UPDATE: According to reports, Catar_Sys’ death is being treated as a suicide.
We’re deeply saddened to announce that the revolutionary Zizek family has lost one of its members. On Saturday, while on tour with Villa Diamante through Brazil, one half of the nü-cumbia-ragga duo Fauna unexpectedly passed away. Federico Rodríguez (a.k.a. Catar_Sys) was at São Paulo’s airport when he last updated his Facebook status. They were waiting for a connecting flight to Belo Horizonte for the last show of their tour at the Festival Electronika. They hadn’t slept, according to his traveling partner Villa Diamante, and they were exhausted when they boarded the plane. We don’t know the details, we do know from a press release that he never made it to the plane’s destination and many of the artists at that night’s festival paid tribute to him, dedicating their performances to him.
Here at Remezcla we’ve been huge fans of Fauna since their debut in 2008 and we followed them through their successful performances (Coachella!) across the US. Sending our condolences to his family, friends, and the rest of Zizek Collective in this difficult moment we’d like to say goodbye to Catar_Sys by playing this video of him improvising a cumbia cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” with Tremor’s Redo and Villa Diamante, on the roof of Zizek’s headquarters.