The Budots Three Turned Davao City's Most Mocked Sound Into a London Record Deal

DJ Love posted the update from a hospital bed in Davao City in February 2025: heart failure, no clear way to cover what came next. His manager, Jorge Wieneke, opened a fundraiser. Strangers who knew Sherwin Tuna only as the guy behind that "tiw tiw" whistle sound paid for his surgery before most of them had ever met him. Three months later, he was on a Boiler Room stage in Hong Kong.

That's the short version of how budots, the 140bpm, whistle-and-breakbeat street sound born in Davao City in the mid 2000s, ended up with a real record deal in London. DJ Love (Sherwin Tuna), DJ Danz (Daniel Lacanilao) and DJ Ericnem (Eric Lopez), three producers who've known each other since Davao's dance-crew scene of the 2000s and 2010s, spent last December putting out a joint album, Budots World: 3-Hit Combo!, on the UK label Eastern Margins. The trio's earned themselves a nickname for it: the Budots Three, a nod to Detroit's Belleville Three.

From Slur to Street Anthem

Budots did not start as anyone's idea of a scene to be proud of. It grew out of internet cafes and pirated FL Studio, its rapid whistling hook built to echo the sound of Davao's streets, its dance a bent-knee, side-to-side sway rooted in Sama-Bajao movement. For years, other Filipinos wrote it off as, in the words NME used when profiling the genre, "dance for the slums," a punchline before it was a genre. DJ Love, who ran one of those internet cafes and co-founded the dance crew Camusboyz in 2004, spent two decades turning that punchline into something people would defend.

It worked, slowly and then all at once. DJ Love's 2023 Boiler Room set with Manila Community Radio is still the platform's most-watched broadcast out of the Philippines, closing in on half a million views on YouTube. His 2024 solo debut, Budots World (Reloaded), opened with "Tiwtiw," a track that alone spawned 50,000 TikTok videos on its own. He called the record "my love letter to the Filipino people and to all local budots producers... budots and all of its creators deserve the world to recognise their art."

Home to Davao, Deal in London

Then came the hospital. The February 2025 diagnosis, and the fundraiser that paid for his treatment, is the kind of story that could have ended a career instead of relaunching one. By May he was back onstage, at Boiler Room Hong Kong, on a bill with Japan's Soichi Terada, Malaysian producer Shehiel and Thai rapper Thaiboy Digital, proof budots now travels in the same rooms as the rest of the region's electronic scene. His note to fans afterward mixed English and Tagalog: "sa awa ng Diyos, pag kaya ko na, sisiguraduhin mas masaya kesa dati. Budots to the world" (roughly: by God's mercy, once I'm able again, I'll make sure it's even happier than before).

Seven months later came the fuller statement. Budots World: 3-Hit Combo! is a dozen tracks split three ways, including DJ Ericnem's "Pao Pao," with each producer bringing his own two decades of Davao dancefloors into the mix. Eastern Margins, which has spent years building a catalogue around East and Southeast Asian club sounds, describes that wider lineage on a companion compilation as "funkot to manyao, budots to vinahouse." It's treating budots less as a novelty than as the next genre in that line, which matters: this is a Southeast Asian dance sound landing on a European label on its own terms, whistle hook intact, instead of getting smoothed into something more familiar.

If You Want to Hear It

Budots World: 3-Hit Combo! is out now on Eastern Margins, to stream or buy. It won't sound like anything else on a Southeast Asian house and techno playlist, and that's rather the point. Manila's own techno producers have been finding routes to European labels lately too. Budots got there by refusing to sound like anything but itself, whistles, breakbeats, Davao streets and all.

Cover photo: DJ Love, DJ Danz and DJ Ericnem in Davao City, credit Khristiandt Lerona / Mixmag Asia.