Filastine

The pauses and accelerations in both the live and programmed drums feel like time itself has been sliced open, offering a cross-section of temporality's complex and relative clockwork, with gears spinning at different speeds. -Philip Sherburne - The Wire

Ce n'est pas tous les jours que l'un entend une chanson du terrorisme sur le radio. Pourtant pour la première fois, Filastine Gris a amené qu'il appelle, « les ambiguités de la définition de terrorisme » dans l'oeil public par la musique. Le Mélange de Terrorismo de Chèvre de Judas parfaitement les morceaux ensemble certaines des bouchées solides les plus bizarres dans les paroles pensé-provoquant. « Les Etats-Unis d'Amérique... menace des gens partout, les nations de l'Amérique latine à l'Asie à l'Afrique à l'Europe... au monde islamique, » dit la voix éditée de Bush Jr, avec Marrakech rhaita (les flûtes) dans le fond.

Pourtant pendant que Filastine insiste que cette chanson présente l'ambiguité, le message est clair ; la paix entre les Etats-Unis et le Moyen-orient profitera le reste du monde.
-Nitreux
- XI Magazine

The deployment of sound as a tactic in social dis/organization is as ancient as the arts themselves. Sound is the great alien communicator. It orbits our unconscious desires with transmissions from altered states; it leads to orgiastic bliss & ecstasy just as easily as it fuels hatred & destruction. Hence its inscription in military as well as pagan history. A great reductionist theory might inscribe all of human movement within this thought: the arrangement of human society as the rhythm clash between the soundtrack to the marching band vs. the talking drums of a ritual... So why is it that most musicians exhibit the common trait of being unable to talk about their practice? Is this an inhibited, “bourgeois” attitude smugly adopted by many “musicians” to enhance their Mystic Appeal? Is it that it is not the place of musicians to self-reflect on their ephemeral media? Yet, with the increasing incorporation of sophisticated, complex technologies (laptops, P2P file-sharing, sampling, software), the production of sonic events has been all too easily confused with the calculative operations of an algorithm. Demonstrating math does not a good sonic event make.
Which is to provide somewhat of an intro to this conversation with Grey Filastine. I inadvertently experienced Mr. Filastine at some point in the mid-‘90s at a ¡Tchkung! concert on the West Coast of North America. ¡tchkung! were the fire to the night. Noise-rhythms, AK-47s unloading blank clips over the crowd, pyrotechnics, screaming chants, and a procession beyond the confines of the club to the street, invoking pavement occupations & late-night bonfires... ¡Tchkung! were a no-holds barred invocation of anarchic potential in its immediacy, and provided the inspiration for the transposition of their energy & tactics, for me as well as others, into technoculture.
The second time I met Grey in NYC, at a benefit for Sound Generation, a forthcoming publication on Autonomedia. We were both playing & in the interviewl ine-up, along with respected sound- artists PamelaZ and anarchist collective Ultra-Red. The energy was ripe: Grey popped up for Mutek 2004, and demonstrated the intervention of his Noise-Kart, broadcasting rhythms recorded from his Middle Eastern travels, playing with calls for Jihad to the fascinated übercöolische of Mutek’s digeratti. Grey & I spoke a common language. The in-common signs? The drum. The drum is also the backbone to any military march, which is why any easy division between, say, bourgeois entertainment (as “spectacle”) vs. “real art musik” is going to unstitch its seams, even more so when one considers the deployment of the drum throughout the world’s cultures. To break the rhythm of the 4/4 is not necessarily a radical act: off-sync “avant-garde” rhythm often merely advocates complacency in an audience……….
[editor note: this is a large article as you can read he is just getting warmed up, it's the cover story, see this link: http://www.fusemagazine.org/TOC/TOC28_4.pdf ]
- Fuse Magazine

Filastine is a dexterous, intelligent DJ whose slashing worldbeat/drum 'n' bass sets sound like DJ/rupture after deep immersion in the Sublime Frequencies back catalog or Muslimgauze's Middle Eastern drone science filtered through ragga-jungle and gritty hiphop sensibilities. You need his and partner Maga Bo's Lost & Stolen Goods mix (recorded as Sonar Calibrado). - The Stranger

