No Clubs, No Problem: Inside Kazakhstan's Electronic Underground

Image by @arthurkennet

Almaty, the so-called cultural capital of Kazakhstan, sits at the base of the Tian Shan Mountains, thousands of kilometres from Berlin, from London, from the clubs that most of the world uses as reference points for "the scene." That distance shows up everywhere here: in the cost of flying a DJ in from Europe, in the years the city spent with almost no dancefloor at all, and in the specific, hard-won flavour of what's been built since. To understand Almaty's electronic music culture right now, its renaissance, its defining parties, and its mix of grit and ambition, you have to hear from the people who built it out of very little.

For this piece, ANOMIE sat down with two of the city's most important figures: DJ Akee (Akezhan), a producer, promoter, and former street dancer who runs the party Vihod, and Nazira, the founder of Zvuk, the techno night that's become one of the most talked-about nights to come out of Central Asia. Together, their accounts sketch the shape of a scene that is, by both their descriptions, still in the middle of figuring out what it wants to be.

From Empty Dancefloors to a Renaissance

Almaty had a real nightlife once, with both DJs pointing to the same lost era. Nazira remembers a "rich scene in the '90s and early 2000s that was super pumping," but says that by the time she returned from studying in the UK in 2014 there was "almost nothing. There was no music I liked playing and there was no dancefloor, no community and sense of togetherness. There was nothing like that." She traces the decline to around 2010, when what remained was "just bars and maybe an odd 'cutesy' party" that she never connected with.

Akee describes the shift from the other side of the timeline, watching the scene rebuild itself more recently: "I think now the electronic scene in Almaty is like a renaissance. We don't have a lot of bars and clubs with electronic music, but we have a lot of events." That renaissance has a real anchor point with Boiler Room's 2021 visit to the city. Ask Akee and Nazira what Boiler Room's stop in Almaty actually changed, and you get two different answers. For Akee, it was a genuine growth moment, a sign he'd leveled up as an artist, but "My life didn't change massively after Boiler Room," he says. For Nazira, the impact was more visible. Zvuk had gone quiet through the pandemic, and Boiler Room became the restart button: "During the pandemic, we weren't doing anything, but after, I got energy and we did Boiler Room with Miller. That was a big breakthrough." What had been a "good" turnout of around 200 people before the pandemic became crowds of 500, 600, even 700 after, proof, in Nazira's case, that the outside attention translated into something the scene could actually feel on the ground.

The Black Box Economy

Ask what makes throwing a party in Almaty hard, and the answer is identical: there's nowhere to do it. Akee lays out the logistics bluntly: "Organising events in Almaty is hard because we don't have the locations. In Tbilisi, you can just ask any club. Here, we have to find an empty space, a 'black box' with no sound system, no visual effects, nothing. We don't really have a club, only Colossus, and that's new. So we find the black box, bring in the sound, bring in the visuals, build the bars, hire a bar team, security, cleaning, everything from zero. It's incredibly expensive." Every party is, functionally, a pop-up club built from zero and torn down again by morning.

Zvuk's parties have run through factories, cinemas, and a modernist bath house, and she connects that directly to Detroit's founding techno mythology: "I was always obsessed with the Detroit history, they used warehouses because they didn't have clubs, and we didn't have clubs either. I'm also a big fan of architecture, I want to go into traditional places, like a beautiful modernist bath house, and breathe new air into it, showing how the past, the present, and the future can work together without destroying the beauty."

The name of Akee's own party, Vihod, grew directly out of the isolation of the pandemic years, and out of exactly this kind of scrappy, self-made instinct. "It started in the pandemic," he explains. "Vihod (выход) in Russian means 'exit,' or 'escape.' Everyone was sitting at home without parties, and we found the escape from that situation." The idea came almost by accident in a taxi on the way home after DJing a bar set with his friend Rustem (@midclassgypsy). "I was in the taxi thinking, 'Maybe I should do a party,'" he recalls. He called a friend who ran a separate party called Kipiw and struck a simple division of labor: "You think about the music and lineups, I'll handle the money and the location." Later, the team came together with Akee, Rustem, and Akku, a former student.

Bringing in international talent compounds the venue problem into a financial one. Akee is candid about the math working against Almaty: "When you organise in Almaty, it's hard, because you're inviting a DJ from France or Germany who knows nothing about Kazakhstan, their fee might be €1,000, but the flight is €2,000. Our scene is smaller than Berlin's, and we end up paying a lot more just to get people here." 

