Click any of the three songs to listen through — its write-up will pop up so you can learn more.
“Visitation” creates an immersive snapshot of pre-colonial village life before a great disturbance from the future breaks through. Ancestral voices, flute and percussion collide with electronics and fractured rhythms, pushing Filipino folk music into new territory. “Visitation” is DATU's exploration of what Filipino music was, is, and could become.
“Temple” is an epic collaboration between DATU, Carl Angelo and Kulintronica, with additional vocals from Lex Junior and Cyrena Fiel. Stars aligned when creating TEMPLE, from Byodo Temple in Hawai‘i, Toronto's Kensington Market studio, to Los Angeles on Temple St. Part of a new wave of Filipino hip-hop, Carl's visceral flow meets DATU's pre-colonial drums, kulintang and electronics in one of EPIK's biggest, most immediate tracks — ancestral sound built for right now.
On “Salidumay,” DATU reimagines a traditional song and dance from the Cordillera region of the Philippines. Featuring Folklorico Filipino Canada, it was recorded live with 14 microphones to create an immersive listening experience, surrounding the listener with voices, kulintang, agongs and percussion before unfolding into an electronic dance party. A love letter to the Filipino folk dance companies that have kept these traditions alive across the diaspora.
Made especially for an immersive experience
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The Making of EPIK
EPIK
EPIK is a story told across ten songs: a journey from nature and visitation through conflict, refuge, awakening, ritual and ultimately community.
DATU calls the world of the album pre-colonial futurism, imagining Filipino ancestral sounds, stories and ways of knowing not as artifacts of the past, but as building blocks for an unknown future. Kulintang, agong, chants and traditional voices collide with electronics, distortion and immersive sound to create something both ancient and speculative.
At its heart, EPIK is about finding your way back to the village, and discovering that no village stands alone.
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.
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.
Now, almost ten years later, DATU returns with their 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.