Opening Note

This text began as a commissioned essay for CTM 2026 and tekhne, where I was invited to write about Budots as a sound and scene entangled in questions of access, cheap and improvised technologies, circulation, and the particular conditions of developing far away from the Philippine capital, Manila. The published version had to hold itself within a certain shape and word count. This version is the one that breathes a little more.

What follows is not a replacement for the CTM piece so much as its open notebook: a longer writer’s cut built from field notes, interviews, leftover observations, and behind-the-scenes details that did not fit the compressed editorial form. It includes more of the trip itself, more of the people around the music, more of the contradictions that emerged once I started asking questions in Davao and the wider region. It includes more of what Budots feels like before it becomes argument.

Part of what I learned while working on this was that Budots becomes difficult to write about the moment one tries to flatten it into a clean origin story, a definitive genre description, or a neat political allegory. The people closest to it do not always agree with one another. Some insist it is a feeling, a spirit, something that cannot be owned. Others insist it has rules, a place, a sound, a social home in Davao and Mindanao. Some hear it in neighboring islands before the name existed. Others insist the naming itself changed everything. What became clear to me is that Budots is not one thing to be settled. It is something people continue to hold differently.

This version lets those differences remain more visible. It also lets me include more of the world around the music: the drive to Mabini for the Tagum Mix Club anniversary party, the beach before the crowd arrived, the speaker stacks, the foam machines, the lunch stopovers, the old FL Studio workstations, the stories that emerged only after the recorder was supposed to be off. If the CTM article was the formal essay, this is the part where the notebook stays open on the table.

The Road to Mabini

By the time we left for Mabini, it was already late enough in the day for the sun to feel less like morning and more like pressure. The road north unfolded the way many roads in Mindanao do: stretches of open sky, long runs of green broken by signage, gas stations, roadside eateries, and sudden pockets of traffic that seemed to gather around nothing visible. We were headed to Lapyahan Resort for the anniversary party of Tagum Mix Club, one of the key collectives in the wider Budots ecosystem, and the mood in the vehicle oscillated between practical and casual. It did not feel like anyone was going to a “research site.” It felt like everyone was going to a party they already understood from the inside.

That difference matters. So much writing on scenes like this tends to arrive with an external gaze already switched on, as if every sound system and every dance move is waiting to be translated into cultural significance. The trip to Mabini reminded me early on that Budots, before it becomes theory, is infrastructure held together by people who are hungry, joking, texting, half-tired, carrying things, and trying to arrive on time. Along the way there were stopovers, food, chatter, checking phones, asking where certain people were, tracking who had already arrived and who was still on the road. Nothing about it suggested ceremonial buildup. The day was assembling itself the way many local events do: through movement, messages, delay, and social trust.

When we stopped in Panabo for lunch, the atmosphere remained easy. Plates arrived, we ate, talked, laughed, drifted in and out of smaller conversations. In other musical contexts, especially once a genre has begun circulating internationally, there is often a strange pressure to narrate artists back to themselves, to make them perform coherence for the sake of documentation. That pressure was largely absent here. DJ Love moved through the day without theatrical self-awareness. He was not behaving like someone under a spotlight, even though he, in different ways, has become increasingly visible as Budots has traveled further. There was no sense of a genre being packaged for explanation. There was just the day, and the event waiting at the other end of it.

This was one of the first things I kept noticing during the fieldwork: Budots remains most legible when no one is trying too hard to make it legible. It arrives inside use. It arrives while people are setting up, waiting around, forwarding tracks, asking for files, making jokes about sound, dancing a little in their seats while someone tests a beat through a phone speaker. If there is a theory in it, it comes later.

By the time we got closer to Mabini, the visual field started shifting. Vehicles began appearing with more regularity, many of them loaded with people, food, gear, and the general density of a gathering that was going to exceed simple “nightlife” categorization. One of the mistakes an outsider could make would be to imagine a Budots event only as a rave, a dance party, or an instance of club culture translated into a provincial setting. What became clear as we approached the resort was that the social shape of the event was much wider than that. Families were coming. Friends were coming in clusters. Kids would be there. Older relatives would be there. The day did not divide neatly into audience, staff, performer, and organizer. It was layered differently.

At Lapyahan Resort, the beachfront was already thick with signs of the day to come: stacks of speakers, coils of cable, foam machines waiting to be switched on later, clusters of people moving with the loose coordination of those who already know what needs doing without needing to overstate it. The sea sat just behind everything, almost indifferent. Vans kept arriving. Food was being unloaded and passed around hand to hand: lechon, rice, adobo, spaghetti, dishes that made the event feel immediately less like a spectacularized “music gathering” and more like a social field where music would eventually become the force that organized everyone into one moving body.

What struck me first was not scale but familiarity. Nobody seemed particularly invested in making this look impressive for a future viewer. The event was not being staged for documentary consumption. It was being staged to be lived in, which is a different thing. Kids ran across the sand barefoot, weaving around cables and adults carrying things. People found shade where they could. Some tested microphones. Others checked tracks. Speaker hum folded into conversation. The event already had texture before Budots was even fully present as sound.

This, to me, is where a lot of writing about genres goes wrong. It starts at the drop. It starts at the spectacular moment of recognition. But Budots is not only the moment when the crowd loses it. Budots begins much earlier, in the infrastructural and social conditions that make that collective loss possible: the systems being assembled, the bodies already gathered, the absence of rigid separation between who performs and who belongs, the tacit understanding that if music is going to work, it has to work for many kinds of people at once.

As the afternoon stretched on, DJs began warming the beach gently. The sound moved but did not insist. Tracks teased, circled, tested. Some people danced briefly, then wandered back toward food, water, or conversation. Others stayed at the edge of the action. What was taking shape was not a captive audience waiting to be entertained, but a porous social environment slowly orienting itself toward rhythm. You could feel the event teaching you something before any formal statement had been made: Budots does not need to arrive as proclamation. It can emerge through pacing, through hints, through the gradual thickening of readiness.

That readiness mattered. By the time foam would eventually burst into the air and circles would form around DJ Love, DJ Danz, and DJ Ericnem, the event would already have spent hours becoming the kind of space where Budots could do what it does best: collapse hesitation, loosen bodies, erase the need to look correct, and redistribute permission across the dancefloor. But before it did any of that, there was the road, the lunch stop, the waiting, the setup, the families arriving, the beach not yet transformed. There was the whole social machinery of an event becoming itself.

And maybe that is the first thing the writer’s cut can hold more fully than the formal essay: that Budots, even before it is sound, is an arrangement of people, tools, hunger, heat, travel, patience, familiarity, and expectation. The beat does not appear from nowhere. It lands on a world that has already been made ready to receive it.

At Home with DJ Love

Chronologically, the beach came later.

Before the drive to Mabini, before the foam machines and the speaker stacks facing the sea, the first place I spent extended time with DJ Love was at his home along J. Camus Extension in Davao. If the party at Lapyahan showed Budots at its most collective and expansive, the house revealed the opposite scale: the quiet infrastructure from which much of it has been built.

The street itself does not immediately announce anything unusual. Motorcycles pass intermittently. Neighbors move in and out of houses. Small stores open and close throughout the day. At first glance, it looks like many other residential areas in the city. Yet within Budots circles, the location carries a quiet symbolic weight. For years, this stretch of Camus Extension has been one of the places where Budots videos were filmed, danced, circulated online, and gradually recognized as belonging to something larger than a neighborhood pastime.

Inside the house, the center of gravity is unmistakable: the workstation.

The setup is modest, even by the standards of home studios. A desktop computer sits on a table that doubles as both production space and general household surface. The monitor displays FL Studio, the software that appears again and again in conversations about Budots’ formation. Around the computer are the small signs of a working musician who has learned to make things function under imperfect conditions: cables looping into each other, folders of files, speakers positioned more for availability than acoustic precision.

In more institutional contexts, music studios are often treated as sacred technological environments. Here the feeling is closer to continuity between life and work. Production is not separated from everyday activity; it sits inside it. Conversations happen while tracks are opened, while files are searched for, while older project folders are pulled up to show how something was constructed years earlier.

When I arrived to set up the interview, DJ Love moved easily between explanation and demonstration. At one moment he would be describing how certain tracks came together, and the next he would open a project file to show the rhythm structure directly. There was no sense of guarding technique. The ethos that had shaped the early Budots scene, learning through sharing and imitation, still seemed to guide how he talked about the music.

At one point he pulled up older tracks, letting them play briefly through the speakers before switching to another. What stood out was not only the recognizable sonic features, the fast tempo, the metallic leads, the insistent kicks, but the casual way these elements were discussed. There was no attempt to frame them as revolutionary. They were described more like practical solutions that had proven effective on dancefloors over time.

For DJ Love, Budots rarely appears as something that had to be invented. It is more often framed as something that gradually became visible through use.

