NYMPHO are bridging the gap between queer club culture in Aotearoa, Australia & beyond

Since its first volume back in 2021, Tāmaki Makaurau’s NYMPHO has evolved into much more than just a club night. Four years and sixteen instalments later, NYMPHO is a queer club night, a collective, a record label, a lifestyle, and as their Instagram handle @nympho.world suggests, NYMPHO is building a world; one that bridges the gap between and unites underground queer club culture across the Pacific, from Aotearoa, to Australia, and beyond.

Co-founded by artists Monoga.my, Teddyyy, ATARANGI, DIESEL, and recent team additions ballroom MC Manila and DJ Kate Butch, NYMPHO’s kaupapa is rooted in uplifting marginalised communities and creating an inclusive and transcendent club experience, following the legacies of Tāmaki club nights like FILTH and FULLY EXPLICIT who they name as key inspirations. With their Instagram bio reading “SEXUAL LIBERATION & GENDER EUPHORIA”, NYMPHO does so by intertwining artforms from visual art, to performance art, to ballroom, all meshed between genre-diverse dance-focused DJ sets. While building a platform to spotlight the best of Aotearoa’s queer talent, throughout their growth as a club night NYMPHO has been able to fill a huge gap in Aotearoa’s market by hosting countless queer international icons on NZ’s shores.

“The event was growing at a steady pace, and with that, we naturally want to make each show more iconic than the last,” DIESEL says. “DJ G2G was the first international we ever brought over, and since then, we’ve graciously had the means to bring international artists for pretty much every show. As DJs, we of course want to see and bring over acts that we look up to, but I think it’s important to bring these international acts over for our audiences to expose them to new sounds and perspectives. These types of experiences strengthen the arts scene here, encourage international connections and platform local talent on a larger stage.

Kylie adds, “we feel very lucky to bring international artists over. We see the benefits in a few different ways. Firstly, obviously, our audience is often fans of these artists, and it is great to see them on our shores and get to party with them. For our local DJs, it’s great for the resumé to share a stage with these artists and to see them DJ up close and personal.

When we brought Kevin Aviance and MikeQ over, the community reaction was immense, and the night was incredibly special. Seeing our ballroom community interact with these icons was so gorgeous. During one moment, Kevin Aviance told Mother Mistress Coven-Aucoin that Kevyn Aucoin (Kevin Aviance’s friend) would have been so proud that her house took his name. Kevin Aviance came to the after party and DJd for us until 10am, with the ballroom girls not far away giving him his 10s.”

In a country that’s often overlooked on artists international tour schedules, particularly for queer artists looking to be booked outside of the limitations of mainstream promoters, NYMPHO has hosted global superstar headliners on their stage including Isabella Lovestory, Doss, TAAHLIAH, Ninajirachi, Kevin Aviance, MikeQ, Pxssy Palace, Jasmine Infiniti, Estoc, DJ G2G, and more. Always ahead of the curve, they hosted superstar producer/DJ horsegiirL back in 2023, before Laneway Festival booked her the following year, and before she played arguably one of the biggest stages in the world this year at Coachella.

Not only growing exponentially as a club night, with such a strong pull and cult-fanbase that they commonly sell out tickets even before their full lineups have dropped, each member behind NYMPHO’s success has evolved over the years into their own renowned respective solo careers. Co-founder couple Monoga.my and Teddyyy have opened for international acts like 100 gecs, and Teddyyy has embarked on an electronic dance-pop musical project distributed through NYMPHO’s new record label venture.

“The label idea formed when I was producing my first single,” Teddyyy says. “It's dead simple for artists to self-release nowadays, but it felt right to have NYMPHO as the vessel. Music has always been at the core of our events. Many of the DJs we book are also producers/artists in their own right - several of them contributed to ‘Radio (Remixes)’, our most recent release. I love that it opens up a new avenue for spotlighting the talent in our local community.”

Two of NYMPHO’s members, DIESEL and ATARANGI, relocated to Naarm in the last year to further expand their DJ careers and strengthen the NYMPHO brand and audience across the Trans-Tasman. The latter pair have quickly become mainstays in the Naarm nightlife scene, cementing themselves at the forefront of the next generation of queer underground club culture across the Pacific.

2024 Mixmag cover star ATARANGI played his first Boiler Room set last year for Lady Shaka’s Pulotu Underworld indigenous all-Māori event, as well as leaving his euphoric mark on stages including Beyond The Valley festival 2024 and B2B sets with legends like Skin on Skin and Chippy Nonstop. Now, after expanding into new territory and hosting their first ever club night outside of Aotearoa earlier this year in Naarm, with international headliners nasthug, Lagoon, and Lil C alongside all-star local support, NYMPHO are preparing to present their first ever Australian tour this May, coinciding with ATARANGI’s debut headline tour as ATARANGI + FRIENDS. With tickets available now via NYMPHO’s website, the tour is set to hit Boorloo/Perth on May 10th, Eora/Sydney on May 23rd, and Naarm/Melbourne on May 31st.

