Shanda Sold Out Hong Kong's ABYSS Parties for Three Years. Then She Moved to Berlin.

Hong Kong doesn't have a techno neighborhood. It barely has room for one: rents on any strip with foot traffic price out anything that isn't retail, and the city's underground scene runs on one-night licenses and borrowed rooms rather than a strip of clubs you can walk between. Shanda started throwing techno parties there anyway, in 2020, the year travel stopped and nightlife with it.

The Doorway

She didn't come up through Hong Kong's club circuit. Shanda spent thirteen years as a classical flutist before a techno club in Australia, in her twenties, rearranged her sense of what a room full of people and a sound system could do. She has described it as feeling like "a doorway to joy and freedom," and she flew home and bought a set of decks. Within months of learning to mix, she and a friend, AngeliKa, started booking rooms under the name ABYSS.

It shouldn't have worked. Hong Kong's underground is small, the venue pool is smaller, and a new party series with no track record has no reason to sell out its first night, let alone its tenth. ABYSS did anyway: more than ten sold-out events and upward of seventy shows across the city's underground rooms, OMA, Social Room and Void among them, in the three years between 2020 and 2023. Shanda headlined Clockenflap, the city's biggest music festival, in 2023, and played dates in Vietnam, Sydney and mainland China on the strength of a party series that started as two people with no budget and a borrowed room.

Berlin

In September 2023, three years into ABYSS and with the Hong Kong scene finally paying attention, Shanda left for Berlin. Not for a residency, not for a label deal. She moved to immerse herself in a city that runs on techno the way Hong Kong runs on finance, and started from close to zero again: new rooms, new crowd, no name recognition. She now plays regularly at RSO, Club OST, OXI, Renate and Alte Münze, a set of venues most Hong Kong promoters would need years to get booked into, and her sound has shifted since the move, by her own description, toward something more hypnotic and texture-driven than the faster, punchier sets that built ABYSS's reputation at home.

That shift is audible on the radio show she hosted for Berlin's Refuge Worldwide station in November 2023, two months after landing in the city, titled simply Sounds of Hong Kong. It's a strange, telling artifact: a Hong Kong DJ, on a Berlin station, naming a show after the scene she'd just left.

What Comes Next

Shanda's first official production, Just a Little More, a collaboration with vocalist Fraen, came out on Bipolar Disorder Records' Various Artists compilation in September 2025, a full year into her Berlin run. It's a small catalog for someone who has been DJing since 2020, and that's the honest read on where she is: still building a production profile from a standing start, the same way she built ABYSS from one.

According to a September 11 interview published in Keyi Magazine, Shanda plays the magazine's own fundraiser, Keyi Vol. 002, at Phantom Bar in Berlin on September 26, promising a set she describes as playful and energetic rather than the hypnotic material she's been leaning into lately. It's a small room booking for a magazine fundraiser, not a festival slot, and that's worth being honest about too. The story here isn't that Shanda has arrived. It's that a scene as thin as Hong Kong's produced someone willing to test whether the export works both ways: whether a sound built in borrowed rooms in one of the world's most expensive cities can hold up in the city that supposedly invented the genre.

ABYSS, meanwhile, is still running in Hong Kong without her, part of a small wave of collectives, alongside Yeti Out, that have spent the last few years proving the city's underground can outlast any one promoter or one departure. Hong Kong's surviving house and techno rooms are still few enough to name on one hand. Shanda built a following inside that scarcity before she ever left it, which is a harder trick than building one in a city with fifty clubs to choose from.