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 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 warehouses 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.

In 2006 DJ Rupture presented Filastines first album, Burn It. 2009’s follow up, Dirty Bomb brought nearly 300 invitations to perform, from Tasmania to Tunisia, with some gigantic tours in the USA supporting artists like Bassnectar. £OOT completes the trilogy and launches another world tour. A new re-tooled live set uses custom software to pull off some deep AV madness and sees Filastine expanding to tour as a duo, joined onstage by vocalist Nova or one of the collaborating cellists from the album. Expect them everywhere.

After a two year hiatus from releases, nomadic bass music producer Filastine is set to drop his third album £OOT this spring. The first warning is this EP, Colony Collapse, an opus of a track, video & concept that comes backed by a grip of beautiful remixes.

For Colony Collapse, Filastine paired up with Nova, indy rapper/singer/poetess from Malang, Indonesia. The duo worked on the track and video an entire year, from an initial session in Barcelona to the final vocal recordings conducted in a Javanese forest. Grinding bass wobbles salvaged from shipwreck of dubstep support delicate metallic gong patterns recorded at the world’s largest collection of gamelan orchestras in Sanur, Bali. Colony Collapse is full of intricate layers and acoustic tricks, listen closely and listen loud.

If the title and the lyrics of Colony Collapse aren’t explicit enough, the video leaves no doubt about the concept. It is filmed at sites of ecological friction, the fault lines of conflict between humanity and (the rest of) nature. Filastine & team entered into industrial disasters, floods, traffic snarls and scaled a mountain of garbage to show you the slow-motion apocalypse, uncomfortably close and personal.

Each remixer took the song to a completely different place, no two sound remotely similar. Beats Antique (US) outdid themselves: adding live banjo, violin and drums to create a lush composition in their inimitable style. Squeaky Lobster (BE) delivers a masterpiece of stuttered avant-garde glitch-hop. Jarring Effects label-mate LʼOuef Raide (FR) transforms the track into a sparse future bass. A dark dubwise ricochet by Capetown’s Fletcher in Dub (SA) closes it out.

Colony Collapse (EP/video) February 29, 2012. Leap!
£00T (full album LP) April 3, 2012.