He spoke about earlier years when Budots had little prestige outside the spaces where people danced to it. Tracks circulated through burned CDs, USB drives, and direct sharing among DJs. Recognition came slowly, often through repetition rather than through moments of discovery. People heard the sound, danced to it, and began to associate that particular rhythmic logic with certain producers and places.

In the corner of the room, there were other markers of the journey Budots has taken since then. A YouTube certificate recognizing over 100,000 subscribers hung alongside local acknowledgments from the city of Davao. These objects sit quietly in the background, but their presence tells a story about the widening of Budots’ reach over time. What once moved primarily through informal circulation now leaves visible traces in digital and civic recognition.

Still, nothing about the house suggests the aesthetic of celebrity that often accompanies global recognition in music culture. The atmosphere remains grounded in routine. People pass through. Conversations drift between music, local gossip, plans for upcoming events, and memories of older ones. The rhythm of the space is closer to a neighborhood node than a monument to a genre.

During the interview, DJ Love repeatedly returned to an idea that would echo across later conversations with Tagum Mix Club and other participants: Budots should not be treated as a rigid formula. For him, the core of Budots lies less in exact sonic parameters than in a particular spirit of participation.

When he talks about Budots, he often emphasizes how people move to it rather than how it is constructed. The music matters, of course, but the ultimate measure of success remains bodily response. Does the crowd move? Do people laugh? Do they lose the hesitation that normally governs public dancing?

If the answer is yes, then the track has done its work.

This emphasis helps explain why Budots developed such a strong relationship to communal dance environments rather than to formal listening spaces. In the stories that DJ Love and others tell, Budots grew through constant testing: tracks played in discos, barangay events, street gatherings, and improvised parties where the only reliable metric was how people reacted in real time.

Production decisions were therefore rarely abstract. They were practical adjustments shaped by feedback loops between DJs, dancers, and producers. If a particular rhythm consistently moved the crowd, it stayed. If something felt weak, it was modified or abandoned.

Watching DJ Love move through his workstation while explaining these processes made something clearer that would only fully crystallize later at the beach party in Mabini: Budots does not originate solely in the studio. The studio is one node in a wider system that includes dancefloors, streets, sound systems, and the social networks that connect them.

The house on J. Camus Extension is therefore both intimate and infrastructural. It is where tracks are made, but it is also a place where the broader ecosystem of Budots continues to pass through. Conversations that begin here often extend outward to clubs, resorts, barangays, and international stages.

Later, when I would stand on the beach at Lapyahan watching hundreds of people move together once Budots fully landed, it became easier to see the connection between these scales. The chaotic joy of the dancefloor and the quiet focus of the workstation are not separate worlds. They are different moments within the same circulation.

The trip to Mabini would make that circulation visible in motion. But the house was where its logic could first be seen up close: a modest room, a computer running FL Studio, a producer scrolling through folders of tracks that have traveled much further than the space in which they were made.

When Budots Finally Lands

By the time the sun began to sink behind the trees lining the beach, the atmosphere at Lapyahan had shifted almost imperceptibly. The afternoon warmth softened, and with it the loose rhythm of the gathering. What had begun as scattered clusters of people drifting between food, conversation, and occasional dancing was slowly reorganizing itself around the stage.

The music had been playing for hours already, but it remained deliberately restrained. DJs threaded together light selections, tracks that moved bodies gently without claiming full attention. The sound functioned more like a current passing through the beach than a force directing it. People danced briefly and then stepped away. Children chased each other through the foam machines while they were tested. Someone adjusted cables near the speakers. Another group passed around food. Nothing felt urgent.

This pacing mattered. The party was not structured like a typical nightclub escalation where the crowd is pushed steadily toward a climax. Instead, the energy gathered gradually, as if the beach itself were learning how full it wanted to become before committing to the moment.

By late afternoon the crowd had thickened noticeably. Aunties arrived laughing loudly in groups, claiming chairs near the edges of the sand. Kids clustered near the foam machines, anticipating the moment they would erupt into the air. Younger dancers hovered closer to the stage, occasionally testing a few steps in the sand before retreating again. Some people remained observers, leaning against posts or sitting with drinks, their attention drifting in and out of the music.

What emerged was not a singular audience but a layered social field: families, friends, dancers, elders, children, curious onlookers. Each group occupied the space differently, yet none appeared out of place. The beach had become an environment where multiple relationships to the music could coexist without friction.

Budots itself had not fully arrived yet. Instead, fragments of its sonic language surfaced intermittently. A familiar drum pattern would appear inside another genre and then disappear again. A metallic lead sound would flash through a mix before dissolving into something else. These moments felt less like announcements and more like signals, reminders of what the crowd was gradually preparing itself to receive.

The anticipation became visible in small gestures. Dancers stretched their calves or rolled their shoulders. A few people began forming loose circles even before the music demanded it. Someone tested a Budots step briefly, drawing laughter from nearby friends. The beach was rehearsing its own readiness.

When DJ Ericnem, DJ Danz, and DJ Love stepped onto the stage, the shift in attention happened almost instantly, though no one explicitly called for it. People moved closer without instruction. Conversations softened. Bodies began orienting themselves toward the speakers.

Then the foam machines burst.

Thick white bubbles shot upward and spilled outward across the sand, turning the beachfront into a shifting field of moving shapes. Children screamed with excitement and ran directly into the foam. Adults followed, some laughing at the sudden absurdity of it, others raising their hands to wipe foam from their faces as the music pushed forward.

The moment Budots landed fully in the mix, the transformation was immediate.

A circle formed near the front of the stage almost automatically. No one announced it. No one directed it. It simply appeared as dancers stepped into the open space and others instinctively pulled back to make room. The circle widened, tightened, and widened again as new participants entered.

Movements sharpened. Knees bent lower. Arms swung outward. Steps exaggerated themselves into something both ridiculous and precise.

Budots has always carried this strange dual quality: the choreography looks chaotic from a distance, yet participants recognize a shared grammar the moment they begin moving. The dance is not formally taught, yet bodies synchronize quickly through repetition and mutual recognition.

Within minutes the beach became a single moving mass.

People who had been sitting only moments earlier were now standing and laughing as they attempted the steps. Younger dancers executed rapid footwork at the center of the circle while others mirrored simplified versions around them. Foam drifted across shoulders and hair as bodies slipped in and out of the rhythm.

What was striking was the absence of performance anxiety.

In many nightlife contexts, dancing often carries an undercurrent of self-consciousness. People watch themselves through the imagined gaze of others. They worry about looking awkward, about performing the wrong gestures, about breaking the invisible codes of cool.

Here, that concern seemed to dissolve almost immediately.

Budots does something peculiar to the social field of a dancefloor. Instead of rewarding polished movement or individual display, it invites exaggeration, humor, and collective ridiculousness. The more people commit to the awkwardness of the dance, the more the room becomes unified by laughter and shared release.

At one point an older man stepped into the circle and began dancing with exaggerated seriousness, arms swinging dramatically while younger dancers cheered him on. A few moments later, a group of teenagers followed with their own variation, intentionally overdoing the movements until everyone around them was laughing again.

The circle became less about showing skill than about sustaining the energy.

Onstage, DJ Ericnem, DJ Danz, and DJ Love watched the crowd with the quiet attentiveness of people who understand that their role is not to dominate the moment but to guide it. Tracks shifted subtly to maintain momentum. A familiar pattern would return, then stretch, then resolve again.

Laughter broke through the bass repeatedly. Someone slipped in the foam and was immediately pulled back up by nearby dancers. Another circle formed further down the beach as the crowd expanded outward.

For a brief period, the distinctions that usually structure nightlife environments, performer and audience, experienced dancer and beginner, young and old, seemed to blur into something more fluid. The dancefloor did not eliminate difference, but it suspended hierarchy long enough for bodies to share the same rhythmic field.

Watching this unfold made something clearer than any interview explanation could have.

Budots does not merely produce dance. It reorganizes the social geometry of a room.

It redistributes permission.

In that moment on the beach, the urge to dance together outweighed the urge to appear impressive. The ridiculousness of the movements became part of the point. Nobody stood apart trying to look cool. Coolness had been temporarily replaced by participation.

The foam machines continued to spit bubbles into the air as the sun disappeared completely and the beach shifted into night. Lights flickered across the stage. The bass pushed deeper into the sand. The circles kept forming and dissolving as new people stepped in.

Later, when the music slowed and people drifted back toward food, chairs, and conversations, the beach would return to its layered social arrangement.

But for that stretch of time, Budots had done what it does best.

It turned a gathering into a collective body.

How Budots Is Built to Be Heard:

Sound Systems, Mobile Phones, and the Technology of Access

One of the most consistent themes that emerged in conversations with DJ Love and members of Tagum Mix Club was how ordinary the tools behind Budots actually were. When people encounter the music later through festival stages or carefully recorded sets, it can be tempting to imagine a sophisticated production environment somewhere behind it. The reality is closer to improvisation than to studio design.

