Ezzrei Taught Siargao to Rave. DJ Mag Just Named Her One to Watch

Ten years ago, Ezzrei moved to Siargao Island to surf and found nobody there was playing the music she wanted to hear. So she started playing it herself, on whatever speaker she could drag to a beach bar, to whoever was still standing.

Last month, DJ Mag put her on a very different kind of list: six emerging artists worth hearing worldwide, alongside acts from London, Paris and Hong Kong. She was the only Southeast Asian name on it, and the only one who got there by way of an island some 470 miles from Manila.

From a Surf Town to a Whole Scene

Ezzrei, born Camille Banzon, worked as a music journalist before she ever touched a controller. Siargao in 2015 had waves and not much else resembling a dance floor, so she became the island's first DJ almost by default, seeding the underground raves that still run there most weekends a decade later. Manila eventually pulled her back, and in 2022 she founded Continuum Bass, which she calls less a genre club than "a cultural seed": the Philippines' first platform built specifically around bass music and sound-system culture, for DJs who wanted somewhere other than house and trance to play.

Continuum Bass has since grown into club nights, a label, a radio strand and workshops, and it hasn't stayed a Manila story. Its Bass Crawl, timed to the city's Fête de la Musique, pulled acts in from Cebu, Bacolod and Davao for a three-venue night, decentralizing a scene that could easily have stayed one city's hobby.

Jungle With a Tagalog Accent

What earns her the DJ Mag nod is what she loads into the breaks. 'Ang Daigdig Ko'y Ikaw', a jungle cut, samples the OPM singer Celeste Legaspi. 'Sinta' runs on a kubing, the bamboo jaw harp that predates every synth in her studio by a few centuries. It could read as a gimmick and doesn't, mostly because the low end still does exactly what a jungle track needs it to do regardless of what's sampled on top.

What's Next

She's finishing 'Baby Vortex', a four-track dubstep EP that DJ Mag previewed, built around pre-colonial Filipino rhythm patterns and, by her own account, a fair amount of John Coltrane and Sun Ra on repeat. No release date is confirmed yet. "Every layer has to justify its existence," she told the magazine, which reads as both a production rule and a fair summary of how she's built the rest of her career: nothing here got handed to her.

Philippine bass music has had a real year on this site. The Budots Three turned Davao's most mocked sound into a London record deal, and Cebu and Boracay are building rooms of their own outside Manila's shadow. Ezzrei is close to the connective tissue in both stories: without Continuum Bass's decentralizing push, a Cebu crew calling itself Bantayan Bass Club has a lot fewer stages to play.