Two Roads Into the Same Scene

Akee's path started with dance. He came up through Almaty's street dance and battle scene, teaching hip-hop and locking for seven or eight years. DJing began alongside his dancing, mainly playing at battles. It started as a substitute favor: a friend who usually DJed the dance battles couldn't make one, and Akee's teacher asked him to fill in. Later on, when knee problems brought his dancing career to an end, he leaned much deeper into DJing.

"I'm like, 'Well, I can't mix,' but for battles, mixing is not the main thing. First of all, it's about the selection of music." He borrowed a controller for two weeks, practised two or three hours a day, and played his first major battle soon after, in a country where, as he puts it, there were only "maybe five or ten DJs in the whole country" playing that circuit.

That battle scene shaped his musical range permanently, forcing him to learn genres on demand: dancehall, popping, whacking, and house, often from a standing start. "I don't know anything about dancehall, but okay, I'll play. I just started learning about genres on Wikipedia and reading books," he says, describing a pattern of deep, self-directed research he returns to again and again. His production side traces back even further, to childhood piano lessons he barely remembers and a father who downloaded him Fruity Loops (a music production software) and six gigabytes of hip-hop instrumentals as reference material. Inside that pack he found J Dilla, "For me, J Dilla is like.. wow. He's the GOAT of hip-hop music", and started producing beats that, unbeknownst to him for years, were circulating among dancers at competitions across Europe.

Nazira's path ran through Scotland. She left Almaty at 19 on a scholarship to study in the UK and found her formative scene at Glasgow's Sub Club, plus muddy, joyful raves in the Scottish countryside. "I love St Andrews, it's so beautiful. I spent a lot of time in the party scene in Glasgow. Sub Club had the biggest influence on me... I also went to raves in the Scottish fields, it was amazing. Everyone was just blackout drunk or on everything, but it was so fun and everyone was so friendly." She's explicit about the sonic through-line from those nights to her own party today: "I think British scenes had the biggest influence on me and Zvuk, you can hear we are really UK-leaning with bassy techno and stuff like that."

Her scholarship required her to return to Kazakhstan in 2014, landing her back in a city with, in her account, almost no scene at all. Two attempts at working with existing parties didn't take. In 2016 she started Zvuk on her own, while also, for years, holding down an unrelated day job in agriculture even as her international DJ bookings began to pick up. She built an international reputation faster than a domestic one, playing Berghain a number of times and gigging in Berlin, Amsterdam, London, and Paris. "People in Kazakhstan started to think, 'It must be legit if she's playing in Europe,'” she says, a telling detail about how validation sometimes has to travel a long way out and back before it's recognized at home.

Image by @drugoyden

What They're Actually Playing, and Why

Genre, for both of them, is less of a fixed identity. Akee is blunt about the economics behind this: "It's too hard to be a DJ here sometimes if you only play one genre. All DJs here know a lot of genres, all DJs play a lot of genres. I can't call myself a house music DJ because I also play hip-hop and a lot of electronic music stuff." He describes most of his sets as roughly 90% freestyle, reserving pre-planned tracklists for higher-stakes gigs, international bookings, and filmed sets, where he knows the results are going online permanently.

His tastes range widely and specifically: original house over the more "electronic," percussion-heavy Afro house that's become globally dominant in the last few years; Brazilian and Latin music, which he calls "one of the best"; a deep love of UK genres, drum and bass, jungle, grime, all of them cultivated through his own research habits. He's also fascinated by jazz's hidden branches outside the "lounge" stereotype, from Ethiopian jazz to what he calls underrated "Pan-Asian music," and by digging into hyper-specific regional scenes like Bulgarian disco: "You can find 'diamonds' in the more niche stuff... Google it and you find the diamonds."

Nazira's sound is more singularly rooted, and she names the lineage directly: bassy, UK-leaning techno, shaped by Glasgow and by London warehouse culture. Her account of finally playing Berghain doubles as a small lesson in trusting her own instincts over expectation. She'd downloaded a library of what she calls "dystopian" Berghain-style techno to prepare, "but it didn’t feel right because it wasn't my type of music." On the advice of friends, she scrapped the plan and opened instead with an hour of ambient on the club's famous sound system. "I was almost crying because I couldn't believe it was happening. That was my 'I made it' moment," she says. 

Vihod and Zvuk: Two Parties, Two Philosophies

Both parties are, at heart, acts of import and translation, but they're translating different source material into the Almaty context, and building different kinds of communities around it.

Vihod is Akee's showcase for the genre-crossing, dancer-friendly sound he grew up on, house, disco, funk, electro, baile fun, all played with the same "no restrictions" spirit he learned scoring dance battles. Its biggest moment to date was a collaboration with Keep Hush, four years after his Boiler Room appearance, which unexpectedly outperformed that earlier milestone emotionally: "I had a singer from Kazakhstan, Lilli, in my set. People on YouTube were commenting, asking who she was, what the track was; for me, that was just, 'wow, cool.' I picked up more followers from the UK and Germany off that one set than I did from Boiler Room." He describes the whole thing as an unplanned, freestyle moment that simply caught fire online.

