A song called “Halik” opens with a vocal that most singers save for the final chorus, and for over twenty-five years Filipinos have been using it to prove they can sing.
The six people who recorded it came from five different provinces. Juliet and Mercy Sunot were from Cagayan de Oro. Rey Abenoja, the guitarist, grew up in Southern Leyte. Stella Pabico, on keyboards, came from Misamis Occidental. Rowena Adriano, the bassist, was from Pampanga. Vilma Goloviogo, on drums, was from Manila.
None of them met at home. They found each other in Japan, assigned to different bar bands under the same talent management company, and in 1995 the manager put them together.
They were part of a migration much bigger than any single band. At the peak of the entertainer visa system in 2004, over 80,000 Filipino women entered Japan on those contracts in a single year. The pipeline had been running since the 1980s, with performers going on six-month terms and their pay held until the contract ended. The money kept families fed across the Philippines. The word that followed the women who sent it, japayuki, did not carry gratitude.
In 2004, the United States named Japan in its annual report on human trafficking. Tokyo tightened the rules, and by 2006 annual entries had dropped to roughly 8,600. A system that had produced a generation of Filipino stage performers disappeared in two years.
Aegis came home before that collapse, signed with Alpha Records, and put out the debut album in 1998. The road between the studio and an audience was rough. Stella told the Philippine Star that in the late eighties and early nineties she had earned as little as 32 pesos per show.
When the album came out, the band played mall gigs to help sell copies. One early show was in a rice field. No popular bar would book them, and they hauled their own equipment in taxis and jeepneys because there was no crew to do it.
The songs they carried were written by someone who never joined them on the road. Celso Abenoja, Rey’s older brother, had been filling notebooks since the 1980s. He wrote “Halik” and “Basang Basa sa Ulan” and enough other material to fill the debut record. He never performed with the band and never recorded with them, and when he died in 2007, most of the people singing along to his songs had no idea who wrote them.
The album went quadruple platinum. Five years after the debut, the Sunot sisters were familiar enough to have their lives dramatized on the GMA series Magpakailanman in 2003. Jopay and Rochelle Pangilinan of the dance group SexBomb Girls played Mercy and Juliet.
Roberto del Rosario was a singing teacher in the Philippines who built a machine in 1975 so his students could rehearse without a live band. He called it the Sing-Along System and patented it in 1983. The Japanese inventor Daisuke Inoue had built a coin-operated version in Osaka in 1971, four years earlier, and both countries still claim the invention.
Filipinos did not wait for that argument to settle. The machine went into sari-sari stores and family living rooms across the country, and the singers who stood in front of it wanted to sound like Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. Birit stopped being purely a stage tradition and became a household ambition.
Katy de la Cruz was born in Bustos, Bulacan, in 1907, and she was performing at town fiestas before she turned ten. By 1925, at eighteen, she was the highest-paid entertainer in the Philippines. When jazz arrived in Manila in the 1920s she learned scat singing and made it her trademark. People called her the Queen of Filipino Jazz. She retired to San Francisco and lived until 2004, nearly a century. Between her and Aegis sit decades of televised contests and living-room karaoke that turned belting into a national expectation.
Katherine Molina, a voice professor at the University of the Philippines, published a study through Ateneo de Manila in 2025 arguing that Filipino singers share a vocal habitus, a set of instincts passed down through performance culture rather than formal conservatory training. The bar circuits and the karaoke machines fed that habitus as reliably as any voice teacher.
Rak of Aegis started as a joke. Myke Salomon, a musical director working on the Philippine staging of Rock of Ages, said two words to PETA artistic director Maribel Legarda: Rak of Aegis. She laughed, and then she took the idea to PETA for real.
Playwright Liza Magtoto wrote the book and built the story on something she had witnessed firsthand. After Typhoon Ondoy flooded Metro Manila in 2009, PETA ran relief workshops in Biñan, Laguna. Magtoto was there documenting psychosocial debriefings, interviewing families about what they had survived. Those conversations became the foundation of the musical.
The heroine, Aileen, is a promodizer who films herself singing in the floodwater and posts the video to YouTube, hoping Ellen DeGeneres will notice. Underneath the comedy, the show asks whether celebrating resilience is just another way of accepting that nobody in charge is going to fix the problem.
Set designer Mio Infante put actual water on the stage. It was chlorinated for the actors’ safety, and the theater building was treated with citronella to keep mosquitoes away. The show opened on January 31, 2014, and its first run of 36 performances sold out completely.
It went on for seven seasons and over 300 shows, winning eleven Gawad Buhay Awards. Kim Molina, who joined as an alternate for the lead role of Aileen in the second run, won Best Actress in a Musical and launched a film career from that flooded stage. The music the critics once called baduy ended up inside a musical the theater crowd lined up for.
In February 2025, the remaining members played two nights at New Frontier Theater in Quezon City under the title Halik sa Ulan. Morissette, Ogie Alcasid, Jona and Julie Anne San Jose sang as guests. Juliet told the press that Mercy had wanted to be at the concert, but her health had already made it impossible.
On Fast Talk with Boy Abunda, the band performed “Luha” and broke down. Rey Abenoja said what the rest of them keep repeating: “Walang iwanan hanggang kamatayan. Kaso iniwan kami nung isa.” We don’t leave each other until death, but one of us left.
Two new singles are coming, one written for Mercy. Juliet has confirmed a tour of the United States and Canada. The band that once loaded its own equipment into jeepneys is still going.
Mercy Sunot was forty-eight when she died at Stanford Hospital on November 18, 2024, after eight months of treatment for breast and lung cancer far from home. Every time someone plays the album, she is still on it, right next to Juliet. Rest in peace, Mercy.
Have you ever heard “Halik” at a family videoke night and watched someone try to go for that opening note? Tell me in the comments what happened.
ns-meta sources: Wikipedia (Aegis, Rak of Aegis, Katy de la Cruz, Roberto del Rosario, Jopay, Rochelle Pangilinan) · Philippine Star (2018, 2025) · Manila Tribune (2025) · GMA News (2025) · HURIGHTS Osaka (2007) · PhilNews (2024) · Archīum Ateneo, Katherine Molina (2025) · Filipinas Library, Katy de la Cruz
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