Hev Abi, the Philippines-based creator behind WALANG HIYA, approaches his sound with a deliberate rejection of the rigid genre classification systems that dominate how most recorded work is cataloged, shared, and understood by audiences and industry insiders alike. The classification of the sound as falling outside all standard genre markers, marked by the stacked “Other” tags that signal its resistance to easy categorization, is a choice that mirrors the growing number of creators across the global south, and specifically in the Philippines, who pull from a wide range of personal, cultural, and artistic reference points that don’t align with the narrow set of genre labels that have long been used to organize creative output.