Zvuk, whose name simply means "sound," is built around a more singular sonic identity,  bassy, UK-inflected techno, but an expansive idea of what the space around that sound should feel like. Nazira describes the party's core values in almost spiritual terms: "Ability to be free. To be yourself and just let it go. Through that comes acceptance and connection... In former Soviet countries, there are fewer spaces where people feel comfortable letting themselves go because of tradition and conservatism." She's watched that unlock happen in real time across repeat visits from the same people: "You see people come once or twice and they are very rigid, but by the third time, they are loosening up and their inside comes out. That's beautiful." Beyond the party itself, she's since founded Şien, a festival built to hold genres that don't fit inside Zvuk's techno identity, after a one-off grime night under the Zvuk banner went sideways: "People were leaving in the middle of the set. So, I thought, let's make a festival for all genres. Strength is in connectivity, 1 + 1 equals 11, not two."

Both promoters describe themselves as actively trying to export the scene outward, not just import influences inward. Akee tested a Vihod event in Turkey last year, which drew around 200 people, with hopes to run more shows abroad. Nazira has organised showcases of Kazakh artists in other cities and has a Berlin festival in the works, framed as a matter of visibility as much as ambition: "Because we are so far away, it makes us unique. We have our own culture and the world deserves to see it. I made it my mission to get more people from Kazakhstan playing outside."

Roots, War, and Why the Music Sounds the Way It Does

One of the most striking threads in Akee's interview is a theory he offers, almost as an aside, about why Almaty's dominant mood skews funky and celebratory rather than dark and industrial, and he ties it to both recent geopolitics and much older musical history. Comparing Almaty to Tbilisi, a city he's played ten times in three years and calls his favourite, he suggests: "If the country has a war, the techno scene grows up. People want an escape, and techno music is more about escape, more about freedom... Even my friends in Ukraine right now, there's more of a techno scene there because you want an escape. Maybe that's why in Almaty, our people love more funky music."

He extends the theory back into Kazakh musical tradition itself, pointing to the Aqyn, a historical figure closer to a folk poet-rapper, who performed lyrical battles accompanied by the dombra, a traditional stringed instrument. "Maybe we guys were the original rappers," he says, only half-joking, before noting a structural detail he finds telling: "Traditional Kazakh music doesn't use percussion, we don't have drums. Most traditional music is about war, battle, and death. Maybe that's why we don't have dance music." 

A City Guide, From the People Who Run It

Both DJs offered practical recommendations for anyone landing in Almaty for a weekend. From Akee: Blue Bar, which he calls small but with a genuinely good atmosphere, and Kumano; he suggests checking Resident Advisor listings. For something further out, he recommends @elevation3200 or @cosmicpicnic, for events built around electronic music in nature.

From Nazira, a rundown of the current landscape by genre: Zvuk for techno, Vihod for house and "fun music," and Spekto for tech house with light shows. Asked to sum up the scene in a single word, she reaches for the Russian Самобытный, roughly, "distinctive" or "of its own origin", and adds that it carries "a strong 'feminine energy' in terms of creation".

Image by @arthurkennet

What's Next for Kazakh Electronic Music

Neither artist talks about the scene as something finished. Akee wants to see more friendship and mentorship across generations of local DJs. "We should support young DJs and be curious about our oldest DJs. I'm in the middle of this generation and I want to share the history", alongside more international collaborations and more shows abroad. He has also produced a documentary film "Алматинский хаус" ("Almaty House"), dedicated to the birth and development of the city's electronic music scene. The film covers the 90s/2000s era, when the first discos, raves, and DJs emerged within Almaty, and music access was limited. The film tells the story of the scene's evolution, from parties for 20 people at the Academy of Sciences to the first superclub, DaFreak, and Kazakhstan's first mention in Mixmag.

Nazira wants to transform Zvuk into more of an international platform and focus on more sound art installations. Her closing thought doubles as a fitting description of what both of these artists add up to: a desire to "go back to the 'old school' approach where DJs were artists creating a space and connection, connecting to people in different ways."

That, more than any single party or genre, seems to be the real throughline of Almaty's electronic scene right now, a group of people building venues out of empty rooms, importing sounds from Glasgow and Detroit and Tbilisi, and translating all of it through a city that's still writing its own rules for what a night out can be.

@DJ_AKEE_

@NAZIRA_IN_ZVUK

Watch Almaty House here