What Nüsuù Knows

Shanghai after midnight is a different city—neon-slicked streets, clubs in basements that feel deliberately invisible to whatever authorities operate above ground, music scenes running on their own logic in the margins of a metropolis both ancient and violently modern. That underground has been shaped, for some years now, by Nüsuù Workshop, a collective founded by Zurich-born Lhaga Koondhor alongside Daliah Spiegel and Amber Akilla.

The name comes from the Chinese word for female—fitting, since the project is explicitly about cracking open a music industry that runs on male gatekeeping. What they actually do is less glamorous and more necessary than any mission statement captures: they feed Shanghai’s underground with industry knowledge, connect people, hold space for artists who’d otherwise have no infrastructure beneath them. In doing that work, they’ve become inseparable from the city itself.

Lhaga managed a bar in Zurich called Longstreet for six years, from 2010 to 2016. It was there she encountered a crew of Asian women who called themselves Wifey, and somewhere in that collision she noticed a gap—the music she loved wasn’t finding its way into the rooms she was building. She described it later as a creeping comfort: too settled in a job, too settled in a city, the feeling of standing still dressed up as stability. So she left. She moved east. I had the feeling I wasn’t moving forward, she told me. I needed to go out into the wider world and experience new things. Shanghai offered that vertigo. Even the daily necessity of a VPN to reach the outside internet becomes, in her telling, almost romantic—a tether to everywhere else while you’re standing inside one of the most contradictory cities on earth. I love what the people of Shanghai create, she said. And I’m glad to be part of it.

What strikes me about Nüsuù isn’t the standard story of outsiders conquering a city—that narrative gets told too often and flattens more than it reveals. It’s something more specific: three women who understood that a scene runs on infrastructure as much as talent, and that transmitting industry knowledge is itself a form of power. In a city where the state keeps a permanent eye on the cultural underground, building that quietly, from the inside, is no small move.