Meet DJ Toska, 23: He has played his music to the world at Tomorrowland in Belgium

TL;DR: DJ Toska created Toska and Friends to foster a community of like-minded partygoers, and lived every DJ’s dream when he performed at world-renowned music festival Tomorrowland.

An audience of thousands moves to the music booming from the loudspeakers as the DJ spins the deck on stage. His eyes fall on a group holding up the Singapore flag – he knows they flew for more than 10 hours to be there.

Bryan Chin, 23, also known as DJ Toska, is living the dream. It is July 2024, and he is only the second Singaporean – after Manfred Lim, or Myrne, in 2018 – to perform at Tomorrowland, an annual electronic dance music festival held in Belgium.

He plays a 30-minute set – his own unreleased tracks – at the festival, which he afterwards describes as an “adult Disneyland”.

Tomorrowland takes place every summer in Boom, Antwerp, attracting people from around the world. About 400,000 tickets made available every year sell within minutes.

Bryan says: “Toska is the Russian word for melancholy. At one point, I was feeling lost trying to figure out what I want to do in life, and then music came around. Every time I don’t do music, I fall back into that feeling of sadness. As a reminder, I owe it to myself to not be like that any more.

“The performance was a true representation of me: a complete mess, but somehow it worked,” he says, referring to his set at Tomorrowland.

Audio company JBL has partnered the young DJ since 2023.

He says: “I was on a Zoom call with the manager at JBL Australia, and she told me to read out a text that said: ‘Congratulations! You’re invited to perform at Tomorrowland.’ Initially, I thought it was meant for someone else, but was surprised to learn it was for me.”

Bryan launched his career as a DJ at the tender age of 17: He spun his first set at a party in January 2020, in front of a crowd of 300.

Amid the Covid-19 pandemic that followed, most artists paused new music releases. Bryan, however, bored by listening to the same club hits and pop tracks, decided to produce and release tracks of his own through platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. 

Then, he had the idea to organise his own mini concerts. He spent about a year going around the scene, asking for advice from other event organisers on how to go about it.

In 2023, Bryan co-organised the mini festival Toska and Friends. It was a series of “ballroom style” concerts – where the audience would simply crowd around the DJ – that would go on for three hours at a time. Ticket prices were as low as $7.

The aim of the festival was not turning a profit, he says – it was community building, something the DJ community lacked in Singapore.

A number of local DJs, invited by Bryan, performed in venues like Ikigai Izakaya at The Riverwalk and the Skyfall Rooftop Restrobar.

“It was a safe space for DJs to play any kind of music they wanted to play, and it would be loved and appreciated,” adds the young DJ.

The last concert organised by Toska and Friends, the sixth overall, took place in July 2024. It sold out, as did most of the previous ones, with about 250 partygoers gathering around the performing DJ.

“I decided to discontinue the festival because it was too aligned with 360 set-ups and boiler rooms – I want to do something new, something two steps ahead,” he adds.

“Boiler rooms” refers to a party concept where the audience crowds around the DJ booth, without anything separating them from the DJ.

Currently studying in the University of Melbourne, Bryan aspires to push out a different kind of song in Singapore – a blend of hard techno and hard house, which is typically more upbeat and fast-paced.

The artist plans to release at least six tracks in 2025, and dreams to travel the world to play at other music festivals.