Alinep's Rolyo EP Lands Manila Techno on a Berlin Label

Nine years ago, riot police kicked in the door at TIME, the Makati club where a twenty-something DJ named Ali Nepomuceno had a residency going. It was 2018, deep in Duterte's war on drugs, and TIME was one of a string of nightlife spots that got raided and never reopened. A lot of the city's house and techno scene scattered that year. Alinep, as he goes by on record labels from Manila to Berlin, didn't.

He kept producing through the shutdown, through the pandemic that flattened whatever nightlife was left a year later, and through a slow rebuild that's still going. This year the payoff showed up on a Berlin label: Rolyo, a three-track EP released in February on OFF Recordings, the techno imprint Andre Crom has run out of Berlin since 2008. In July, Mixmag Asia put it on their 2026 essential listening list, calling it a tight snapshot of everything Alinep does well.

What Rolyo Actually Sounds Like

The title track opens with rolling basslines and synth stabs that sound slightly extraterrestrial, in a good way. "Gapang," Tagalog for crawl, loosens up into playful synth flickers dancing around the low end. "Arangkada," Filipino slang borrowed from the Spanish for kickoff or in gear, closes the EP on a hypnotic, bass-driven groove that locks into a head-nodding pocket and stays there. None of it is trying to be a peak-time weapon. It's minimal techno built for the two hours before sunrise, when the room's thinned out and everyone left is actually paying attention.

The Dubfire Connection

This isn't Alinep's first pass at a European label with a serious reputation. Back in late 2023, Dubfire remixed his track "Tala" without much fanfare, and the exchange stuck. Alinep built a new EP around that connection, Futura 101, which came out on Dubfire's own SCI+TEC imprint in January 2025. Richie Hawtin has played his records since. That's the kind of co-sign that means something in techno circles even when the artist himself isn't a headline name yet, and it's part of why Rolyo landing on OFF Recordings a year later doesn't read as a fluke.

Still Building at Home

Alinep splits his time between the UK and Manila now, but he hasn't let go of the label he started in 2020, Deepsomnia, which exists mostly to put out records by other Filipino producers who don't have a Dubfire remix to open doors for them. It's the less glamorous half of the story and probably the more important one. Manila's house and techno scene lost a real anchor when TIME closed, and it's still finding new ones, the way Bangkok's scene has rallied around figures like Sunju Hargun. Rolyo is worth your time on headphones. Whether it gets you into a club in Manila is a separate question nobody's answering yet.