What is funkrust?

Funkrust Brass Band is a 20-piece post-apocalyptic disco-punk brass band playing all original music with megaphone vocals, heavy tuba bass lines, thundering percussion and searing brass melodies. Their explosive live performances feature full band choreography, signature wasteland/glam uniforms and LED lighting effects. The band mixes post-punk, disco, EDM, metal, and funk with Balkan brass and New Orleans second line sounds, and filters that through the medium of a massive street brass band with a punk rock sensibility.

The band was co-founded in 2014 by brass band scene veteran Phil Andrews and singer-songwriter Ellia Bisker. The real-life couple collaborates on each song, with Andrews composing the music and Bisker contributing lyrics. His past art and musical projects include the Rude Mechanical Orchestra, Apocalypse Five & Dime, Gay Panic and the Miss Rockaway Armada and he currently plays bass with the art-rock outfit Trouble with Kittens. Bisker become known on the NYC singer-songwriter scene with her band Sweet Soubrette, and is currently one-half of the popular goth-folk duo Charming Disaster.

The project was conceived as a brass band from a future dystopia, dedicated to bringing hope to the survivors: in this post-apocalyptic world, the only bands left are those that can play without electricity or sound equipment. The music of the apocalypse isn’t death metal—it’s brass. Each of the songs addresses that audience in a different way--from the examination of loss and despair to the collective catharsis of high energy dance music.

Based in Brooklyn, the band has played a wide variety of venues, festivals, and events throughout NYC and beyond. Notable examples include underground art party series Rubulad and Gemini & Scorpio, immersive events at the McKittrick Hotel (home of the wildly popular Sleep No More), cultural institutions such as the New York Botanical Garden and the Queens Museum, the EDM festival Mysteryland USA in Woodstock, NY, the O+ Festival in Kingston, NY, the annual Sinterklaas celebration in Rhinebeck, NY, the World Maker Faire, opening for World/Inferno Friendship Society at the Mercury Lounge, and HONK brass band festivals in NYC, Providence, RI, and Austin, TX.

Funkrust’s debut album, Dark City, was released in 2017, and an ambitious song and video cycle entitled Bones and Burning was released in late 2019.

REVIEWS

"One of New York’s most explosive live bands. They march in various formations, wear illuminated costumes, climb on anything that looks like it could support them…and write catchy songs that draw from styles as diverse as Serbian dances, New Orleans second-line marches and punk funk."

- New York Music Daily review of Bones and Burning

"The band put on a dazzling auditory and visual display in the video, dressed in post-apocalyptic gear and marching into the wastelands...'Terminus,' the song and video, is bright and upbeat and offers up hope (unity and community) in a world that’s slowly sliding into dystopia."

- The Big Takeover, premiere of “Terminus” music video

“Funkrust Brass Band's Bones and Burning redefines eclectic cool with its eighteen-piece band of shiny brilliance...the band creates a uniquely cinematic, post-apocalyptic vibe worth getting lost in.”

- Independent Clauses review of Bones and Burning

“The apocalypse inches ever closer and trust me, YOU WILL NEED THESE JAMZ WHILE IT ALL BURNZ DOWN.”

- Michael Kammers of MK Groove Orchestra on Bones and Burning

"It’s an upbeat album that is easy to sing along to, but more importantly it’s easy to dance to. The biggest problem the record has for the listener is that it makes it impossible to not want to catch Funkrust live and in person right away."

- rBeatz review of Dark City

"Funkrust Brass Band waste no time opening the album with their signature song, Funkrust. Catchy tuba bassline underpinning its rat-a-tat trombones, cinematically rising trumpets and undulating groove, this mashup of Balkan brass and American funk sounds like an even more epic version of iconic Brooklyn band Slavic Soul Party."

- New York Music Daily on Dark City

"Prior to hitting play limber up your hips, knees and most importantly ankles as Funkrust Brass Band take the listener on a journey that demands much of the lower joints in a roughly twenty five minute, seven track, release of unrelenting strutting dance."

- Emerging Indie Bands preview of Dark City