UNOS Reconnected With Her Filipino Roots Through a Singapore Record Label, Not a Plane Ticket

Steffi Sturm didn't grow up around Filipino music. She grew up in Brussels, teaching herself to DJ behind a plastic fold-out table at house parties and hosting a regular slot on Bruzz 99.8 FM, more fluent in Belgian pirate radio than in anything from her father's home province of Surigao, in the southern Philippines. Under the name UNOS, she now records for a Singapore label that gave her something her own upbringing hadn't: a route back to that other half of her identity.

A Label Instead of a Plane Ticket

UNOS signed to Darker Than Wax, the Singapore imprint Loopliner has already named one of the labels shaping Southeast Asia's underground, somewhat by accident. Through the label's roster she met similarobjects, the production alias of Jorge Wieneke, the Manila studio owner and BuwanBuwan Collective co-founder whose decades-long fight to keep the city's DIY scene alive Loopliner covered earlier this month, and fellow DTW artist Tropical Futures. Meeting them during her first Asia tour in 2019, playing rooms in Singapore, Bangkok and Manila, did more for her sense of where she came from than any family holiday had managed to.

That tour produced Tropical Diskoral, a compilation series UNOS and her new Manila contacts built specifically to put homegrown Filipino producers on a release with international distribution instead of asking them to wait for one to come find them. Volume 1 landed in 2019, pairing LUSTBASS, Pamcy and Tarsius across trip-hop, house and neo-soul; Volume 2 followed in December 2020 with three more Manila-based names, LONER, Lui. and VVVV, both released under a stated goal she's kept coming back to since: "to celebrate and encourage Philippine artists to create music on their own terms."

A Debut Named After a Family Feast

UNOS didn't put out her own record until March 31, 2023, when Darker Than Wax released her debut EP, Boodle Fight, catalogue number DTW074. The title borrows from the Filipino communal dining tradition of eating a shared spread with bare hands, no plates, no assigned seats. The five tracks, Angermanagement, Headlock, Powerslide, Flavourtown and Loveletter To Summer, run through an equally communal set of reference points: ballroom and voguing culture, block parties, the inclusive spaces she'd missed during the pandemic, and the tropical warmth she associates with a country she'd only visited a handful of times growing up.

The record moves across house, techno, breaks and trance without settling on one, which tracks with how she describes her own DJ sets: less a fixed sound than a mood she builds over the course of a night.

Still Repping the Label, Three Years On

UNOS hasn't slowed down since. In August 2026 she closed the Motion Room at Fuse, Brussels' best-known techno club, during the afterparty for XRDS Festival, a set the festival's own site described as moving between "break-driven transitions, trance-leaning motifs, and house-rooted rhythmic structures," the same range Boodle Fight put on record. Away from her own bookings, she's spent more than four years teaching music production, including sessions run through Manila Community Radio in the Philippines and Wild Pearl Studio in Singapore, plus workshops closer to home at Trix in Antwerp and AB in Brussels, passing on the access Darker Than Wax gave her to the next producer trying to find their way in from the outside.

There's no word yet on a follow-up EP or a Tropical Diskoral Vol. 3. For now, Boodle Fight and the two Tropical Diskoral compilations remain the clearest record of what a Singapore label, three time zones and a continent away from Brussels, did for one DJ's sense of where she's actually from.

Cover art: Boodle Fight, official EP artwork for UNOS on Darker Than Wax.