in 16 cities with 15 collaborators, the album blows apart the hipster generation's casual interest in developing-world styles. Filastine immersed himself in each country he visited, not just sampling the local genres, but collaborating with musicians to create a riotous version of what the trumpeter Jon Hassell calls “fourth world” music.
“If there's one goal I have in making electronic music, it's making sure that it has some sweat and blood in it,” he says. “I want to make something that can make people dance and bring out emotions, music that has a real human soul inside it.”
Filastine's a political artist, too, mixing snippets of news reports and protest chants into his recordings. A former member of an agit-percussion band called the Infernal Noise Brigade—a fixture in the anticapitalism movement around the time of the tumultuous 1999 WTO conference in Seattle—the producer is not shy about using his music to express his social views, but he's cautious not to release something that sounds like it was made by a pundit, not a musician.
“So much political art is people with good intentions who have a progressive idea they want to transmit and they're like, ”˜I bet I could cram this through a painting or through a song,' ” he explains. “They're not coming from the position of being an artist who's politically informed and trying to incorporate that into their art. Whenever I make something with a political angle, I have to think, ”˜What is this saying? Is it too obvious? Does it insult people's intelligence?' If it can pass that intelligence test, then I put it out. If not, I move on.”
Filastine plays the Rickshaw Theatre on Friday (August 21). 08/20/09 >> go there
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