DATU

DATU is a Toronto-based, Filipino Canadian music duo, Alex Punzalan (Lex Junior) and Romeo Candido, exploring what they call pre-colonial futurism: bringing ancestral sound, rhythm and ways of knowing into conversation with electronic music, hip-hop and experimental production. Just releasing their new album EPIK, which is an Immersive Album built for spatial audio from the ground up, recording gongs with multiple mics. Built around kulintang, agong, voice and collaboration, DATU fuses traditional Filipino folk music with contemporary genres like R&B, hip-hop, rock and house, treating tradition not as something fixed, but as a living language for imagining new Filipino futures. Since their 2017 debut album, High Blood, the duo has released a string of EPs and music videos amassing millions of views and streams, earned a Berlin Music Video Award nomination, and performed at TEDx Toronto, NXNE and Summerworks, with music featured across TV, advertising and film internationally. Almost ten years later, DATU's second album, EPIK, a culmination of the High Blood era, their Meditation series, a bunch of single releases, years of sound designing for theatre and film composition, and deep collaboration with community. At this stage, DATU is less about defining a genre than building a world: one rooted in community, memory, movement and possibility. Website: www.datu-epik.com