Nastia: Keep on dancing

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.”