Darker Than Wax's Decade-Old Day Party Brew Finds a Third Singapore Home at Ida's Bar

Dates: Saturday, October 24, 2026, 3:00 PM to 10:30 PM Venue: Ida's Bar, Gillman Barracks, 9 Lock Road, Singapore 108937 Tickets: From $27.31

Darker Than Wax has moved its signature daytime party twice already, each time because the last spot stopped working. Brew's next stop, on October 24, is a cocktail bar inside Gillman Barracks that otherwise hosts gallery openings and wedding shoots.

A vinyl listening session that got too loud

Brew started small. Around 2015, Dean Chew, the Singapore label's co-founder, asked the owner of Chye Seng Huat Hardware, the Jalan Besar coffee roastery, if he could use the courtyard for records on a lazy afternoon. "I pitched the idea to the owner about using the courtyard for a lazy daytime vinyl listening session," he told Mixmag Asia. It worked, and kept working, until it didn't. "Brew sort of outgrew the courtyard," Chew said. "Noise complaints started to occur more frequently." The series went quiet.

It came back in August last year on AIR CCCC's outdoor lawn in Dempsey, with Pam Anantr and Mawkus on the bill. That run has apparently run its course too: Brew's next outing is billed as one last hurrah for the year, this time with no lawn in sight.

Why Ida's Bar

Ida's is a cocktail bar and event space that opened inside Gillman Barracks, the former British military compound turned contemporary-art cluster on the fringe of Alexandra. It's built for garden parties and wedding receptions, not sound systems, which makes it an odd match on paper and a fairly honest one in practice: Brew has never been a club night, it's a daytime hang with a good selector, and a bar with natural light and a courtyard fits that brief better than most actual clubs would.

Who's playing

Ray Kong returns to Brew for a back to back with Chew, who co-founded the label 15 years ago and still answers to "DTW boss" in his own label's press. Residents Daryl Knows and Dexter Colt round out the afternoon. None of the four are strangers to a daytime crowd that's shown up for Brew in three different postcodes now.

Darker Than Wax turned 15 this year, a milestone Loopliner covered in August, and its roster now runs from Singapore to Manila: the label put out a release from UNOS, whose track Heights is still sitting free to download on the label's SoundCloud. Brew is the low-stakes, no-door-fee version of what that label is about, which is probably why it keeps getting invited to borrow someone else's address.

Tickets run from $27.31, with entry from 3pm and last call at 10:30. Nobody's said yet where Brew goes next if Ida's doesn't stick either.