Moni-Moni's Crate-Digging Turned Cebu Into a Philippine Underground Hub, and Mixmag Asia Noticed

A Dig Through Someone Else's Record Shelf

Mikelis Yu was born in the Philippines, raised in California, and came back to Cebu to help run his family's hotel business, the kind of path that usually produces an accountant, not a radio station. Instead, with co-founder Dean Pasque, he started Cradio Radio in 2023 and began DJing under the name Moni-Moni, building a practice around one specific, patient move: dig up a Filipino record nobody plays anymore and set it next to a contemporary club track, then let the two argue it out on the same turntable.

It's not a party trick. By September 2026, Mixmag Asia's "Artists Exciting Us" column was describing his sets as moving through acid and trance, disco, house, funk, soul and rare groove, and occasionally world fusion, the kind of range that only makes sense if someone has actually spent years in the crates instead of scrolling a plugin preset. The magazine put him on the same list as a New York industrial act and a Yogyakarta noise-techno producer, strange company for a DJ based in a city that had barely any house and techno scene to speak of before Cradio showed up.

The Network Nobody Asked Him to Build

What Mixmag's write-up only gestures at, Cradio's own YouTube channel proves in detail. A mix titled "Acid, House, & Trance by Mike Sharpe, Salo-Salo, & Moni-Moni," uploaded March 11, 2026 and tagged CRADIO X UNKNWN, is a direct collaboration with UNKNWN, the Manila party that turned ten. Scroll further back on the same channel and there's a Barbosa Records crossover (Siargao's vinyl bar and label) and another with a Davao crew going by WCR, short for We Can't Relate. None of these are big cities by club-industry standards. Stacked together, they're most of the Philippine underground that currently has a name attached to it, and Cradio has a release with each one.

Sinulog Ni Cradio

Cebu's biggest date on the calendar is Sinulog, a Catholic festival built on a pre-colonial war dance, drawing crowds every January that dwarf anything the city's bars see the rest of the year. Cradio runs its own strand inside that week: "Sinulog Ni Cradio," a run of mixes and parties timed to the festival instead of competing with it, now in its second year. One instalment from the 2025 run is credited to Moni-Moni and a producer going by Ramon.mp3, a hip-hop-edits-and-UKG set that has nothing to do with the devotional procession happening a few blocks away and everything to do with what Cebu's underground actually sounds like once the tourists clear out.

What Mixmag Didn't Confirm, and What's Actually Checkable

Mixmag Asia's profile also credits Cradio's reach beyond Cebu: shows broadcast in Japan, appearances on Bali's Headstream Radio, run out of the Potato Head hospitality group, and a feature on Gilles Peterson's Worldwide FM, though the write-up doesn't say which Japanese station carried the broadcast. Those are the magazine's claims, repeated here as reported rather than independently verified; Loopliner couldn't track down the specific episodes to confirm them directly, and a DJ's own hype sheet isn't a source. What is checkable, sitting in public on Cradio's own channel, doesn't need the embellishment anyway: a DJ with no label backing and no major-city advantage built a working network across Manila, Siargao and Davao, one uploaded mix at a time, from a city that two years ago had karaoke bars and budots nights and not much else.

The magazine nod is nice. The bookings from three other cities' scenes are the actual evidence something real is happening here.

Cover photo: Moni-Moni (Mikelis Yu), via Mixmag Asia's "Artists Exciting Us in 2026 / September."