Nastia: Keep on dancing

It’s the nightmare start that every DJ dreads. Ukrainian techno star Nastia has just taken to the decks of Vinyl Pimp, the East London shop stacked floor to ceiling with rare second hand records, when the turntable on which she’s playing her first track –SBTRKT’s ‘Hold On’ – turns off. Someone, somewhere, we find out later, has accidentally pulled the plug out.

Given the challenge of playing this in-store using vinyl plucked from the shop’s uncatalogued shelves in just an hour, she’s admitted that she’s stressed at the prospect of playing music she doesn’t know. The situation feels tense, the suddenly muted crowd looking on expectedly. But Nastia, whatever is going on in her mind, holds the room with a calm, unfazed smile. A minute later the power is back and she sets to work like nothing has happened, Sampha’s soulful vocals mixing into an hour of perfectly sequenced house and techno, deep, delicate and with a trippy 90s edge. It’s a magical sleight of hand conjured up from a few record descriptions and a finely tuned ear; precisely why Richie Hawtin has asked her to play alongside him at Fabric tonight.

With no hype hits or label hook-ups to her name, Nastia has earned her place at techno’s top table the old-fashioned way: by consistently turning up and doing the business, turntable malfunctions or not. Born in a tiny Ukrainian village, the 28-year-old hosts a weekly radio show on Kiss FM Ukraine, the station giving her complete free reign over selection. At the non-stop two-week KaZantip festival she mastered her art by playing a minimum of three shows every day, and current demand for her DJ skills – as easily turned to house, or drum ’n’ bass (her other love) as they are to techno – means that last year she was playing up to 20 consecutive nights without a break.

Somehow in 2013 she found time to start Propaganda, her vinyl-only label that quietly puts out releases, with full artwork, from the likes of iO and Andrey Zots, its concise back catalogue ranging from intricately detailed minimal to dubby breakbeats. Then there’s the gathering pace of Strichka, the festival held in Kiev, where she now lives, each year around her birthday (on May 20); the 2016 edition, happening in conjunction with Closer on May 21, boasts a host of talent from Pearson Sound and DJ Stingray to Jus-Ed and Anthea. Her first appearance at Panorama Bar is up this month, then dates at Circo Loco in Ibiza and a packed festival schedule.

If this suggests a full-on approach, then today is no different. Having come directly to Vinyl Pimp from the airport, she has a sound check at Fabric almost straight after, then dinner, so our interview is split into two parts, leaving minimal time to prepare for her set. Nastia takes it in her stride. She’s disarmingly honest and willing to talk at length, joking and laughing despite modestly warning us about her English, after we’ve found a table in the plush basement bar of the Malmaison where she’s staying. Dressed in black Armani jeans and buckled leather boots, standard techno issue, she’s sporting a kakhi T-shirt she bought in LA picturing Robert Johnson, the legendary 1930s blues player who rumour has it sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his guitar-playing prowess (and who lent his name to one of Germany’s best clubs). It’s an apt choice. Although Nastia hasn’t knowingly entered into a Faustian pact, success, she suggests, comes with a price.

Born in a village of less than 2,000 people, the youngest of three sisters, Nastia (then Anastasia Besedina) grew up helping her mum with the chickens and pigs in their garden. But it was at school that she was happiest. Obsessed with dancing for as long as she can remember, she became something of a school celebrity, forming her own dance group to put on concerts, while even the village dances would end with everyone else gathered in a circle around her.

She was just 13 when she started going out, her age further disguised by make-up and high heels. She discovered electronic music around the same time, not just from MFM, the radio station broadcasting from Donetsk, the nearest big city, but also via TV. “There were some cool movies like The Matrix and The Dancer,” she says of two particularly important film soundtracks, the latter exposing her to Propellerheads ‘Take California’, which she opened her set with at France’s Kolorz Festival earlier in the year.

At the age of 16 she began dating DJ Cross, her favourite house DJ from MFM, and by 17 she was a dancer at Club NLO, then Donetsk’s best club, after being spotted by management on her first visit. “I was expressing myself as much as I could,” she chuckles about the exuberance that stills marks her out behind the decks. “It was a show, really.” She moved to the city to study marketing, but it sounds like this was never the real plan (“I have no idea what marketing is,” she laughs). Instead, despite the scepticism of some friends, she declared that she wanted to become a DJ. Taught how to mix by DJ Cross, the technical side came quickly and aged 18 she played her first gig, going straight in as the headliner. “It was very stressful, my hands were shaking, but it was cool,” she says.

The next year, 2006, while on holiday in Thailand, she got an email from Tapolski. The father of Ukraine’s drum ’n’ bass scene and now a festival promoter, he was such a respected figure, she says, that “I couldn’t believe it was him – I thought it was fake because he was so cool.” When the two began dating it profoundly altered her life. He introduced her to d‘n’b, the sound that still sits best with her expressive energy. It’s what she listens to when she’s feeling down, it’s what she says she prefers to play, her skills demonstrated by an incredible recent set in Mixmag’s Lab LDN. Even more importantly, the pair got married and had Uliana, Nastia’s now eight-year-old daughter.