Early Budots tracks were often made on aging desktop computers running pirated copies of FL Studio, sometimes machines already considered outdated by the standards of the time. Processors struggled to handle large project files. Software would crash unpredictably. Internet access was unreliable or nonexistent, meaning tutorials and online production resources were largely out of reach. If someone discovered a new technique, it usually happened through trial and error rather than through formal instruction.

Knowledge traveled socially rather than digitally.

Producers learned by watching each other, by opening each other’s project files, by asking questions in person. Someone would discover a way to shape a kick drum or structure a rhythmic loop, and that method would spread quickly through the small network of DJs and producers who were experimenting with the sound. Tracks were exchanged not through online platforms but through USB drives, burned CDs, and direct file sharing between friends.

In this sense, Budots developed within a kind of informal peer-to-peer laboratory, where ideas circulated freely because withholding them would have slowed the entire scene. The goal was not to perfect a single track in isolation but to create sounds that would function collectively on dancefloors.

Just as important as the production environment was the playback environment.

Budots was rarely heard through high-end club sound systems during its early years. Instead, it circulated through mobile phones, small speakers, jeepney sound systems, barangay parties, and open-air discos where the acoustic conditions were anything but controlled. Music needed to cut through ambient noise, cheap speakers, and outdoor spaces where subtlety could easily disappear.

This is where the famous Budots tempo, often hovering around 140 BPM, begins to make practical sense.

Members of Tagum Mix Club repeatedly referenced what they jokingly described as palakasan sa mobile, an informal competition over whose music sounded loudest, fastest, and most exciting when played through phone speakers or small portable sound systems. Tracks that moved quickly, emphasized heavy kicks, and repeated rhythmic patterns aggressively tended to survive these conditions better than slower, more intricate arrangements.

What might sound excessive or exaggerated in a perfectly tuned club environment becomes functional engineering when the goal is to reach listeners through tiny speakers or outdoor sound systems competing with environmental noise.

Budots therefore developed as a kind of acoustic survival strategy.

The bass had to be strong enough to register even through weak equipment. The rhythmic structure had to be repetitive enough that listeners could lock into the groove even if the audio fidelity was imperfect. The melodies had to be sharp and recognizable, cutting through the mix with metallic or synthetic timbres that would remain audible in crowded environments.

These aesthetic decisions were not simply stylistic preferences. They were solutions to material conditions.

Another layer of this infrastructure appeared in how Budots circulated physically. Before streaming platforms became dominant, tracks often moved through informal distribution networks that combined music sharing with small-scale entrepreneurship. Producers would assemble bundles of tracks, sometimes fifteen or more on a single CD, and sell them locally or ship them to buyers through courier services like LBC.

Each CD contained potential exclusives that DJs might use to differentiate themselves from competitors. At the same time, copying was inevitable. Once a track entered circulation, it would quickly appear on other devices, other CDs, other sound systems. Rather than attempting to control this spread completely, many producers treated it as part of the scene’s life cycle. The more people played the music, the more visible the sound became.

These practices reinforced a culture where openness was not ideological but practical. Teaching someone how to produce Budots or sharing a track file did not threaten the scene; it expanded it. The boundaries between producer, DJ, and dancer remained porous because the ecosystem required multiple roles to sustain itself.

This relationship between production and playback also explains why Budots often behaves differently in more formal nightlife settings.

Clubs designed for electronic music typically assume a different technological baseline: calibrated speakers, controlled acoustics, and audiences accustomed to listening carefully to subtle variations in sound design. Budots was not originally optimized for those environments. It was optimized for spaces where music needed to be immediately legible and physically compelling, even when heard through imperfect systems.

When Budots later entered international clubs and festivals, it carried with it the imprint of these earlier conditions. What some listeners initially interpreted as roughness or excess was in fact evidence of a sound designed to travel through environments where clarity could never be taken for granted.

This is why discussions of Budots that focus exclusively on genre classification often miss something essential.

Budots is not only a style of electronic music. It is also the product of a particular technological ecology: cheap computers, pirated software, portable speakers, street-level distribution, and the collective improvisation of people working with whatever tools were available.

Access shaped the sound.

The limitations of infrastructure became aesthetic decisions. The absence of institutional support forced producers and DJs to invent their own networks for learning, distribution, and performance. What emerged from these conditions was not merely a genre but a community technology, a system of making and sharing music that allowed Budots to survive long before anyone outside the region recognized it.

Seen from this angle, the heavy bass and relentless tempo that define Budots are not exaggerations. They are traces of the environments that first demanded them.

Budots sounds the way it does because it was built to be heard by many people, under imperfect conditions, without permission.

What Manila Couldn’t Hear

Taste, Class, and the Early Stigma of Budots

For much of its early life, Budots existed almost entirely outside the attention of Manila’s music industry and nightlife circuits. This was not because the music was hidden. On the contrary, Budots circulated widely across parts of Mindanao, appearing in street parties, barangay celebrations, mobile phone speakers, and improvised dance gatherings. But within the cultural imagination of the Philippine capital, the sound was often dismissed long before it was properly heard.

The stigma was immediate and persistent.

In interviews, several producers and DJs recalled how Budots was frequently described with words like baduy, a Tagalog term that roughly translates to something unfashionable, tacky, or embarrassingly unsophisticated. The criticism rarely focused on specific musical elements. Instead, it operated as a shorthand judgment about taste.

To call something baduy is not simply to critique its aesthetic quality; it is also to signal a distance from the people associated with it.

Budots emerged from environments that Manila’s mainstream cultural institutions rarely engaged with seriously. Many of the producers experimenting with the sound were working with minimal equipment and without formal training. The music circulated through community networks rather than record labels or curated platforms. Dance movements associated with Budots were exaggerated, playful, and deliberately unpolished, a style that contrasted sharply with the more restrained forms of performance typically valued in urban club culture.

These differences made Budots easy to caricature.

Clips of dancers performing the signature movements spread quickly online, often framed as comedic spectacle rather than as expressions of a living dance culture. The music’s high tempo and repetitive structures were sometimes interpreted as evidence of technical simplicity rather than as responses to the acoustic environments in which the tracks were meant to function.

From the perspective of Manila’s club ecosystem, shaped by imported house, techno, and EDM scenes, Budots appeared difficult to classify. It did not resemble the global electronic music styles that dominated major venues. Nor did it align neatly with established categories of Filipino pop.

In practice, this meant the sound was often excluded from spaces where it might have been heard more seriously.

The divide was not only geographic but cultural.

Mindanao, where Budots took shape, has long occupied an ambivalent position within the Philippine national imagination. Despite its immense cultural diversity and historical importance, it is frequently treated by the capital as peripheral or distant. Musical forms emerging from the region often struggle to receive the same institutional recognition granted to sounds produced in Manila.

Budots therefore carried more than just a sonic difference; it carried a regional identity that many listeners in the capital did not immediately understand.

Yet while Budots was dismissed in some circles, the communities where it originated continued to develop the sound with remarkable persistence. Producers refined rhythms. DJs exchanged tracks. Dancers elaborated the choreography through endless variations. The music’s ecosystem expanded not because it was validated by institutions, but because it worked socially.

It made people move.

In many ways, the very qualities that critics labeled as excessive, the fast tempo, the exaggerated dance gestures, the bold synth lines, were precisely the elements that made Budots effective within the environments where it circulated. What appeared chaotic from a distance revealed its own logic when experienced inside the dancefloor.

This gap between perception and practice remained wide for years.

Then something unexpected began to happen.

As Budots slowly reached audiences outside the Philippines through online circulation, DJ sets, and festival appearances, international listeners encountered the sound without the same cultural baggage that shaped local reactions. Instead of dismissing the music as unfashionable, many heard it as a striking example of grassroots electronic experimentation.

The same characteristics that once provoked ridicule, the relentless rhythm, the surreal vocal samples, the playful choreography, now appeared innovative and distinctive.

This shift produced a strange reversal.

Within the Philippines, Budots had often been treated as a novelty or an embarrassment. Abroad, it began to attract curiosity and admiration from DJs, researchers, and festival programmers interested in electronic music scenes developing outside the usual centers of production.

For some of the artists involved, the change in perception was both gratifying and confusing.

Recognition from international platforms opened new opportunities for travel, performance, and collaboration. At the same time, it also highlighted the uneven pathways through which cultural legitimacy often circulates. Sounds that struggle for acceptance at home sometimes gain validation only after they are reframed through global networks.

Budots was not the first genre to experience this pattern.

Across many musical traditions, forms that originate in marginalized communities frequently encounter skepticism or ridicule before later being embraced as innovative once they reach broader audiences. The transformation rarely happens because the music itself changes dramatically. Instead, the context surrounding it shifts.

What Manila once struggled to hear was not only the sound of Budots, but the social conditions that produced it, the technological improvisations, the communal dance practices, and the regional networks that sustained the genre long before it attracted outside attention.

