In Tacloban, a DIY Music Party Renaissance Takes Shape

As rain pours in the small city of Tacloban, Leyte, a blonde in six-inch platforms and a pink leopard bra with matching panties walks arm in arm with a statuesque redhead in a vinyl maillot, baby-oiled to perfection. Under the rain, their makeup doesn’t budge and there is no stutter in their strut. These drag queens may seem out of place on this stretch of Leyte asphalt, packed long jeepney and tricycle queues beside smoky stalls of roasted meat. But as soon as they turn towards an abandoned building behind an old library, everything makes sense.

From the street, one can hear the cheers of revellers penetrating the bass that thumps through the sound system. For the evening, the courtyard of a dilapidated heritage site has transformed into a chimera of music festival, cabaret, and art show. Between the electronic music and drag queen variety, partygoers sip on top shelf cocktails, take selfies by a hanging installation, and watch graffiti artists paint a mural. 

This is an installation of Now.here, a bi-monthly DIY music party that pops up in various, unannounced locations throughout the Tacloban area. The inside joke is that the name is pronounced “nowhere” before the venue is announced and then “now here” when it’s revealed. The party has appeared in a gated subdivision’s empty swimming pool, an old meatpacking factory, the showroom of a car dealership, a storage room, and other unexpected spaces.

Always packed to the gills, Now.here brings the city’s criminally overlooked local talent straight to party kids who are hungry for something new in a city that has, time and time again, offered the same old thing. Pulsating under vape smoke and strobe lights, they penetrate a portal out of this stormy town and into a place that, for Tacloban, is both far away from what has been, yet still uniquely its own. 

Brick by brick

For entertainment, Tacloban locals have come to expect the usual fare: a beloved balladeer singing decades-old hits at the annual fiesta, a Manila-based artista spinning at the local politician’s private resort, an ABBA cover band playing at the Astrodome convention center. It’s flashy enough to draw a crowd, but only because there’s nothing better going on.

Jacques Palami, 37, planted the first seeds for Now.here following Supertyphoon Yolanda in 2013. He was in his mid-twenties when the strongest typhoon to ever make landfall (at the time), decimated his hometown. Relief workers the world over descended upon Tacloban to rebuild infrastructure and distribute aid, but Palami couldn’t shake a sense of seclusion. “There were no signs of togetherness,” he remembers, “The nights were really quiet, and I felt alone in the city.”

Amid the rubble, he transformed a truck into a mobile bar. It popped off immediately. In those months after the storm, relief workers sought out the truck amidst power outages, to bask in good tunes and some normalcy. There, people could joke, flirt, and meet new friends, if not to unwind before diving back into the heart-wrenching grind of disaster relief work. 

As the city was rebuilt in early 2014, Palami swapped the truck for a brick-and-mortar space. In the modest corner building he still calls home today, he opened a hostel, which turned into a cafe, which turned into a thrift shop, which turned into an arcade, which turned into an events space. When the crowds outgrew the building just as Palami began using it as an “unofficial headquarters” for Leni Robredo’s 2022 presidential campaign, he partnered with drag performers from Tacloban’s Haus of Fuchsia and local electronic music DJs Khandri, Klij, Stanislau, and YLMRN to kickstart the Now.here parties. Though seemingly erratic in his pursuits, he’s actually grounded by a distinct Tacloban logic. 

“It’s become my life’s philosophy,” he says, reflecting on the impact of Yolanda’s destruction, “to appreciate the beauty of impermanence.”

On their own terms

Over the last 18 months, young people have lost faith in age-old establishments, turning to counterculture gigs like Now.here which have electrified Tacloban: A family-run restaurant called Giuseppe’s turned their usually empty second floor into a speakeasy, featuring bi-weekly DJ sets ranging from deep house to nu-disco. Regional transplants, under DIY label Moody Music, uploaded their yearner-pop songs, attracted thousands of listeners, and are now scrambling to borrow instruments to play in-demand shows. European DJs Fernando Wax and Julian Groove introduced darkwave to the city through an impromptu set in a leaky-roofed warehouse. 

These types of parties have already taken hold in major cities like Manila, Cebu, and Davao. But in Tacloban — a city of just 252,000 — the rise of DIY culture feels more pointed, and the fight for space, while not unique to smaller cities, is more visible and often more difficult. Still, that hasn’t stopped a wave of youth-led initiatives from taking root. The energy building here suggests that countercultural scenes are no longer confined to the country’s largest urban centers; they’re expanding into smaller cities, quietly reshaping cultural landscapes along the way.

Pedro Funk is a homegrown acid jazz band known for its funky riffs and politically charged Waray lyrics. The band prides itself for steering away from the “Manila-radio sound,” or English-Filipino love songs with familiar chord progressions. When asked to explain their curious popularity, frontman and guitarist Pierre Dann Ampo speaks of heritage and duty. “Pedro Funk is about cultural preservation, passing the Waray language on, and protecting our community,” he says. (Ampo is also an outspoken advocate for farmers rights, the preservation of Tacloban’s Cancabato Bay, and justice for the Tacloban journalists detained, for the past five years, on trumped up terrorism charges.) 

Pedro Funk is a bit of an outlier amongst the generations of macho rakistas – bands like After The Chaos, Descended to Salvage, and Fingerchain – that has cast a long shadow over original Taclobanon music. Half-jokingly, Ampo describes playing alongside the older guys at now-shuttered venues by taking a deep breath and wafting his hand towards himself: “You could smell the testosterone.” But other musicians, including folk-R&B singer-songwriter Mayarie, 21, and indie-pop multi-instrumentalist Aira Mendiola, 23, are also carving out an alternative niche. Oozing with chillgirl charm, these performers are established solo acts. But they also happen to play in a Boygenius-esque “supergroup” called 2am. Although new to the scene, their arresting performances have turned them into mainstays for indie shows throughout Tacloban. 

Echoing Ampo, they attribute their success to a sense of local pride that, as one of the few female songwriters and performers in the area, comes from a desire to take up space as queer women from the Visayas. “People like us because we don’t do this for clout,” Mayarie says, “We’re genuinely having fun” — an act that may feel subversive in a music scene where profitability has often taken precedence over authenticity. 

For everyone

Aside from the goodwill collaborations webbed between venues, producers, artists, and audiences who buy into community values, the Tacloban scene is eager to shed the pretentiousness that is so symptomatic of living in the city. 

For its DIY scene, there are no dress codes, and no space for toxic machismo. In one instance, a lively event shut down because an out-of-towner was harassing some of the young women in attendance. No one complained that the music stopped early. It’s as if the organizers, performers, and other guests were saying, “We’re in this together.” If one of us is having a bad time, we all are. The moment underscored what Palami describes as a Waray traditional dance of “kuratsa,” which is performed on ground level with the audience instead of on stage. This tradition is also why Now.here DJs are in the middle of the crowd, rather than cloistered off in an elevated booth. 

It’s a kind of radical intimacy that, while echoed in other cities, feels especially pronounced here. In Manila or Cebu, where DIY communities often emerge in resistance to commercial nightlife, the same instinct to protect one another is diluted by scale or scene politics. Tacloban’s smallness is its strength: it allows Waray culture and values of resilience, resistance, and performance to shape not just the tone of a music event, but its entire structure.

It suggests that what resonates most with revelers goes beyond spectacle, novelty, and cool factor. Instead, it seems the draw is in its insistence. In a city distinguished by disaster, the endurance to keep creating reframes the anxiety of survival as celebration. While some grief has no relief, Tacloban’s counterculture shows us that even in its throes, we can begin imagining – and embodying – what’s next.