The sound of Filastine which the synchronizer it could point raw sound and the like of the drum in the world where it reaches to Brazil from noise + conversational + Morocco of beat + town, although being original, somewhere is full in the longing which smell of the earth does. Singer and the wrapper in the world participate, the air of everywhere street corner the vacuum, real like whether quite reverse side of the earth is there of, imagination is shot from the music of Filastine which is packed. In addition Filastine designates that the rhythm is offered to demonstration on the street and the case of protect moves as purpose active. We want verifying the radical activity style with the photograph of the below-mentioned home page. While fumbling the laptop, in the live performance of the highlight which personally hits the drum Filastine which tour it goes round in the world. Hip hop reggae , it can overlook no fan,!
[editor note: run through babelfish for translation, the result is perhaps the best piece of press ever written) - U-Do-Sha

This is grit. This is raw. This is...actually...a bit spooky. Trip hop two-step jungle break-beats infused with varioius ethnic instrumental samples and a stripped down to fundamentals production style round out producer Filastine's debut Burn It one of the more interesting releases to land on our desks in quite a while. He's studied with tabla superstars, played with 'coke-fueld' samba bands in Rio, and absorbed often disturbing knowledge in North Africa. With his debut, we're treated to midi triggers, laptop, percussion, creepy politically twinged samples, and a smorgasbord of varied vocalists throwing down. With CD art that depicts a wartorn zone filled with missile shells and burning tires coming from a guy who founded the 20-piece anarchist marching band Infernal Noise Brigade, this thing is quite a uniquely though evoking listen.
- Kotori Magazine

The dictionary definition of "philistine" reads: "A person who is guided by materialism and is usually disdainful of intellectual or artistic values," and while this description assuredly does not describe experimental, globe-suckling producer Filastine, it relates to many of the questions and much of the content his work brings up.
A longtime Seattle resident, Filastine has been a part of the hammering rhythm section of anticapitalist tribal-rock/performance troupe ¡Tchkung!, conceiver and founding member of radical marching band Infernal Noise Brigade, and, most recently, a sweat-inducing club DJ and composer of wildly diverse and drrty laptop music. In short, he has spent his artistic life heretofore straddling the line between unrelentingly political statement and action, and the lost-in-music euphoria of the broadest possible definition of pop music. His new proper debut, Burn It (on kindred avant spirit DJ /rupture's UK-based Soot Records), steams with juddering hiphop/modern R&B rhythms, South American breaks, North African trance, and a grip of vocal and instrumental contributors from every corner of the world.
Recent years have seen an overwhelming influx of Asian and Middle Eastern textures in pop production, with gargantuan hits like "Get Ur Freak On," "Baby Boy," and "Toxic" threading undulating tablas, screeching Bollywood strings, etc. into their black-lit melodrama. While some of Burn It's tracks mine these veins in a way just as instantly gratifying and club ready, Filastine's appropriations are more legit. A voracious traveler and student of various global musics, he has studied with Indian tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, spent weeks at the feet of the Master Musicians of Jajouka, and dug deep into the ancient-to-the-future music of Brazil. Like many great producers, Filastine is also a great instrumentalist, and his years of rhythmic study lend magnificent depth to Burn It's varied and intricate programming.
The record's long list of singers, MCs, and musicians brings the songs to endlessly surprising and rich places, as well. Filastine layers artists from distant genres and locales with great architectural sense, and while at times the extremity of the juxtapositions borders on hilarious, the music always feels heroically well designed and strong in conception. On "Palmares," disaffected French oration is overlaid with clouds of gypsy-brass ennui, while party-starter "Judas Goat" lets the rhaita, one of the wailing horns of the Master Musicians, loose over beats that wouldn't be out of place propelling an Aaliyah cut. On some songs, Filastine's constructions are reminiscent of the murky drama of Ninja Tuners like Amon Tobin and DJ Food, and throughout the album the lines between live performed contributions and meticulously contextualized samples is slurred and burnt. The most emotional and fully realized pair of songs come about two-thirds in: "Boca de Ouro" alternates dizzy rhymes about dental work with a fuzzily cinematic chorus, and "Autology" is a slow-burning adaptation of an Indonesian song in which the intoxicatingly mournful singing of Jessika Skeletalia Kenney sails over a bed of screeching bowed bass and quicksand-sinking drum patterns.
Overall, Burn It is a stunningly successful integration of varied international musical styles into the polyglot schemes of its maker; way beyond most "electronic world music" in both its conception and execution. Not unlike the Infernal Noise Brigade, Filastine absorbs music from all over the world and bends it (with all due respect) to his own designs. And, like the INB, he veers wildly between pointed polemic discourse and bacchanalian party embrace. Burn It contains several brief collage tracks of media snippets and sound bites that illustrate the artist's antiglobalism and anticapitalist beliefs and agenda more expressly than any of the album's proper songs; and overall the work feels like a thrillingly tense interaction between these ideological factors and the gold-toothed, whip-riding luxury of hiphop culture (which is, of course, also the present dominant global pop culture).
In this way the album has more of a personal stamp and feeling of its creator than a lot of electronic music, as it deals—whether consciously or unconsciously—with these essential imperfections and warring forces in the dude that is Filastine. Ideally, though, the record could be taken as a great statement for the case that party music is the most equalizing and class-unrestrained corner of modern culture—that it is the very lifeblood and right of everyone. - The Stranger

