Ice Cream Sundays Turned 10 This Year. Its Birthday Present Is Japan's Rainbow Disco Club.

Dates / Venue / Tickets

Rainbow Disco Club Singapore, presented with Ice Cream Sundays: Saturday 3 and Sunday 4 October 2026. Day Session 1pm-10:15pm and Night Session 10pm-3am at Tanjong Pagar Distripark and Cargo39; Recovery Session Sunday 4pm-8pm at RASA. Category 1 tickets via Tessera: S$58 Day, S$50 Night, S$98 Day+Night, S$45 Recovery, S$138 for all three.

Haw Par Villa is a century-old theme park where a diorama called the Ten Courts of Hell shows sinners being sawn in half for eternity. It is an odd place to throw a party. Ice Cream Sundays has been doing exactly that since 2019, and this October the Singapore collective is marking its tenth year by inviting Japan's most fanatically followed dance festival to come see for itself.

A Drunken Idea, Ten Years Late

The accepted origin story, repeated by co-founder Daniel O'Connor in a recent Mixmag Asia interview, is unglamorous: a few friends decided to throw a party for their friends, no grand plan attached. Bandwagon Asia's 2024 profile of the crew fills in the specifics: O'Connor and schoolmate Jake Camacho, who DJs as Toppings, seeded the idea outside the old club Kyo in 2015 after a night out. The first parties, run out of a house with a soundsystem, followed in 2016.

Ten years on, ICS is one of Singapore's largest and longest-running alternative dance events, credited locally with popularising the day-to-night format: start in daylight, end in the dark, so a party has two distinct moods instead of one. "There's something really alluring about the natural vibe shift you get around dusk," co-founder Nick Bong told Mixmag Asia, "the journey to get there and the joy of closing it out good."

Teaching Hell's Courts to Dance

Haw Par Villa almost didn't happen. O'Connor first got the idea after hearing about a one-off Noise Invasion Festival there in 2017, but ICS was barely a year old and had no business taking on a venue like that. The idea sat for two years until he drove past the park's entrance again and picked up the phone. Management took some convincing: three meetings, by his own account, before ICS earned enough trust to book the Culture Courtyard.

That first Haw Par show, with Mugic Sound System, grew into Haw Par Thrilla, ICS's flagship series and a standing collaboration with fellow Singapore label Darker Than Wax, which we profiled on its own 15th anniversary. Half a decade later, ICS is still one of the few outside promoters the park lets in, at a venue built for embalming tycoons' legacies in concrete tigers, not techno.

Triple Scoop

Musically, ICS has always stayed in a lane of house, disco and balearic records, anchored by three resident DJs: Toppings, Bongomann and Muto. Their signature move, a three-way back-to-back called "Triple Scoop," started almost by accident at the crew's first party after Singapore's pandemic lockdowns lifted, when all three residents played the full day rather than splitting a bill. It stuck. This year the format stretched to six hours at Klymax Discotheque, the Bali sound system built by DJ Harvey that ICS's residents got invited to play.

From Singapore Outward

A 2023 booking at Hong Kong's Shi Fu Miz, arranged through ICS's connection to programmer Florian Melinette, turned into something bigger: Sunda Festival, a joint venture the two crews still run together. ICS residents have since played Thailand's Wonderfruit and Manila's Nokal, and the crew has hosted Shi Fu Miz and Darker Than Wax names on its own bills in return. "One-off bookings can feel quite fleeting," Bong told Mixmag Asia. "The relationships built with collabs like this are most real."

Why Rainbow Disco Club, Why Now

Rainbow Disco Club has spent twelve years selling out a hillside weekend in Izu, on Japan's Shizuoka coast, and has taken the format on the road to Bali, Melbourne, Amsterdam, Lisbon and Paris. Singapore is the second Southeast Asian stop after Bali, and ICS is the reason it's happening at all: the relationship dates to 2023, when ICS hosted RDC residents Kikiorix and Sisi at a Haw Par Villa show the crew still calls one of its best nights.

The Singapore edition borrows RDC's own three-part shape, but its Sunday closer has a specific source. Nick Bong and the RDC producer Kuniyuki, alongside Wata Igarashi, played an ambient live set called "Melting Hours" at this year's Japan edition; ICS's own ambient artist Kin Leonn was in the crowd. That set became the template for Sunday's Recovery Session at RASA, where Kuniyuki, Xiaolin and Kin Leonn now play a three-way live collaboration for the first time, a direct line from one festival's best moment to the other's anniversary programme.

The Next Ten Years

Anniversary talk is cheap in this business; every collective calls its milestone party a family reunion. What separates ICS's decade from a marketing exercise is that the receipts are traceable: a specific 2017 festival that planted an idea, three meetings to get into Haw Par Villa, a pandemic-era accident that became a trademark set format, a Hong Kong booking that grew into its own festival. Sunda and the RDC weekend are what that decade actually bought.

O'Connor's own plan for what comes next is characteristically undramatic: "deeper regional exchange, experimenting with new event formats, leaning harder into making ICS family-friendly, and more local tie-ups with collaborators old and new." No rebrand, no arena ambitions, just the same carpark-and-clan-hall math that got the crew here. Whether Rainbow Disco Club's slow-build ethos survives a Tanjong Pagar carpark in October heat is the actual test. Ice Cream Sundays has bet ten years on the idea that it will.

Cover photo: an Ice Cream Sundays daytime crowd. Courtesy of Ice Cream Sundays, via Bandwagon Asia.