Filastine returns to Bend Electronic music producer arrives with brand new album in tow By Sigourney B. Nu ñ ez / The Bulletin Last modified: April 06. 2012 2:17PM PST

At the epicenter of sites infected by ecological friction, a sense of doom lingers.

The clash between humans and nature is portrayed in a close and personal slow-motion video by electronic music producer Grey Filastine, who will perform tonight at the Domino Room in Bend as part of a stacked bill of electronic artists, including Heyoka (see “If you go”).

The clip for “Colony Collapse,” the first single from Filastine's third album, “£00T” (which was released Tuesday), was filmed on location of ecological disasters in Indonesia.

Sitting atop a mountain of garbage, Filastine bangs away on metallic junk as soft lyrics escape from the female rapper and singer Nova. A boom box is never too far away.

“It's a very ironic single,” Filastine said in a telephone interview last month. “It's not exactly the most commercial thing, but we spent a lot of time on that video.”

The video received over 50,000 views on YouTube in a week, he said.

“The video was so big and took a lot of effort. We didn't want it to get lost. We wanted to release it apart (from) the album,” he said. “My goal was that people would see it and be affected by this.”

What's the message?

“We are fouling our own nest, and we have declared war on nature,” Filastine said. “Even though we are not aware of that, we are at war with ourselves. I hope it works.”

Filastine said he tries to avoid labels. Though he won't say he's an activist, he has always been an artist with purpose.

“I'm trying to make music that has soul with acoustical elements and instruments,” he said.

While living in Seattle for about a decade, he was the drummer for ¡Tchkung!, a guerilla performance group which blended percussion, violin and acoustic sound to create a rhythmically driven message about liberal perspective on environmental issues.

“My first introduction to politics came from ecological struggles. Logging was a big issue in the mid-'90s. I became passionate and participated in the movement,” Filastine said.

Now, the nomadic musician has taken his projects abroad. Working on his craft from Barcelona to Mexico, he layers gritty, global sounds atop unconventional beats and deep, rugged bass music, then wraps it all in a dissident's aesthetic. It is a distinctly 21st century kind of sound, but still, Filastine is trying to figure out how to stay relevant and prominent in a digital world.

“Pre-Internet meant pre-easy electronic music. It was harder to get music out,” Filastine said. “Now, everything is demanding your attention. You can make super quality music that goes unnoticed. I have to find ways and methods to circumvent my music.”

Making the switch to no longer touring alone, he is sharing the stage with a cellist, which adds much-needed melody to his sound, he said. The tour that will bring him to Bend kicked off at the SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas.

Filastine said he's never been more busy.

“This is really eating every bit of my energy, like three times over, 20 hours a day,” he said.

On stage, Filastine projects sights to accompany sounds from a laptop computer and an amplified shopping cart wired with what he calls electronic gadgets: drum pads and touch screens with different interfaces to control audio and video, just to name a couple.

Each song has a theme, so during performances he curates visuals from his library of videos grabbed from documentary footage.

“It's about storytelling,” he said. “It's a complex performance in less than an hour. I'd rather people hear and see what I do and come to their own analysis.”

As a multimedia performer, Filastine is surrounded by technology.

“My art involves computers. These tools that are so phenomenal will literally eat our lives and we just gotta take a break from that,” he said. “I find it really hard to find that time. What I do is try to spend time away from computers, roads and electricity so that usually involves going into the ocean, mountains and deserts, just to reconnect without technology.”

Toward that end, he's ready to come to Bend.

“I'm thrilled. I love it there,” he said. “The temperament of it suits mine and the nature is phenomenal. I try to spend little time in the city and more time in the wilderness.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7811, snunez@bendbulletin.com