Understanding Budots requires listening beyond the surface of the tracks themselves.

It requires recognizing the communities that built the sound and the cultural dynamics that shaped how it was received. The laughter and dismissal that once accompanied Budots were not simply reactions to unusual music; they were reflections of deeper hierarchies about taste, geography, and legitimacy.

Today, as Budots continues to travel into new contexts and new audiences, those hierarchies are beginning to shift.

But traces of them still linger in the story of how the sound was first heard, or, for many listeners in the capital, how it was not heard at all.

When Budots Travels

Carriers, Gateways, and the Politics of Circulation

For most of its existence, Budots moved primarily through local networks, producers sharing tracks directly, DJs exchanging files, dancers spreading choreography from one gathering to another. Its circulation depended less on formal distribution channels than on the simple fact that people kept playing it.

The music traveled because it worked.

But eventually Budots began to move beyond the environments that had originally sustained it. Clips circulated online. DJs outside the Philippines encountered the sound through YouTube videos, mixes, and informal file exchanges. What had once been a regional dance phenomenon gradually entered global electronic music conversations.

This shift did not happen through a single moment of discovery. Instead, it emerged through a series of small acts of attention, DJs playing a track in a set, researchers writing about the scene, curators introducing the music to audiences unfamiliar with its history.

In many of these cases, the people facilitating the movement of Budots were not its originators.

They were what might be described as carriers.

A carrier is someone who helps move a sound across contexts. They introduce it to new audiences, program it in festivals, play it in DJ sets, or build platforms where it can be heard beyond its place of origin. Their role is neither purely passive nor purely creative. Instead, it sits somewhere between advocacy, translation, and mediation.

Carriers make circulation possible.

But the act of carrying a sound also introduces a set of questions that are difficult to resolve neatly. Who has the right to represent a genre outside the community that created it? What responsibilities accompany that role? And how can a sound travel without losing the social context that gave it meaning in the first place?

These questions appeared repeatedly in conversations with DJs and organizers outside the Philippines who have chosen to platform Budots in their own work.

For many of them, the initial encounter with the genre was striking precisely because it felt so different from the electronic music they were used to hearing. The rhythms were faster. The melodic structures were more playful. The choreography associated with the music carried a sense of humor and exaggeration that contrasted sharply with the controlled aesthetics often present in European club spaces.

Budots did not arrive quietly.

Yet the same qualities that made the sound exciting also made its presentation complicated. Playing Budots in a European club, for example, inevitably raises questions about translation. The music carries references, linguistic, cultural, and social, that may not be immediately legible to audiences encountering it for the first time.

A dancer in Davao might recognize the gestures embedded in the choreography instinctively. A listener in Berlin or London might experience the same movements simply as novelty.

This gap between contexts can produce both opportunity and risk.

On one hand, global circulation allows the music to reach listeners who might otherwise never encounter it. Artists gain new platforms. The sound enters conversations that extend far beyond the environments where it first emerged.

On the other hand, circulation can easily detach a genre from the communities that created it. Once a sound begins moving through international networks, it may be reframed primarily as an aesthetic object rather than as the product of specific histories and social conditions.

The challenge for carriers, then, is not merely to play the music but to carry its context along with it.

In practice, this responsibility can take many forms. Some DJs actively foreground the originators of the genre in their sets, ensuring that audiences understand where the sound comes from. Others collaborate directly with artists from the Philippines, creating opportunities for performances, exchanges, and joint projects. Still others focus on documentation, writing, and archival work that helps situate the music within a broader cultural narrative.

These gestures do not eliminate the tensions inherent in cultural circulation, but they acknowledge them.

At the same time, Budots itself complicates the idea that a genre can ever remain fully contained within a single geographic or cultural boundary. Even within the Philippines, the sound has always been shaped by movement, between cities, between producers, between different communities experimenting with its rhythms.

As DJ Love suggested in conversation, the essence of Budots may not reside exclusively in its formal characteristics.

It may also exist in something less tangible, a certain spirit of play, exaggeration, and collective release that can surface in unexpected places. When that spirit appears inside another genre, the result may no longer be Budots in a strict sonic sense, yet it still carries traces of the original impulse.

In this way, Budots challenges the conventional logic of genre ownership.

Some participants in the scene emphasize that Budots belongs specifically to Mindanao, and particularly to the communities in Davao and surrounding areas where the sound was shaped and named. Others suggest that once a music begins circulating widely, it inevitably becomes part of a larger ecosystem of interpretation and transformation.

Both perspectives coexist.

The tension between them reflects a broader reality about how cultural forms travel. No genre remains entirely fixed once it begins moving across borders. Sounds mutate. Contexts shift. New participants enter the conversation.

The question is not whether Budots will change as it travels.

The question is how those changes will be negotiated, and who will remain visible within the story of its movement.

For the DJs, organizers, and researchers now helping introduce Budots to audiences around the world, the task is less about claiming authority over the sound than about maintaining a careful relationship to its origins.

To carry Budots responsibly means recognizing that the music already has a history, one built through countless nights of dancing, experimentation, and community life long before it appeared on international stages.

The work of carriers is therefore not to define Budots for others.

It is to create pathways where the sound, and the people behind it, can continue speaking for themselves.

The Spirit That Escapes the Genre

Throughout the conversations that shaped this research, with DJs, producers, organizers, and dancers, a recurring idea surfaced again and again: Budots might be a genre, but it is also something more difficult to define.

On the surface, Budots appears easy to describe. It is fast, often hovering around 140 BPM. It is rhythmically insistent. It relies on sharp electronic melodies and repetitive drum patterns that cut clearly through portable speakers and open-air sound systems. The dance that accompanies it exaggerates movement, bent knees, swinging arms, playful gestures that look chaotic but follow an internal logic shared by those who recognize it.

These formal markers make Budots legible as a genre.

Yet many of the people closest to the scene speak about it in ways that move beyond sonic definition. During interviews, several artists suggested that what truly defines Budots is not only its sound but its energy, a certain attitude toward dancing, participation, and collective release.

In this sense, Budots behaves less like a fixed musical category and more like a method of making a room move.

The dancefloor scenes in Mabini offered one glimpse of this phenomenon. When Budots finally entered the mix, the transformation of the crowd was immediate. Circles formed without instruction. People stepped forward to dance who might otherwise have remained observers. Laughter spread as bodies exaggerated movements in playful ways. The choreography was not formally taught, yet it was recognized instinctively by those who joined in.

Participation replaced performance.

This quality makes Budots unusually resilient as it travels. While the sonic markers of the genre can be reproduced relatively easily, a tempo, a drum pattern, a certain style of synthesizer, the deeper social dynamics embedded in the music are harder to replicate without understanding the environments where the sound originally emerged.

Budots was not designed primarily for polished stages or carefully curated club environments. It developed in spaces where music functioned as a shared social infrastructure: barangay parties, open-air discos, improvised sound systems, gatherings where multiple generations could occupy the same dancefloor.

Within those contexts, dancing did not require expertise. It required willingness.

The choreography invited exaggeration rather than precision. Mistakes became part of the humor of the dance rather than interruptions of it. What mattered most was the collective rhythm of bodies moving together rather than the technical perfection of individual performers.

This ethos is part of what some artists refer to when they speak about the “spirit” of Budots.

During interviews, DJ Love reflected on how fragments of this spirit sometimes appear in unexpected places. A track might not technically belong to the genre, yet it carries a similar feeling, a playful rhythm, a sense of movement that encourages dancers to exaggerate their gestures rather than contain them.

When this happens, the music may no longer be Budots in the strict sense.

But something of Budots has traveled with it.

This observation complicates the usual way genres are discussed. In many music histories, genres are treated as stable categories defined by identifiable sonic features. Budots suggests a different possibility. A genre can function simultaneously as a sound and as a social practice, a set of gestures that organize how people gather, dance, and relate to each other on the floor.

If Budots has begun to circulate internationally, it is not only because the tracks themselves are distinctive. It is also because the social dynamics embedded in the music resonate with listeners encountering it in other contexts.

The exaggerated dance gestures, the humor of the choreography, and the collective energy of the rhythm all offer a reminder that electronic music can be something other than cool detachment. It can also be playful, messy, and openly communal.

This does not mean that Budots loses its roots as it travels.

Members of Tagum Mix Club were clear in emphasizing that the genre belongs to the communities of Mindanao, particularly the environments in Davao where the sound took shape and where the name Budots was first used to describe this specific style of music. The term itself existed earlier in other contexts, but its association with the genre emerged locally.

Recognizing this history matters.

At the same time, the story of Budots demonstrates how musical forms rarely remain confined to a single place once they begin to circulate. As the sound travels through DJs, festivals, and online platforms, it inevitably encounters new interpretations.

Some of these interpretations may reproduce the genre’s original structures closely. Others may transform it in unexpected directions.

