Manila's Twelve Points Records Marks Two Years With Pathways II

Twelve Points Records just turned two, and its anniversary release is a quieter record than the year that led up to it. Pathways II, the Manila label's 12-track second-anniversary compilation, lands after a stretch that saw Twelve Points pull artists from Bangkok and Hanoi onto its books. This time, the label mostly stayed home.

From One Rework to a Real Label

Tomas Cabili and Emel Rowe started Twelve Points in Manila in February 2024. Emel is the driving force behind UNKNWN, a party that has run for nine years, and Tomas spent years behind the decks at The Sesh at XX:XX before releasing music of his own on Transit Records and Sounds Nais. Their opening release was JAV/'s "Your Love," a deep house rework of Aaliyah's original that JAV/ had first put out back in 2021 on the EP "in the meantime." The label's stated aim was never complicated: give regional producers somewhere serious to land a track, then get out of the way. As Tomas has put it, the goal is "to contribute to fostering our scene and create avenues for them to hear or play their music," preferring that "the artists arrive there on their own," without the label steering the process. By November 2024 that had grown into Framewerk, a monthly party at Nokal Manila that gave the catalogue a room to be heard in.

The Year That Went to Bangkok and Hanoi

The label's first anniversary compilation, simply titled Pathways, arrived on 13 February 2025 with a roster that reached past Manila. DOTT, the Bangkok producer and More Rice co-founder, and Mishouju, a Belarus-born selector based in Hanoi with a residency at Mirage who co-runs the Homebp label, both featured alongside Saint Guel, Junoy Manalo, JAV/, Meek and others. Twelve Points backed that connection with an actual night on the ground, a label takeover at Bar Temp in Bangkok, the room founded by the More Rice, Never Normal and Human Spectrum crews. It turned a compilation credit into a working relationship rather than a file sent over email.

Pathways II Comes Back Home

For the sequel, released 6 March 2026 with artwork by @arch.bny under creative direction from Nash Cruz, the label describes a more dancefloor-focused set, "songs that would fit well in any Filipino dance floor," moving through techno, house, ambient and breaks. The tracklist keeps returning names like Bins, Saint Guel, ThirstKid, Tomas and Meek alongside newer entries such as Soft as Silk, Jiann and NAIA, but neither DOTT nor Mishouju appears this time. Among the twelve is Junoy Manalo's "Love Is," featuring Lester Sorilla, from an artist whose deep house has previously run without a label behind it at all.

Two Years, Two Pathways

What the two compilations show together is a label that can reach outward when it wants to and still knows its own floor. Pathways proved Twelve Points could put a Bangkok producer and a Hanoi label runner on the same record as its Manila regulars and back it up with a real show. Pathways II is the year it chose to stay closer to home instead, which reads less like a retreat than a label confident enough in its own scene to not need the passport stamps this time around.

Cover photo: Pathways II artwork by @arch.bny, creative direction by Nash Cruz, courtesy of Twelve Points Records.