Emerging out of the Seattle-based agit-pop underground in the 1990s, Filastine formed the anarcho-punk dance theater group Tchkung! then the multiculti marching band Infernal Noise Brigade, making the latter a strategic participant in protests at the 2000 IMF Meeting in Prague, the 2004 US Republican Party National Convention in New York, and the G8 Summit in Scotland in 2005. He went solo and nomadic to form an amorphous digital collective under the name Filastine in 2006; while touring Jakarta in 2009 he was introduced to Ruth. She was already active as a videographer and community hacktivist, as well as a singer-songwriter who performed as half of the rap duo Twin Sista.