The pair’s separation in 2009 was another catalyst in Nastia’s career. Having become involved with KaZantip after she’d met one of its VJs and he’d sent her CD to one of the festival bookers in Moscow, she progressed to running her own stage. A video of her, filmed during a nine-hour set at its 2009 closing party, went viral. Dressed in a green sleeveless dress, it shows Nastia DJing in high intensity mode, dancing, shaking and shouting more wildly and loudly than anyone around her, the pounding maximalism of Loco & Jam’s ‘Medusa’ adding to her aura.

Offers started to flood in. Some wanted her to recreate the moment, though she soon refused to play the track. There were accusations that she was on drugs (she’s only ever smoked weed and tried mushrooms on a handful of times), as well as the standard barrage of social media sexism. In reality it captured the release of something that had been pent up. “After I broke up with my husband I had so much energy that I didn’t realise before,” she says, frankly. “It was coming out of me.” The reaction helped spur an across-the-board reassessment. Having originally been christened ‘DJ Beauty’ by DJ Cross, she was still known at this time as ‘Nastia Beauty’. But feeling that she’d never be taken seriously, she trimmed down to her current moniker. “I could feel that people misunderstood me. It was a really hard time. I changed my style, I changed my music, I changed my name.”

The very next year the floodwaters broke, carrying her on a growing torrent of international gigs through to now, a year which sees her first appearance at Panoramabar on April 29 and numerous gigs at Circo Loco over the summer. It was also in 2010 that she formed a relationship with Moscow club Arma17, after meeting some of the club’s DJs at KaZantip. Allowed to hand-pick her dates as new resident of the club, which closed three years ago due to re-development but continues to throw parties, it’s become her home from home, giving her a space to redefine her sound in less obvious, more experimental realms. “It was super underground and they created amazing ideas,” she says, bright eyed, rating its atmosphere even above the legendary Berghain. “Once, they put ice on the dancefloor so you could skate. Another time they invited artists into a nearby building and created an entire labyrinth.”

Nastia seems uncomfortable acknowledging her talent, ascribing her journey to luck – even when we point out that her only other appearance at Fabric was to support Ricardo Villalobos (who was still playing, using her borrowed headphones, when she’d been to sleep after her own set). It’s certainly not luck tearing the roof off the London club at 4am when Hawtin starts setting up to follow, cameras thrust into Nastia’s face from the front of the booth, sweaty bodies stretching in every direction. As Discrete Circuit’s demented, bleeping ‘Machine Code’ stutters out of the system, a man in a wheelchair is hoisted head high in the middle of the floor, cheers erupting.

Two of the biggest tracks are forthcoming on Propaganda. ‘Safari’ is one of her own rare excursions into the studio alongside the handful of producers that she’s worked with (‘Safari’ was made with Nikolay Bogomolov, otherwise known as d’n’b producer NickBee, while she’s currently making tracks with Gera Taraman). All pulsing bass and polyrhythmic percussion, Nastia, now in a chic black dress, is clearly relishing it as she dances along with a wide grin. The other, the bubbling ‘Journeyman’ by Matteo Papacchioli, forthcoming on the same Various Artists EP and a hit in waiting, breaks down into an instantly familiar vocal hook from the earthy tones of Rich Medina.

It’s pitched perfectly, boiling over just as she hands over to Hawtin. But in her post-weekend Facebook post, covering all four of her extended weekend gigs, she brands it simply “okay, but professional”. It shows the exacting standards she holds herself to, as well as her refusal to engage with the usual online smoke-blowing. While her performances might look faultless to anyone watching, in private Nastia admits to some personal challenges. Last year she says she almost burned out thanks to her phenomenal tour schedule, refusing to cancel any dates (as she did two years ago, when she sank into a deep depression after the invasion of the Crimea) because she didn’t want to let fans and promoters down.

She also talks about the struggle of raising a daughter while earning money as a DJ, afraid she neither has enough time to spend with Uliana or to dedicate to finding music and getting into the studio. She even floats the idea of taking three months off at the end of the year, and of going back to university to study psychology. “It’s an experiment for me,” she says seriously. “I haven’t been at home for longer than a week since 2009. I want to experience normal life: sleeping at night, seeing the mountains in the interior of the country, not getting on any flights.”

At 9am, though, Nastia is at the front of the booth between Ali Dubfire and Hawtin, the ENTER. boss twisting the night into a crescendo of sound and bright white light. The woman with music and movement in her bones is still the gravitational force who pulls everyone else in around her. Her life might not be as uncomplicated and carefree as back in those village school days. But with an uncompromising purity and transparency around everything she does, Nastia is still a hypnotic force of nature.

Nastia plays at Strichka, Distortion, Kamehameha, Mystic Garden, Kappa Turin, Dour Festival, Tomorrowland, Into The Valley and The Social Festivals this summer