The latest edition of the two-day festival presented a mixed programme of music, arts and culture, and featured Funktion-One sound throughout   

Malasimbo Festival 2019, which was held on 1-2 March, welcomed around 5,000 visitors to Puerto Galera in the Philippines. Its organiser Miro Grgic takes a purist approach to sound, leading him to Funktion-One several years ago.

After eight years at Malasimbo Ampitheater, the festival relocated to the private nature reserve park of White Beach, only 4km from the original site. The new site includes a jungle and a virgin beach, more nature, new terrain stages, and more roaming space.

Grgic is, in fact, more than just the organiser. “It’s a bit of passion project,” he said. “I organise and own the event, whilst booking all the acts, being technical director, systems and sound engineer, lighting director and other things I have to do to tie the event over, since sponsorship is extremely scarce.

“I load the sound system at home, unload at the festival grounds, set it up and operate it for the entire event. After the event I bring it back home, unpack and clean. I’m very hands on and I love my speakers, so I take care of them personally.”

Grgic created a new amphitheatre in the new location, with sound from Funktion-One Resoution 4 3-way speakers and F218 double-18” bass enclosures.

“Funktion-One is great for live music,” highlights Grgic. “We have jazz, soul, funk, blues, electronic and world music, some nice indie pop lately as well. This year we had Robert Glasper, Anomalie, Laneous and Ruby Ibarra headlined.

“The DJ Stage is mostly funk, disco, house, drum and bass – a bit of everything depending on the day. This year, it was headlined by Danny Krivit.”

Discussing his preference for Funktion-One, Grgic says: “It’s an efficient sound system, so I don’t need much power to drive it and I get a much higher output compared to any other speaker I’ve used. Also, I don’t use much signal processing, I keep a lot of things at zero – seldom do I touch EQs or compression.

“I spend more time getting the right positioning and coverage and I don’t really go over 100db. I like the average of 95-97db, this is what I call ear friendly. A lot of people fail to be considerate in this area, but I don’t like to beat up my audience’s ears.”

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