Shanghai Underground
Shanghai’s club scene operates below the official narrative. Neon-lined streets, bass pressure from beneath street level, the kind of night-time infrastructure that doesn’t match the daytime. In the clubs you find down there, there’s a different circuit running—attention distributed away from the usual oversight, rules that apply selectively, the machinery of control loosening just enough to let something breathe.
This is where Nüsuù Workshop does its work. Three women—Lhaga Koondhor from Zurich, Daliah Spiegel, and Amber Akilla—built this collective in that space. They’re operating against a music scene that was locked down, male-dominated, going through the motions. What they created is a kind of knowledge infrastructure for the underground—taste, method, information, permission. They’re part of Shanghai’s fundamental contradiction: a city steeped in tradition, choked by the present, torn apart by modernity.
Lhaga came to this through necessity. She’d managed a bar in Zurich called Longstreet from 2010 to 2016, and there she met an Asian girl crew named Wifey. Something in that intersection stuck with her—a reminder that the music and community she wanted didn’t exist in Zurich anymore, maybe never would. The city had become too safe, too mapped, too settled. She moved to Shanghai and became like a chameleon, picking up everything—music, food, the texture of what people were creating. A VPN keeps you networked even inside the wall. She wanted to be inside the production, not outside observing it. Wanted to be part of what Shanghai’s underground was actually making.
The collective started funneling that knowledge back into the scene. Building scaffolding where nothing existed before, making room for people who didn’t fit the template. It’s not flashy, not a revolution, just methodical infrastructure in the margins. You move through Shanghai’s underground music world and you can feel the shift—not everything changing, but enough changing that different things can exist.
There’s a discipline to it that appeals to me. Not breaking the system, just knowing it well enough to slip through it, to carve out space where you can make something that matters. Shanghai’s full of people doing this same calculation—finding where you can move, where nobody’s quite looking, what’s possible in the gaps. Nüsuù’s just doing it with more intention, more clarity about what they’re building and why.