This is easily one of the best records that will be released this year, electronic or otherwise. Before beginning to make music under the name in 2004, Filastine spent years gathering sounds and samples, building beats and studying percussion, and his record is dripping with an intelligent and worldly panache. Burn It stretches its Brazilian, African and hip-hop-influenced beats and breaks across genres, creating a record that could be mistaken for a cross-over effort, except that this is simply Filastine’s method – you’re listening to all these genres at once, mashed together. Filastine is not content to be only an amazing musician; he has been the soundtrack to countless protests around the world, using counter-hegemonic noise to fuel activism. While lost in the sound of a choir of rhaita flutes on ‘Judas Goat’, I realized Burn It’s vigorous beauty; this is a thinking-man’s record, assembled by the thinking-man’s DJ. - some mag, can't remember

On Burn It, Filastine's debut for Rupture's label, one of the multicultural experiments is the dagger-sharp track “Judas Goat.” Worldly field recordings, sound collages and electro burners line a tracklist with concealed explosives that loom in the splitting beats and impending ruin of cuts such as “Splinter Faction Delight,” promising paranoid sleeplessness for all in earshot. - Remix Magazine

With a fiercely anarchist agenda and voracious appetite for exotic global music, Filastine has a reputation for intense—and often illegal—live performances. The solo Seattle musician is notorious as the founder of the Infernal Noise Brigade, a black-clad marching band that has performed in demonstrations across the world, facing off against riot cops, rubber bullets and tear gas while creating cacophonies of tribal percussion. Whether or not you agree with Filastine’s politics, it’s impossible to deny his tireless passion.
Released on DJ Rupture’s Soot Records imprint, Burn It has many of the trademarks that make Rupture’s mixes so appealing. Hip-hop and jungle mix seamlessly with Middle Eastern strings, French and Spanish rapping, dancehall toasting, Hindi singing and countless other global sources. What sets Filastine apart, though, is his mastery of the drum. Having studied under Indian tabla masters and Moroccan percussionists (namely, the Master Musicians of Jajouka), Filastine layers his tracks with a hypnotic variety of both sequenced and live percussion. Murky hip-hop beats melt into rapid tabla workouts and then further transform into intricate patterns, all while politically charged guest vocalists sing, rap and ululate.
With Burn It, Filastine has condensed the populist discontents of multiple continents into a musical tincture that’s simultaneously aggressive and lovely. - Missoula Independant