ATARANGI first came on board the NYMPHO team a few volumes in, but his close relationship with OG founders Monoga.my and Teddyyy dates years back, even citing Kylie, AKA Monoga.my, as the first person to teach him how to DJ. Through booking international headliners for NYMPHO since his first instalment booking DJ G2G in December 2022, he’s come to learn both sides of the differing perspectives of being a DJ and a booking agent, and the dance that is finding the middle ground for both parties while having the best interests of both in mind.

“It’s really interesting being a full-time DJ and negotiating with booking agents for other artists,” Liam reveals. “The logistics of booking international artists is, like, their agent has their best interests in mind, and we have our best interests AND their best interests in mind. So finding middle ground for that is always so important. Sometimes it can get a little bit hard and strenuous, but the logistics is just a part of the job, and it's something that we're all kind of learning as we go.

It's really valuable to know how to do that stuff and know how to negotiate with those artists. But also, outside of dealing with the agents, we try to build really good rapport with our artists when they're on ground with us. We really try to make sure that the whole experience for them is great. It’s strictly business on the emails, and then on ground, we try to give the artist the most fun possible experience.”

Having two of NYMPHO’s members living in Naarm now and expanding the brand into new territory, and with more New Zealanders than ever leaving the country and moving to Melbourne in the face of cost of living crisis’ and lack of opportunities in Aotearoa, it’s more important than ever for the NYMPHO team in Tāmaki Makaurau to continue to fill the gap in the market for queer club culture in their city. They’re aware of how hungry our new generation of queer kids are to go out and experience high quality club culture - noting how the majority of NYMPHO attendees are 18-20 year olds - and are eager to give them the real club experiences that they may not have gotten in their early clubbing days.

“I am so proud of all of our events, but most of all, I’m proud of the audience we have built. We love them and it is so fab to see people partying without a care in the world,” Kylie reflects. “We would really love to start holding events in larger venues, work with other collectives to create bigger events. We would love to do multiple stages. It would be great to do events in Pōneke and Ōtautahi, and maybe we will be doing one soon!”

Having lived in Naarm for the past year now, ATARANGI has experienced first hand the differences between Tāmaki Makaurau and Naarm club culture. While the Melbourne population is much bigger - in fact, the same size as New Zealand as a whole - the infrastructure around events and nightlife in Melbourne makes for a much more sustainable scene.

“People actually go out and stay out here in Naarm,” He says. “It reminds me of when I came home to Tāmaki last August. It was when Double Whammy had their opening night, and I went out and saw Half Queen play. She finished playing at 1am, and then everyone went home. I was like, what the hell? Are we not gonna go do anything else after this?

I don't know. I haven't really heard what it's like now, but I do see less events happening. I think the difference here in Naarm is that there is more infrastructure for clubbing. But there's also not as much money as people think there is. We do get a lot of big acts, and we do have a lot of bigger venues. But even Melbourne has the same problem as Auckland in regards to not having enough medium-sized venues. That's why NYMPHO hasn't really gone out of Neck of the Woods in Tāmaki, because there's kind of nowhere in the middle to go. Naarm has a lot of great 400-cap venues, and then the next venue is, like, 800 to 1000. So it’s like, an accessible 600 capacity venue just doesn't really exist.”

He adds, “Another thing here in Naarm is that people go to events for the support acts a lot more than they go for the headlines, which I think is really sick. People go to support their friends, and they go to support people that they're familiar with in the community, and I think people are also all really open-minded here. It's always such a varied assortment of people. I don't really know if I had, like, a core audience back home."

Having just played the first show of the NYMPHO PRESENTS: ATARANGI + FRIENDS tour last weekend in Perth, the experience of putting together a full headline tour has proved to be a much bigger undertaking than NYMPHO’s usual club night editions. ATARANGI admits that the tour has come with its uncertainties, but acknowledges with confidence that no artist can grow without taking risks.

“Putting these shows together has been vastly different to the usual club nights for multiple reasons,” ATARANGI says. “Personally, I’ve learned so much more than I thought I would have."

"Planning and executing an entire tour, especially one that falls under not only your name but NYMPHO as a whole, is a lot of pressure! Aside from the obvious logistics of it all, I think there’s also a lot of pressure put on underground artists when we do things like this, especially in Australia. For me to be touring in Winter when the scene is pretty quiet is a pretty ballsy move, but I wouldn’t have done this if I didn’t trust in not only myself but the weight that the NYMPHO brand holds.

It's all paid off pretty well so far, though; the reception to the tour across the board has been amazing, and a lot of the audience we gained from our first collab event with DUTTY at the beginning of this year have bought tickets to the show in Melbourne, which feels great. I’m stoked to be able to carry what was started back home over here.”

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Tickets for NYMPHO PRESENTS: ATARANGI + FRIENDS are available now via NYMPHO’s website, hitting Eora/Sydney on May 23rd, and Naarm/Melbourne on May 31st.