A local festival spotlighting Filipino culture wraps up this weekend with the winner of NPR Music's Tiny Desk Contest as its headliner.
Sakada To Cypher: Island Gongster Edition will feature traditional and modern music, including performances from House of Gongs.
The headliner, Filipina hip-hop artist Ruby Ibarra, beat out thousands of entries to win the Tiny Desk Contest this year — and performed at the NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., with her band in May.
"Hailing from the Bay Area by way of the Philippines, Ibarra is a rapper, singer and spoken word artist whose entry, 'Bakunawa,' stunned the Contest judges with its passionate delivery, genre-defying sound and multi-generational band," NPR said in an article. "Our judges were floored by Ibarra's entry and agreed that she is a star."
Throughout the summer, Ibarra crisscrossed the country for the Tiny Desk Contest On The Road tour.
Ron Querian, the co-founder of House of Gongs, said, "Filipino artists have taken up other disciplines here, and it seems like they're telling a lot of local stories, not necessarily from that Filipino perspective. So we're hoping, at House of Gongs, that this event will catalyze people to kind of come out of their balut shell."
The event starts at 4 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 25, at Capitol Modern in Honolulu. To get tickets, click here.
