Brooklyn's Jadalareign and Tokyo's FU Bring Their Soul Night to Manila's Nokal Tonight

Dates: Friday, October 10, 2026 (Manila) and Friday, October 16, 2026 (Tokyo) Venue: Nokal, Basement 1, Makati Square, Legazpi Village, Makati City Tickets: Presale listed at ₱500 through Nokal's HelixPay shop

Nokal doesn't look like much from the street. It sits in the parking basement of Makati Square, the mall everyone in the neighborhood still calls by its old name, Makati Cinema Square, long after the multiplex closed. Tonight the orange neon sign that replaced the original pink one is doing its job, because the club has booked two touring DJs who rarely share a bill this far from home.

FU, the Tokyo selector behind the long-running party Siren of Soul, plays alongside JADALAREIGN, a Brooklyn DJ and the senior curator at Halfmoon BK who spent years on the social media and artist-relations side of Discwoman before moving fully into the booth. Her sets pull from the American house, techno, soul and jazz she grew up on, filtered through a club context built around Black, Latinx and queer nightlife. She also runs SKILLSHARE, a workshop series on DJing, production and event work aimed at womxn, non-binary and LGBTQ people of color.

A Poblacion Name, a Mall Basement Address

Nokal isn't new to reinventing its own geography. It opened in 2018 on Kalayaan Avenue in Poblacion as a three-level diner-club-bar combo, built a regular crowd its owners still call the Lokals of NoKal, and shut down in 2020 when the pandemic made a three-floor lease impossible to carry. Managing director Marco Viray and music director Jason Soong reopened it in October 2022 in the last place you'd expect a dance club: the basement of a mall parking level. "The ones that brought back NoKal was the community," Viray said at the time. "They used to be our biggest spenders, now they're our partners." Soong has kept the booking policy blunt ever since: "Everyone's just hungry for a new sound."

A Tokyo-Brooklyn booking on a Friday night fits that line better than most. It's also a rare instance of a Manila basement landing a DJ days before she headlines a show on the other side of Asia.

Then Tokyo

Six days after Nokal, FU brings Jadalareign back for Siren of Soul at Circus Tokyo on October 16, alongside Tokyo DJ Nari on the main floor and a second room of Kairi Komoda, Disc Camp Forrest and Cirra. Siren of Soul has run in Tokyo for years as FU's showcase for soulful, boundary-crossing selections, the kind of party that doesn't translate easily onto a festival poster. Manila getting the warm-up date, rather than an afterthought stop, says something about who's actually booking international names into Southeast Asia's smaller rooms right now.

If You Go

Nokal is open Wednesday through Saturday, doors generally from 8 or 9pm, in the basement parking level of Makati Square on Chino Roces Avenue, Legazpi Village, Makati. Presale tickets for tonight were listed at ₱500 through the club's HelixPay shop, linked from Nokal's own channels. Bring cash as a backup; mall parking basements are not where you want your card to get declined. For a longer list of where else to hear house and techno in the city, see Loopliner's guide to Manila's clubs.