What persists across these changes is not always the exact form of the music, but the impulse behind it, the invitation to move, to exaggerate, to turn a room of strangers into a temporary collective body.

Perhaps this is why Budots has proven difficult to categorize neatly.

It is not simply a regional curiosity, nor is it easily absorbed into the stylistic taxonomies of global electronic music. Instead, Budots occupies an in-between space: deeply rooted in specific communities while also capable of generating new meanings as it travels.

Seen this way, Budots becomes more than a genre.

It becomes a reminder that music scenes often emerge not from institutional support or technological abundance, but from the creativity of people working with limited resources, improvising their own infrastructures for making sound and movement possible.

The cheap computers, pirated software, portable speakers, and informal distribution networks that supported Budots were not merely technical details. They were part of the social environment that allowed the genre to develop.

And perhaps that environment, more than any particular rhythm or melody, is the real source of Budots’ enduring vitality.

Because even as the sound changes, even as it enters new rooms and new audiences, the spirit that first animated those gatherings continues to surface wherever people choose to move together.

Budots, in this sense, is not only a genre that can travel.

It is a way of making the dancefloor belong to everyone who steps into it.

This one emerged.

What you’re hearing here is the original uncut 47-minute version of a piece that was later abridged and shortened as a companion to XUE’s Butoh performance at the Asia Butoh Gathering 2026 in Manila, organized by Kapwa Movement, its founder Sasa Cabalquinto, and Japan Foundation Manila.

Before it became performance, before it was shaped for stage, it existed like this: drifting, accumulating, unresolved.

Process

The music was composed alongside the text “Apophenia Orange: Resting Sawah”, written collaboratively between myself and XUE.

We passed music files, recordings, field recordings, fragments of writing, and full passages back and forth, again and again, responding to each other in an intuitive loop until this work took shape. There was no strict outline, no predetermined structure. Just accumulation, reaction, and a shared sensing of where things wanted to go.

The piece wasn’t scored in a traditional sense. It wasn’t designed to resolve. It was assembled in motion, mirroring the density of the text, its contradictions, its moments of stillness and overwhelm.

What remains here is the raw form of that exchange.

Themes

At its core, the work circles around a few recurring tensions:

• the desire to believe, and the inability to fully do so

• the collapse between the sacred and the decaying

• inherited memory, grief, and the body as a site of both

• Southeast Asian landscapes as lived, not aestheticized

• ritual as both devotion and performance

• the self dissolving into environment, crowd, and system

Temples sit beside nightlife. Offerings beside trash. Prayer echoes into subwoofers. Rivers carry both flowers and plastic downstream.

Nothing is pure. Everything coexists.

Photos by:

Junko Bartolo

Kapwa Movement

Asia Butoh Gathering

On Meaning

The title references apophenia, the tendency to find meaning or patterns where there may be none.

In many ways, this work sits inside that impulse.

To pray even when unsure.
To repeat gestures until they feel true.
To construct belief out of fragments.

Not to resolve these contradictions, but to stay with them.

The Uncut Version

The version presented here is intentionally unedited in its original form.

It drifts. It lingers. It accumulates.

Later iterations would compress and reshape it for performance. But this version holds the full length of the process, the excess, the gaps, the slow transitions, the unresolved weight.

Included Text

The original written piece (see below), “Apophenia Orange: Resting Sawah,” is included as a PDF with the download.

It exists not as explanation, but as a parallel body, another layer of the same terrain.

Credits

Composition: obese.dogma777
Text: XUE & obese.dogma777
Performance: XUE
Mastering: obese.dogma777

i can’t make beats
like i used to

still i tell myself
maybe i’m better
than i used to be

not tied to any self long enough
to call it mine

grown in some ways
talentless in others

it feels like no one remembers me
or worse
i’ve gone so far out of reach
no one notices i’m gone

and no one notices
how badly
i want to die

six minutes in
and still nothing said

everybody hates me
or maybe they just want
a clean shot
at whatever in me reflects them back

overhead projections

people use me
like a tool
like a surface
like a room with the lights left on

remember me?

i was passionate about friendship
i was passionate

i was

you don’t notice the fracture at first
just small distortions in the audio
tiny latency in the friendship
a skipped frame in the conversation
nothing you can point to
just signal noise
just interference
just vibes

then suddenly the narrative starts running ahead of you
faster than truth can walk
faster than memory can load
faster than context can buffer

you wake up one day and realize someone is already telling a story about you
a story you never got to read
a story you never got to speak in
a story where you are already cast

villain villain villain

and it loops
and it loops
and it loops

what you’re seeing isn’t strategy, it’s panic
panic wearing the costume of conviction
panic disguised as righteousness
panic typing long paragraphs at 3am
panic refreshing who still believes them

because the scariest thing for someone who survives on illusion
is being seen in daylight
plain
unfiltered
unmythologized

so they scramble
they rewrite history in real time
they reverse victim and witness
they call honesty manipulation
they call boundaries violence
they call silence proof
they call proof silence

and suddenly the world feels glitchy
friends speaking in half-truths
rooms feeling colder than they should
familiar places loading wrong textures
like walking through Binondo at night when the streetlights flicker
like a club track warping off-tempo
like Manila humidity before a storm

you realize the kindness wasn’t kindness
just credit
just leverage
just positioning
just future ammunition

you realize the warmth had conditions
terms and conditions
terms and conditions
terms and conditions

and when the mask slips
it doesn’t slip quietly
it crashes
loud
desperate
ugly

smear campaigns don’t look like evil in movies
they look like confusion
they look like screenshots out of context
they look like anonymous posts pretending to be justice
they look like people saying “i don’t know what to believe”
they look like noise noise noise noise noise

but truth has a strange gravity
it doesn’t chase
it doesn’t perform
it just sits there
heavy
unchanging
waiting

and eventually the distortion collapses under its own weight

because the real horror for the narcissist
is not being exposed publicly
it’s being seen privately
by someone who once loved them
and now sees clearly

sees the pattern
sees the repetition
sees the hunger
sees the emptiness underneath

and once you see it
you can’t unsee it
you can’t unknow it
you can’t return to the earlier version of the story

signal received
mask removed
connection lost

and the city keeps moving
jeepneys still running
clubs still humming
friends still laughing in our Discord Server at 4 am
life buffering forward without them

because the truth doesn’t need to shout
it just keeps existing
steady
unbroken
alive

Dear you,

I know you’re trying to be generous right now.
I know you’re choosing softness because you think it might keep things intact a little longer. You’re telling yourself that this is what maturity looks like, giving people space, believing their language, trusting that care doesn’t always arrive in familiar shapes.

I want you to know something, gently, without urgency:
You are not wrong.

That unease you keep explaining away isn’t insecurity. It isn’t projection. It isn’t your shadow misbehaving. It’s information. You’re picking up on something real, even if you don’t have the words or the permission, to name it yet.

You’re going to hear phrases that sound elevated. Clean. Almost ceremonial. You’ll be told this is about growth, clarity, becoming. You’ll want to believe it because believing feels kinder than suspicion. You’ll tell yourself that love sometimes requires stepping aside.

And maybe it does.
But love doesn’t require erasing your perception.

I wish I could sit beside you and tell you this without interrupting the choice you’re making: you’re acting in good faith. That matters. Even when it doesn’t protect you.

Time will pass. Not dramatically. Just enough for patterns to finish revealing themselves. What feels rushed now will later feel pre-decided. What feels confusing will later feel strangely linear. You won’t feel victorious when it clicks; you’ll feel sad. And angry. Mostly because you wanted the story to be true.

You were never foolish for that.

What I’m proud of, what I hope you’ll one day be proud of too, is that you didn’t abandon yourself to stay loved. You listened. You stayed present. You told the truth as best you could, even when it made you feel exposed.

You don’t need to rehearse what you should have said.
You don’t need to tighten yourself into something sharper.

This experience will not hollow you out.
It will tune you.

One day, you’ll stop asking whether you were right.
Not because you forgot, but because you no longer need the proof.

You’ll be on your own side.
Quietly. Finally.

And that will be enough.

With love,
You

In 2022, I made what felt like a clean and necessary break. I pulled all my projects off Spotify and closed my account. That choice came from a mix of anger, exhaustion, and a deep discomfort with the direction the company was taking. There were the military tech investments, the unsettling data practices, the payouts that felt like an insult, and the slow flattening of music culture into something smooth and flavorless. None of it sat right with me, and I had been saying so for years.

Leaving was not hard. Staying away was.

After months of explaining myself, dealing with strange reactions, and trying to operate in an industry that orbits the green app, I found myself crawling back. It bothered me, but I did not return because my stance softened. I returned because I got tired of fighting alone. Spotify was so embedded in my work that avoiding it began to feel like a self inflicted wound. I reopened my account for survival, not belief.

