WILHELMINA Fuses Kulintang and Budots Into Jersey Club. His Liner Notes Thank Davao's DJ Love.

A Shoutout From New Jersey, Not Davao

Open the credits on SALAHILO, a six-track EP that came out in December 2024, and the first line isn't about mastering or samples. It reads: "Big shout out to DJ Love from Davao City, Philippines for pioneering the budots genre and bringing it to a worldwide stage." The record isn't from Davao. It isn't from the Philippines at all. It was built in New Jersey by a producer called WILHELMINA, and it opens by naming the same Davao DJ this site has already covered twice, a man who invented budots as a joke and has since beaten heart failure and played London's Margins United.

That's an unusual thing to put at the top of an EP. Most producers who lift a rhythm from somewhere else don't say where it came from, let alone credit it to a named individual. WILHELMINA's credits also thank House of Gongs, a kulintang preservation project, and a list of culture bearers by name, including Datu Waway Saway, for teaching him the instrument. This isn't a producer treating Southeast Asia as a sample pack.

A Gold Horse and a Kelis Sample

The February EP, Book of Spells, pushes the idea further. Its cover, by an artist from Kidapawan City who works as Kosmos.Khaos, shows a tikbalang, a horse-headed figure from Philippine folklore, rendered in gold. The artist's own note calls it "a meeting point between ritual memory and contemporary sound." Five tracks in twenty-odd minutes: the opener, Divine Hand, folds a Kelis "Milkshake" sample under drum patterns that thicken as the track runs. The closer is Kinulam Ng Sayaw, Bewitched by the Dance, sáyaw being the Bisaya word for dance.

What it actually sounds like: jersey club's rattling low kick under everything, hard-drum breaks doing the work a snare usually does, and gong tones and budots' bouncy swing sitting where a lesser producer would just leave the kick alone. It's dense. A reviewer at The Flying Lugaw liked the record but flagged the same thing a listener notices by track three: some of it repeats a groove longer than the idea needed. Fair.

PORTAL, Barrio Bounce, and Rooms That Don't Exist Here Yet

WILHELMINA doesn't just make records alone in a room. He's tied to Barrio Bounce, PORTAL and BootlegKTV, a loose network of US parties built around Asian diasporic club sound rather than the usual Top 40 remix circuit. PORTAL's inaugural Philadelphia night, in January 2025, had him on the decks alongside a lineup mixing techno, hard drum and unreleased kulintang-flecked tracks.

BootlegKTV, per Mixmag Asia's February profile of the producer, is building a compilation around what it calls working-class Asian genres, budots very much included. That's the same genre the Philippines' own underground has been reckoning with all year, a sound born as a punchline in Davao that a New Jersey basement scene now treats as reference material worth crediting properly.

Homage, Not Just Borrowing

SALAHILO's title is Tagalog for stubborn, hardheaded, unyielding, and the record earns the word. Naming your sources, crediting living culture bearers, and crediting the inventor of a genre by name and city isn't a legal requirement for a Bandcamp release. Most producers sampling gongs or budots swing wouldn't bother. It's a low bar and WILHELMINA clears it anyway, which says less about him being exceptional and more about how rarely diaspora producers get asked to.

None of that makes the music above criticism, and it shouldn't. But crediting your sources properly is the least interesting thing a record can do well; whether the tracks hold up on their own, stripped of the acknowledgments section, is the harder question, and Book of Spells mostly answers it.

Mixmag Asia's profile noted Southeast Asian tour dates were expected later in 2026, though nothing has been confirmed publicly since. Until then, Book of Spells and SALAHILO are both streaming on Bandcamp, credits and all.

Cover photo: WILHELMINA, from the artwork for the SALAHILO EP, courtesy of the artist.