We’re starting to quite like Nastia here at Ears To The House. She’s one of few DJs in the modern, vanilla world who’s prepared to take a stance on something. Unlike many of the top, highly pampered touring DJs, she’s taken a strong, uncompromising view on the Ukraine war – and we have a lot of respect for the way she uses her platform to bring things to public attention.
Which is why we were very curious to see the Ukrainian DJ’s announcement yesterday that she was pulling out of the Awakenings Summer Festival, due to take place between July 29th and 31st. Here’s her full statement on Instagram explaining why…
A source in the festival world tells me Nastia’s fee was likely to be “somewhere in five digits”, so this decision will clearly result in a financial hit for the DJ. But she has done something almost non-existent in the echelons of the so-called top DJs – namely by putting principles ahead of money.
What a contrast with the likes of David Guetta, Carl Cox and Jeff Mills. These three men are multi-millionaires who were happy to accept Saudi Arabian blood money last year – an issue covered heavily on this site at the time and ignored almost entirely by the dance music press. These three men didn’t need to accept MDL Beast Soundstorm to pay the bills – but they chose to do it anyway.
We just have one question. Nastia says “As a Ukrainian DJ, I can not play in the same line up with Russians who are tolerant to war in Ukraine”. But which Russian is she talking about? Ears To The House decided to look through the Awakenings Summer Festival lineup – Nastia helpfully included it in her above Instagram post – to see how many we could find.
And whilst we accept the possibility we missed someone, we could only find three. They were Nina Kraviz, Vladimir Dubyshkin and Anastasia Kristensen. And as far as we can make out, Kristensen was born in Moscow, but seems to have spent most of her life living in Europe.
Dubyshkin has said nothing about the Ukraine war, and most recently posted on Instagram last week to inform us of his latest release on Trip Recordings – which just happens to be owned by Nina Kraviz. The very same Nina Kraviz who Nastia called out publicly two months ago.
Draw your own conclusions…