My distrust did not start in 2022. By 2020, I had already seen enough. The support I received on Bandcamp and Currents.fm outweighed what I had earned on Spotify over five whole years. It became very clear that the platforms people treated as fringe or niche were actually the ones sustaining artists. I kept trying to remind people that Spotify was not the only way to exist. I wanted Filipino musicians to stop tying their self worth to monthly listener graphs.

I even made a parody Spotify Wrapped. It was funny on the surface, but the numbers behind the joke were ridiculous. One year on community platforms beat five years on Spotify. That parody was my quiet way of saying that the system people worshiped did not make sense.

In 2022, I finally quit for real. I pressed delete and took everything down. It gave me a sense of relief, almost like exhaling after holding my breath too long.

But I was early, and being early in a protest often feels like standing alone in a street no one walks through. Everything around me continued as usual. Work demands piled up. The pressure grew. I returned.

Now, after everything the platform has become in the last few years, I am leaving again. This time the reasons feel sharper and heavier, and I cannot ignore them.

Why I Am Boycotting Spotify Again

Coming back never felt comfortable. It always felt like a quiet compromise. The recent changes have pushed things into territory I refuse to be part of.

1. The CEO’s war tech investments cross a line I cannot accept

The head of Spotify puts massive funding into AI-based weapons and battlefield systems. Every subscription touches that world. I do not want anything I do to be tied to that kind of machinery.

2. Spotify is now using machine-generated music to replace real artists

Playlists are filled with synthetic tracks. Some of the artist names are not real people. Music is being engineered to be consumed without attention. None of this builds culture. It just fills time.

3. The new payout rules punish small artists on purpose

If you do not hit a minimum number of streams each year, you get zero. That hurts independent musicians, local scenes, experimental makers, and anyone who is not on the pop conveyor belt. The money flows upward.

4. Spotify has taken over taste itself

It decides the pace of releases, the length of songs, and the shape of listening habits. It hides anything that does not feed the algorithm. Discovery is not discovery anymore. It is curation by a machine designed for retention, not depth.

5. Staying on the platform made me feel disconnected from my own values

Everything I care about in my work comes from community, experimentation, queerness, local culture, and resisting extractive systems. Spotify represents the opposite. Staying felt like walking away from the things that matter to me.

6. This time, I am not alone

Artists are speaking out more openly. Listeners are more curious. More people want alternatives. Leaving now feels like joining something instead of leaving something behind.

Imagining Music Outside the Stream

Spotify narrowed our imagination for a while. It made us forget that music existed long before streaming, and that it can exist beautifully outside it, too.

Relearning Direct Support

Buy a track.
Go to a show.
Join a Patreon.
Tip someone.
Buy a shirt.
Help fund a release.
Talk to the artist.

These things sustain real people, not platforms.

Platforms You Actually Own

Newsletters, Discords, Bandcamp libraries, personal websites, Telegram groups, listening circles. These spaces allow artists and listeners to meet without a corporation dictating the terms.

Returning to the Joy of Collecting

Before Spotify, I had folders full of music. I saved things, organised them, traded downloads with friends. I built taste by hunting, not by scrolling.

Owning your files shifts how you listen.
You pay attention.
You remember where songs came from.
You care differently.

It makes listening feel alive again.

The Magic of Discovery

Algorithms might feel convenient, but they cannot replace the moments that make music unforgettable.

So many of my favourite discoveries came from strange and human places: long nights of digging, random forums, obscure blogs, friends sharing wild tracks in private chats, little accidents, overhearing something in a mix by chance. The best songs often came from conversations and curiosity, not automated playlists.

Music becomes dull when a machine does all the choosing. Taste becomes flattened. Culture becomes quiet.

Let us bring back the thrill of asking someone what they are listening to.
Let us bring back digging.
Let us bring back the joy of stumbling on something rare.
Let us talk about music again in real ways.
Let us share tracks with actual excitement.

Do not hand your ears to a company that does not care about you.
Taste is a power.
We should protect it.

Showing Up Matters

Go to the show.
Stand in the room.
Feel the sound with your body.
Let the music hit you the way it is meant to.

A stream cannot do that.

Looking for Better Paths and Better Platforms

Since leaving Spotify again, I have been rebuilding my listening life in smaller, more intentional ways. I jump between YouTube Music, Bandcamp, and SoundCloud. None of these is perfect, and I am not claiming they are some moral victory. They just feel less violent to my spirit right now.

YouTube Music and Apple Music are still corporate structures with their own problems, but they do not cross the same ethical line that Spotify crossed for me. I needed to get out quickly, so I moved to a place where I could breathe a little.

Bandcamp and SoundCloud feel closer to the worlds I want to support. They are not flawless either, but at least they still leave room for community, curiosity, and direct support.

I want to explore more. I want to research ethical alternatives and see what new ecosystems can be built. I am thinking of writing a future post that is basically a guide on how to shift out of Spotify without feeling lost. A kind of practical map for listeners and artists who want to care more deeply about how they engage with sound.

Leaving Spotify is not the end of anything for me. It is the beginning of a different kind of listening. A different kind of relationship. A different culture.

I do not expect the perfect platform to appear out of nowhere. I left because a line was crossed, and I could not keep participating. Now my work is figuring out a path forward that feels honest, and building a future where listening actually feels like a living, human act again.

A Culture Built on Imagination Instead of Extraction

I am not asking anyone to follow my lead. I am asking people to imagine something better. A world where support is direct, where scenes grow without corporate permission, where weirdness thrives, where taste is something we cultivate, not something we receive through a feed.

Spotify shrank what we believed was possible.
We can stretch that back out.
We can build something richer than convenience.

The tools are here.
The people are here.
The hunger is here.

All we have to do is decide that music deserves more than the algorithm.

Maybe I Just Grew Out of Birthdays

I’ve always been sentimental about birthdays, maybe too much so. Every year, I find myself torn between what the day means and what I expect it to mean. Maybe it’s because of how celebrated it used to be when I was a kid: the surprises, the cakes, the parties, the feeling that for one day, you were at the center of everything. That kind of joy leaves a trace, an imprint you spend the rest of your life chasing.

But as I’ve gotten older, birthdays have started to carry a quiet heaviness. Every year, as the date approaches, I feel the same flicker of birthday blues. I’ve tried everything: throwing parties, letting friends plan, celebrating alone, even retreating completely. I’ve had birthdays I regretted doing nothing, and birthdays where I went all out. Over time, I’ve realized I’ve outgrown the idea that birthdays should measure love or friendship. Still, I can’t deny it stings when people forget.

Social media doesn’t help. It inflates expectations until they collapse under their own weight. Birthdays become performance metrics for affection and belonging. But once you release those expectations, things start to feel lighter. Maybe that’s what growing up is, learning to hold joy without waiting for it to be confirmed by others.

And maybe that’s why this year felt different.

This Year Felt Different

This birthday was one of my simplest.
I filed for a leave from work to reclaim the day, eat well, take a walk, and maybe have dinner somewhere nice. But life had other plans. I got hit with a gout flare and couldn’t walk. The timing felt oddly poetic, like the universe insisting I slow down.

Still, I didn’t let it ruin the day. My old self would have.
My partner made it special anyway. She surprised me at midnight with a small cake and a candle to blow out. I felt remembered and seen. We stayed in, watched horror films, and ordered food. It was quiet, but it felt good. The day passed gently, and the reflections stayed.

“That quiet stayed with me long after, the kind that asks you to listen inward.”

The Quiet Kind of Celebration

I used to think birthdays had to be loud and grand. Now, they’re getting quieter, and I don’t see that as sadness. It feels like alignment. Maybe I’m just getting closer to who I really am, and that person is naturally more reflective.

Not celebrating too hard feels right. Maybe I stopped expecting because disappointment taught me to. Birthdays have become emotional mirrors, reflecting how I relate to life and attention itself. Maybe being low-key means I no longer need validation. Or maybe I’ve simply learned to live without it. I’m not sure which, but I prefer to think it’s growth.

And in that quiet, I’ve started noticing something else. Joy doesn’t need a special occasion. It shows up in the unremarkable moments, morning light, good coffee, slow days. Maybe growing older means realising joy is less about fireworks and more about steady warmth.

Lowering the Bar Without Losing the Spark

Still, birthdays are complicated. They carry memories of being forgotten, of caring too much, of hoping too loudly. I’ve learned not to wish that people remember, but to celebrate in my own way. Maybe that’s emotional maturity: choosing steadiness over spectacle when spectacle once led to pain.

But sometimes I wonder, does protecting myself from disappointment also protect me from joy? When does self-sufficiency become distance?
I tell myself it’s normal to care. I’m only human. Maybe I’m just learning to make peace with the fact that emotional needs can be inconvenient, and that’s okay. It’s not detachment; it’s acceptance. I’m learning how to feel seen again, gently, on my own terms.

“Maybe it’s not detachment, it’s acceptance.”

And in that process, birthdays have started to change meaning altogether.

