Music Wednesday: Filastine – “The Salarymen”
“The Salarymen” is the third installment of Filastine’s audio-visual project for “Abandon”. The duo is a synthpop project made up of Grey Filastine (US) as composer/director and Nova Ruth (Indonesia) as vocalist/designer which are based in Barcelona, Spain. Weirdly enough, the combination of these artists from different countries work well and through Filastine, they got to interpret their inner thoughts with audio-visual.
“The Salaryman” punches you right in your face with the huge amount of lo-fi synthesizer that they use. From the press release, “The Salarymen” is a metaphor that captures workers’ never ending cycle. Through the video that they uploaded on Youtube, we kinda get the idea that they want to convey. The video shows an old office room that looks like it was in the early 90s, and the three workers there are rebelling for their own freedom. It turns out that those 3 workers are actually butoh (traditional Japanese dance) dancers that were hired for this video from P.A.N collective and those are Alan Sutherland, DK Pan and Douglas Ridings. Although the dance might give you the creep, it is filled with a lot of symbolic meanings.
“Abandon” as a series is tied in one theme which is dances of liberation from degrading work. The previous two videos for “The Miner” and “The Cleaner” highlight people whose jobs are low class workers who rebel. The concept is well thought and it’s synced well with the music. We definitely could not wait for the fourth and final edition of “Abandon” series called “The Chatarreros” that will be out in December. Amidst their busy schedule to perform all over the world, make sure you catch their show on Indonesian Dance Festival in Jakarta this November 5th 2016. Check out the video for “The Salarymen” below
