TASHASAN Shut Down Her Own Singapore Collective, Then Built Two More to Replace It

Natasha Hassan did something almost no promoter does: she closed her own party on purpose. North East Social Club, the bass and garage night she spent years building into one of Singapore's more dependable rooms for UK sound, didn't fold because the crowds stopped showing up. It folded, in her words, because its work was done.

Hassan DJs as TASHASAN. Design came first. She's one of Singapore's more prolific graphic designers, and only started DJing post-pandemic, roughly two years before she played Boiler Room Singapore on July 20, 2024. "Because I am a designer, I feel like DJing was a natural progression or an easy transition," she told City Nomads. "The framework kind of translate easily." By her own account she'd already spent nine years working in music by that point, just not from behind a mixer, time split across design work and a stint inside a major corporate music environment that showed her how visibility actually gets manufactured there, playlist placement, pay-to-play. Seeing the mechanics up close cost her something. "I really lost all the meaning for my love for music because of what I saw," she said, "and I was the contributing factor to this." She stopped listening to music altogether for a stretch, filling the silence with podcasts and white noise until she could come back to it on her own terms.

A Crew Named After Its Own Founders

North East Social Club started as exactly what it sounds like: Hassan and photographer Chris Sim organising gigs together, later joined by Jerome Chong on music and Esther Goh on events. The initials spell out the crew's first names: Natasha, Esther, Sim, Chong. What began as New Year's Eve shows for local bands like Subsonic Eye and Blush grew into pop-up markets selling vinyl, tattoo art and zines, artist management for rapper BGourd, and eventually club nights built around UK garage, bass and jungle, the sound of UK festivals like Outlook, under the NESC x Phuture banner. It was enough to get Hassan into the Boiler Room Singapore booth two years into DJing, a fast climb for someone who didn't grow up behind decks.

Why She Walked Away From Something That Worked

NESC ended, as Hassan put it, "with the sense that its work was done." No scandal, no blowup, just a read that the platform had done what it set out to do and didn't need to keep running on momentum alone. What replaced it wasn't one project but two.

Huru-Hara, co-founded with Mia and Traction Control, both formerly of Kuala Lumpur's Breakboy Club, launched in October 2025 as a cross-border platform linking Singapore and KL's underground. Its debut at Cero PJ in Petaling Jaya paired UK producer Dubrunner with the three residents for a night built around dub, breakbeat and leftfield bass. "We aim to lean more towards celebrating our own sounds here in Southeast Asia and building a platform that can carry them further," Hassan said at the time.

Bringing Keep Hush to Raffles Place

The second project pulled an existing name into Singapore rather than inventing a new one. Hassan was the one who first brought Keep Hush, the London-born bass platform, to the city. Its most recent local edition, Keep Hush x Carhartt WIP, landed at RASA on Raffles Place in April 2026, presented under the Huru-Hara banner, with RAH, Hassan herself, Raissa Febriani and SHYHAIR b2b Jaydah on the bill. She's kept playing around town since, including a June 2026 slot on Mixmag Asia's own Circuits series at HighHouse, alongside ling:chi and PNNY, where she was billed as the Singapore-born DJ whose sets move through breaks, dubstep, juke and dub, grounded by heavy sub-bass.

Ask her about access in Singapore's electronic scene and Hassan doesn't reach for the usual talking point. Race shapes her experience, she's said, but gender is the more persistent barrier, especially when it comes to lineups. As a booker herself, she says she's often short on women to choose from, "not for optics," but because the opportunity to develop as one never evened out. It isn't a flattering soundbite, which is probably why it rings true.

None of Hassan's three projects chased scale for its own sake. NESC, Huru-Hara and Keep Hush Singapore are built on the same bet: that the scene's bass, garage and jungle corner, the one that never gets a festival headline slot, is worth a platform of its own, even one that eventually closes and gets replaced by another. Follow @_natashahassan on Instagram for where she turns up next.

Cover photo: TASHASAN at Boiler Room Singapore, 2024. Photo: Jared Rezel of Colossal Photos, via City Nomads.