Birthdays as Mirrors of Time

Now, they’re less about counting years and more about checking in with myself.
Birthdays remind me that I exist, not because of achievements, but because I’m still here. That awareness carries both gratitude and nostalgia, a light melancholy that isn’t sadness but perspective.

Each year, the mirror asks:
Am I living true to my values? Did I grow? Did I show up for myself? Am I living honestly?

The day has become a pause, a checkpoint, not a performance. It’s less about who shows up for me and more about how fully I’ve shown up in my own life. Maybe that’s what maturity really is, when celebration becomes introspection.

Invisible Joy

Not all growth is visible.
It appears quietly, in forgiving faster, complaining less, and noticing small beauty I used to overlook. That’s the real kind of celebration, when the ordinary feels enough. When I no longer need the day to be extraordinary just to feel alive.

Maybe I’ve simply redefined what joy means. It’s no longer about attention; it’s about alignment, presence, and self-recognition.

And still, even the most self-sufficient souls deserve to feel special.

So maybe next year, I’ll keep it simple again.
Because maybe I didn’t grow out of birthdays,
Maybe I just grew into myself.

We don’t outgrow celebration; we just learn to find it where it’s been waiting all along, in ordinary time.

I’ve written before about accountability, discernment, and the quiet ways harm circulates through our communities,
But I feel the need to bring it up again.
Not because I want to revisit old wounds,
but because the silence and lack of context keep coming back,
reshaped and reused in ways that distort the truth.
This isn’t a new story, but the aftershocks of one,
and every time it’s left unspoken, it finds another way to surface.

Lately, I’ve been learning how to verbalise pain and trauma,
the kind that sits in the body for years
because naming it always felt too risky.

For a long time, I told myself silence was safer.
That not saying anything would make things fade.
That “moving forward” meant letting go.

But silence doesn’t heal, it rots.
It leaves space for people to twist, reinterpret,
and reframe your story into something convenient for them.

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of that,
you know how disorienting it is to watch your own experience
get rewritten by people who weren’t even there.

I’ve written before about accountability and discernment,
how necessary they are,
and how easily they slip away once comfort sets in.
But I feel it’s worth returning to.
Because forgetting is easier than remembering,
and we seem to be forgetting a lot.

Who benefits from your silence?

When you stay quiet, someone always benefits.
And usually, it’s not the person who was harmed.

It’s the person who wants things to stay comfortable.
It’s the platform that gains clicks from dramatising pain.
It’s the “community leader” who thrives on being seen as a saviour
while quietly evading accountability.

When you don’t name the harm,
The story gets told by those who have something to lose
If the truth ever surfaces.

That’s how complicity works.
It’s not always malicious.
Sometimes it’s just people preferring convenience over confrontation.

And when the people who try to confront that
are cast as the problem,
that’s when you know something’s deeply broken.

Community is not a brand

It’s become so easy to hide behind the word community.
We throw it around like a badge of purity.

But not everyone who says they’re “building community”
is actually doing the work.

Some use it as a shield, a PR strategy.
They gather followers, clout, and sympathy under the guise of inclusivity,
but what they’re really protecting is their image.

And when they cause harm,
They weaponise that same image to avoid accountability.

If you’ve been following my reflections for a while,
you know this isn’t a new thought,
But it feels heavier now.
Because every time I think we’ve learned,
I watch the same pattern repeat.

So before you support anyone,
before you repost, donate, attend that show or gig, collaborate, or defend,
ask yourself:

Who benefits from this?
Who gets excluded or erased in the process?
Who has been silenced so this version of “community” can exist?

When accountability makes you the target

Sometimes it feels like putting your foot down
is what puts you at risk.

When you confront contradictions,
you become the contradiction.
When you speak up,
you become the problem.

The moment you stop enabling dysfunction,
you get labelled “difficult,” “divisive,” or “bitter.”

It’s wild how easily good faith gets weaponised.
How quickly care turns into currency.

I’ve realised that being vocal about harm
can make you a target
because in scenes built on performance,
truth is always bad for business.

But if your name is what it costs to stay honest,
then maybe that’s the price of integrity.

Gatekeeping vs. Safeguarding

I’ve been accused of “gatekeeping.”
That word gets thrown around
whenever someone tries to set a boundary.

But there’s a big difference
between keeping people out for power
and protecting people from harm.

Safeguarding means drawing lines
around what’s acceptable,
who’s safe to collaborate with,
and what behaviour we refuse to normalise.

That’s not gatekeeping.
That’s care.

And sometimes care means saying:

“No. This person shouldn’t be given another platform until they take accountability.”

The point isn’t exclusion, it’s repair.
And you can’t repair what you refuse to name.

Who gets protected, and who gets punished?

Every community reveals itself
in how it responds to harm.

Who do we rush to defend?
Who do we ask to stay quiet?
Who do we believe by default?

I’ve seen charm and status protect people endlessly,
while the ones they’ve hurt
are told to “heal privately.”

I’ve seen publications twist nuanced conflicts
into one-dimensional narratives for clicks.

I’ve seen silence rewarded with access,
and honesty punished with exile.

And I think about how often we say
we want “safe spaces,”
yet allow the same people who’ve caused harm
to keep curating them.

How does that make sense?

The question of discernment (again)

Discernment is something I’ve talked about before,
and I’ll probably keep talking about it
because we seem to forget it right when it’s most needed.

We need to get better at seeing patterns.
At recognising when “community” is being used as cover.
At spotting when “allyship” is just marketing.
At understanding that not all harm is loud or visible.

Discernment means listening deeper than the headline,
beyond a PR apology,
and into the behaviours that keep repeating.

Ask yourself:

Who benefits from this story?
Who’s left out of it?
Who keeps being harmed while we look away?

If the answers make you uncomfortable,
that’s a good sign.
It means your conscience still works.

What I’m learning

I’m learning that healing doesn’t mean silence.
That being kind doesn’t mean being complicit.
That confrontation can be an act of love
when done with integrity.

I’m learning that calling something “community”
doesn’t make it one,
and that trust isn’t built through commissions,
events, or language.

It’s built through care, through clarity,
through the courage to say,
“This isn’t right,”
even when it costs you something.

Because sometimes,
speaking up isn’t about ego,
it’s about refusing to let harm define the truth.

And if that makes you a target,
so be it.

Silence was never going to save you anyway.

So if you take anything from this,
let it be this:

Be critical of what you support.
Ask who benefits.
Ask who’s excluded.
Ask who’s been harmed.

Because a community without accountability
is just performance.

And silence isn’t neutrality,
it’s permission.

Thank you for still being here while I learn how to name things more clearly.
Each time I write about harm or accountability, it isn’t about reopening wounds,
but about trying to understand how we can move differently next time.
I’m learning that reflection is its own kind of repair.

There’s a strange paradox I keep returning to:
Sometimes, standing up against harm feels like it causes you more harm, or even puts you more in harm’s way.

Maybe it’s because protection doesn’t always feel safe.
Sometimes it feels like loss, like distance, like isolation.

After everything I’ve seen, the half-truths, the flattery, the quiet betrayals dressed as friendship, I’ve learned that protecting yourself can sometimes look like inviting danger.

Because when you start drawing lines, people who benefited from your openness get angry.

You live long enough to see your good work flipped on you by people you once stood beside, people you believed in, lifted up, and gave the benefit of the doubt, until you realise they were just waiting for the right time to use what they knew against you.

They say givers attract takers.
And maybe that’s true.

Some people will take what they can: your time, your warmth, your name, and still feel wronged when you stop giving.

They’ll twist the story when you protect your peace, paint your boundaries as cruelty, and your silence as guilt.

Suddenly you’re “difficult,” “toxic,” “dramatic,” or “irresponsible with your influence.”

But that’s only because they’ve lost access to what they were feeding on.

What hurts most isn’t even the betrayal; it’s the silence.

It’s watching people who know the truth choose neutrality, all for the sake of “keeping the peace.”

And in that silence, there’s a loneliness that seeps in,
the kind that comes from realising you might be walking this path alone.

Because not everyone wants to face what’s uncomfortable.
Not everyone wants to draw the line, to name what’s wrong, to talk about what’s rotting beneath the surface.

I crave the vulnerable talks, the uneasy truths, the moments that break false harmony.

I’d rather confront tension than pretend things are fine.

Because balance isn’t born from avoidance,
it’s maintained by honesty, by fairness, by the courage to cut off what’s toxic before it infects everything else.

The truth is, this kind of abuse goes unnoticed.

And every time I push back, it feels like I’m punished for it.
The more I refuse to play the game, the more I’m painted as the problem.

But I’ve also learned that these projections always reveal more about them than about me.

Their anger is proof of their insecurity.
Their gossip is proof of their guilt.
Their need to twist the story is proof that the truth hurts.

It sucks to feel like a problem for pushing against the problem.
It hurts to see kindness used as ammo.

