By Raya Untalan

By Reanna Cornejo

A Fair is often defined by color and feeling: warm lights in the dusk, the blur of booths, sugar-dust in the air, familiar faces half-lost in motion — but the ASHS Fair has always had its sound. Footsteps sync with basslines. Laughter drifts like backing vocals. When the Ateneo Senior High School Fair turns on its lights on January 30, the featured artists become more than just performers on a stage. They symbolize a map of moods, constellations of student stories, and a promise that somewhere between the first chord and the last encore, you will recognize yourself.

This is your guide to the artists shaping that soundscape; student bands with names like inside jokes, solo acts who write songs like confessions, and well-loved guest performers who’ll turn the fields into a chorus of voices and light. And together, they form the soundtrack of Siklo.

How to Move Through the Sound

If you’re coming for the music, come early and stay late; you’ll feel the shift from daylight to stage lights, from anticipation to enthrallment. The ASHS Fair doesn’t sound the same all the way through. Its music shifts with the sky, with the crowd, with the hour. To experience it fully is not just to attend, but to listen closely. 

Dress for movement. You will stand, dance, wander, return. Bring friends, but don’t be afraid to drift on your own for a while. Expect crowds, expect noise, expect joy. Expect moments where you stop mid-conversation because a song feels too familiar, too tender, too alive to ignore. 

Siklo: Artist Vignettes

The first night belongs to the students. If the two day event were in a coming-of-age film, Bluelapalooza would be the montage; flashes of a radiant kind of electricity in the air, where everything feels a little brighter, a little louder.

For one of the student bands part of the Bluelapalooza lineup, the Raindrops, that scene plays with nostalgia. As students, they wear many hats and roles: leaders, collaborators, friends. But onstage, those identities melt into something collective. To listen to them, as described by their members consisting of Jake Villanueva, Vj Garcia, Elris Madayag, Reine Emiterio, Lorenzo Liwanag and Theia Evangelista, is to be dropped gently into a memory you didn’t know you missed. It’s the kind of sound that reminds you of inside jokes, of songs played too loud in bedrooms, of a past that still feels close enough to touch. For the members, music has always been about connection: a small, glowing shelter where people feel welcome. In their words, it is “a bittersweet sense of reminiscing, like a memory that makes you smile in times of yearning or melancholy.” This performance is especially precious to them, and they hope each song can be a reminder for everyone that music can hold more than sound. It can hold people. 

Bluelapalooza’s lineup continues to unfold like a playlist curated by feeling and fun. Each name on the list carries different shades of energy, and together create a kaleidoscopic spectrum of student artistry at the ASHS. Student bands like charley horse!, just in case, interlude, sugarless, kaleidoscope, inglare, and nitroglycerin bring their own qualities and touches to the Students’ Night; sounds born from jam sessions, shared playlists, and friendships forged in hallways and practice rooms. 

On the other end of the stage, the Raindrops’ fellow Bluelapalooza performer Stella Thursday, the solo project of Trinny Uyquiengco, steps into the light as the final chapter of her story at the ASHS. “Not only because I’m about to graduate, but I think it’s a symbol of how my songwriting has changed over the past two years I’ve been here.” She describes her indie-pop sound as built on poetry and pause, lyrics that linger like thoughts you only admit to yourself at night. What began as a love for music and writing, eventually converged into songwriting, shaped by the people she met in school, and the perspectives she gained along the way. Music, for her, is about hope and understanding, about offering listeners a mirror where they feel recognized. “I hope people feel peace if they find themselves listening on January 30th. Peace in the sense that somebody understands them through music.”

As evening settles over campus, the stage becomes a mirror of genuine student life: layered, expressive, unapologetically alive. Taylor Sheesh will excite the crowd with pop spectacle and communal joy, a reminder that music can be playful too. Indayog ng Atenistang Kabataan (IndAk) , the official dance troupe of the Ateneo Senior High School and known for their energetic choreography and vibrant performances at major dance showcases, will be gracing the Fair’s stage with rhythm you’ll feel in your chest before you even recognize it as music. The ASHS Performing Arts District (PAD) will gather many expressive voices into one expansive performance, proof that creativity and art at the ASHS is not confined to one genre or stage.

A Moonlit Second Act

Haliya, the Fair’s special fundraising concert for ASHS scholars, draws from the imagery of the moon emerging after darkness, light circling back despite everything. Inspired by the mythic tension between the moon and the Bakunawa, the night holds a quieter power. It asks the audience not just to cheer, but to feel.

The lineup is a constellation of OPM across generations. Apo Hiking Society brings decades of song and story, evoking nostalgia with timeless Filipino anthems like “When I Met You,” “Batang-Bata Ka Pa,” and “Panalangin,” melodies that have outlived the moments that first created them. Over October and The Ridleys bring warmth and feeling, the kind of music that feels like they were written for late nights and long drives, for feelings you don’t always know how to say out loud. They’ll perform indie-tinged tracks such as “Ikot” and “Be With You.”

Artists like Janine, known for her heartfelt singing style; Hey June! Whose breakout track “Lasik” has captured many ears; and The Vowels They Orbit, with their alternative pop, add sounds that move between genres, each act shaping the night in their own way. Rounding out the scene with homegrown talent, the Loafers bring vibrant student-born sound to the moonlit stage.

Haliya is not just a night of music. It is a gesture toward hope, continuity, and toward the belief that even in the dark, light always finds its way back.

A Stage of Belonging

Siklo is about return: of light, of laughter, of sound. The Fair’s soundtrack is proof that music doesn’t just accompany memory, it creates it. As the lights rise and the first chords ring out, as the guest artists elevate the fair while still making room for student voices to shine, where seniors play their final chords and first-time performers step into the spotlight, the audience become part of the soundtrack simply by being there.

As the nights unfold, listen closely. Somewhere between the cheers and the quiet moments, you might hear the sound of light returning — carried by students who dared to make something beautiful and share it with everyone else.