But I’d rather be misunderstood than be silent in the face of rot.

Because my conscience is clear.
My actions speak louder than their whispers.

And those who judge and attack from the shadows will always reveal themselves in time.
You start to recognise the cheap shots from the dark for what they are: desperate attempts to wound what they can’t control.

The truth always shows.
You can delay it, distort it, disguise it, but you can’t reinvent truth.

For anyone who’s ever chosen integrity over belonging.
For those who know that honesty is its own kind of exile.

“Community” is everywhere, on flyers, in press releases, and splashed across social media. But the more the word spreads, the more it feels hollow. In an age where belonging is packaged as a product, how do we tell the difference between real care and empty branding?

“Community” used to mean something. It was about trust, solidarity, struggle, and showing up for one another. Now it has become a shiny word that gets tossed around on marketing decks, event posters, and Instagram bios. Capitalism has this way of draining words of their soul, repackaging them into things you can sell. And in nightlife, in creative scenes, in the online mess we all scroll through, it feels like “community” has become more of a slogan than a practice.

The hunger to belong is real, especially for young people looking for something to anchor themselves to in an overwhelming world. But this hunger is exactly what profiteers prey on. You see “collectives” formed just to look like collectives. Magazines or platforms run by people who masquerade as organisers but are really just self-promoting. The mainstream, meanwhile, keeps strip mining the underground, lifting aesthetics, language, and labour while leaving behind the spirit of resistance. Rave, which was once a countercultural tool for liberation, is now dangerously close to being just another lifestyle product. A ticketed commodity. A weekend purchase.

And then there are the wolves in sheep’s clothing. The rise of attention driven platforms makes it so easy for opportunists to pose as community builders. Rage, clout, spectacle, these become the currency. Suddenly, the loudest voices are the ones on top, not because they nurture, but because they exploit.

This is why we need to ask harder questions. Who actually benefits from this platform or space? What does it bring to the table? Does it harm anyone, or encourage harm? Who runs it, and what is their track record? And if they have messed up before, what have they done to fix it? These are not paranoid questions. They are survival tools.

Because maybe what we forget is that our real power is in our attention. Where our attention goes, our energy follows. And what we feed with our energy becomes the meta, the new norm, the thing everyone else ends up copying. If we saw our support as sacred, maybe we would be more careful about where we put our time, our money, and our trust. Real community is not built by buzzwords, press releases, or infographics. It is built by accountability, reciprocity, and the slow, unglamorous labour of care.

Of course, there is no perfect rulebook for navigating this. Sometimes you have to stumble, get burned, and learn who is real and who is not. But if you have been around a while, maybe you carry a bit of responsibility to guide the younger ones, to lessen the margin of error, to help steward better futures. And honestly, it does not take much to tell who is doing it for the right reasons. You just need to learn how to see through the fog.

Here is a simple toolkit I try to keep in mind:

• Follow the money, the clout, the spotlight. Who benefits?
  
  

• Look for harm. Who is being excluded, silenced, or exploited?
  
  

• Check for accountability. Mistakes happen, but were they owned up to?
  
  

• Watch for consistency. Real care is not one off, it is ongoing.
  
  

• And trust your gut. You can usually feel when something is extractive versus nurturing.
  
  

Because despite all the fakes and opportunists, there are still meaningful gatherings, headstrong collectives, and intentional communities out there. People pushing back against the noise. People who are in it for love, care, and connection. They exist, and they shine through if you know how to look.

So this is not about tearing things down for the sake of it. It is about sharpening how we see, so we can tell what is real from what is fake. Despite all the noise, there are still people building with intention, still scenes that nurture, still spaces that remind us what community really means. If we learn how to see through the fog, it does not take much to know who is doing it for the right reasons.

In conclusion, I am writing this not as a callout, but as reflection, expression, observation. We are not exempt either, our own projects deserve the same scrutiny. There are many good actors in the scene, and I want this to empower people with discernment, because your vote and your patronage matter. What we support decides what thrives. It decides what cultures rise, and what gets pushed forward.

I also want to keep this piece from being read as a targeted attack. It is meant to be informative, a contribution to dialogue, something to chew on. Because at the end of the day, the choice is always ours. Do we give our energy to simulacra, or do we invest it in the messy, imperfect, but necessary work of collective care?

Support what feels true, starve the grift, and the rest will follow.

People come and go. Stories get rewritten. Harmful behaviour fades into rumour and then into silence. After a while, the lines blur between what we remember, what we choose to ignore, and what we simply stop talking about.

I’ve seen it happen before. A project that once stood for collaboration and community slowly unravelled, not because of one dramatic moment but through a thousand small breaks. Decisions made without care, trust eroded in the background, and finally, a quiet rewriting of history that leaves only a polished surface behind. And in that surface-level version of the story, the people who stayed, the ones who walked away, and the reasons why all of it disappear.

Then there are the platforms that promise connection but thrive on spectacle. I recall when a local online publication ran an article that reduced a complicated and painful fallout into a neat headline that had nothing to do with what happened. It wasn’t just inaccurate, it was convenient. Convenient for engagement, for the algorithm, for a narrative that people didn’t have to think too hard about.

And maybe what stings the most is watching those who harm or exploit others not only avoid consequences but thrive. They get invited back into rooms, celebrated on stages, and framed as symbols of success. After a while, you start to wonder if winning in this scene just means learning how to outlast the memory of what you’ve done.

Add to that the rise of rage-bait social pages and AI-generated “community media” and it feels like we’re watching the culture turn itself into a feedback loop. Metrics over memory. Optics over care. (and not to mention the normalisation of misinformation)

Maybe that’s why I’ve been feeling this low hum of detachment lately. When a scene forgets, it becomes easier for the same patterns to repeat. Accountability starts to feel like “drama,” and those who hold the receipts get written off as bitter. It’s not that I want things to be combative. It’s just that if no one is willing to remember, what’s left to build on?

I still believe in what this scene can be. I still believe in its moments of joy, its rare flashes of solidarity, and the quiet ways people take care of each other when no one’s watching. But I also believe in holding on to the context, in keeping the uncomfortable truths that stop us from running in circles. We don’t need to live in the past, but we can’t keep erasing it either.

Because culture isn’t just what we create, it’s also what we refuse to forget.

The other day, I found myself reflecting on how music-making, something once so sacred to me, had lost much of its meaning over the years. I’ve spent so much time oscillating: between working independently and being signed to a major label, between relying on external structures and going it alone, between bands, side projects, collaborations, and breakdowns. I’ve endured the fallouts of toxic friendships, creative partnerships gone sour, and the slow erosion of trust that comes from repeatedly offering your vulnerability to the wrong people.

The trauma of those experiences, betrayal, burnout, and creative exploitation, left scars. There were long stretches where I couldn’t create. Or wouldn’t. I was afraid to give too much of myself again, afraid of being used, discarded, or misunderstood. Music became a landmine field of memory and mistrust. The rhythm was lost.

But lately, something’s shifted. A flicker. A pulse. A rhythm returning.

I’ve started to hear again. Not just sound, but the impulse to create. Ideas come in waves, bursts of inspiration I can’t ignore. And for the first time in a long while, I welcome them without questioning their purpose. It feels like the spirit of music has found me again. Possessed me, in the best way.

What’s different now is that I’ve stopped tying creation to outcomes. I’m no longer chasing metrics, audience reach, or platform performance. I don’t care if it goes viral. I don’t care if it even gets heard. The act of creating is enough. Making something from nothing, purely because I can, feels like a radical reclamation of joy.

Maybe it’s this return to form, or formlessness, that’s guiding me back to myself. I’m rediscovering what it means to make music without strings attached. No algorithm, no pressure, no false sense of worth assigned by streams or likes. Just the sound in my head, brought to life on my own terms.

And for now, that’s more than enough.

Maybe I need to let it out, all of it.
The way I feel like I don’t belong anywhere.
The way I feel like I’m a guest in every room, an afterthought.
The way I feel like I’m either too much or not enough, never just right.
Unwanted. Hated. Out of place.

The more time I spend on social media, the more I feel like I’m watching life from behind a glass wall. Everyone curating, performing, parading joy, wokeness, aesthetics, anger: whatever’s trending that day. And here I am, frozen on the other side. Not quite participating. Maybe I don’t want to. Maybe I refuse to.
Because when everything feels like a performance, like a projection, nothing feels sacred anymore.

I’m tired of the charade.
Tired of the pressure to smile for the feed, to be "on brand," to say the right thing in the right tone at the right time.
Tired of crafting myself for an audience when I don’t even know who I am when I’m alone.

I want to feel real again.
I want to write not to impress, but to purge.
I want to speak not to be heard, but to be understood,

if only by myself.

So maybe this is where I begin.
Letting the faucet run.
Letting the water clear.
Letting myself be, even if it’s awkward, even if it sputters.

At least it’s honest.