This month’s Afropicks heads west to Vancouver, where creative director Drew Ragiste is turning more than a decade of work in branding, design and experience into a new women-led nightlife platform — and putting four distinct selectors at the centre of its first night.
Before there was MUSE, Drew Ragiste spent more than a decade thinking about how people experience things. The creative director has worked across brand strategy, marketing, design and creative direction, building a career around the details that shape how people encounter a brand, a space or an idea. With roots spanning Grenada, Jamaica and the United Kingdom, Ragiste is now bringing that thinking somewhere new: Vancouver nightlife.
MUSE N°001, launching Sep 11, 2026 at GRIO, is her first move into that world.
The premise is simple: what happens when women are considered while a nightlife experience is being designed, rather than being marketed to once everything else has already been decided?
For Ragiste, that question reaches beyond who appears on a poster. She is interested in who books the talent, who shapes the programming, who makes decisions behind the scenes and, crucially, who gets paid.
“I’ve spent years thinking about what makes an experience feel intentional and what makes people feel connected to a space,” Ragiste says. “MUSE is an extension of that.”
Her ambition is not simply to put women into an existing nightlife formula. MUSE brings music together with performance, beauty and other creative disciplines, while creating paid opportunities for women working across those spaces. Ragiste ultimately envisions it as a broader cultural platform, with future iterations moving between music, visual art, fashion, wellness, performance and other forms of creative expression.
The first edition begins with the sound.
MUSE N°001 brings together four women of colour behind the decks: RAEDIAMENDZ, SAANZ,and DJ BOMBAE. Across two rooms, the night moves between R&B, hip-hop, Afro House, African electronic music and percussion-led rhythms.
More importantly, these are not four interchangeable names assembled underneath an “all-women lineup” banner. Each arrives with her own relationship to genre, culture and the dance floor.
For this month’s Afropicks, we’re meeting the women setting the tone.
RAEDIAMENDZ: The Crowd Mover
If you have been paying attention to Vancouver nightlife, RAEDIAMENDZ is already moving through some sizeable rooms.
The Vancouver DJ has built a reputation around high-energy sets pulling from global and club sounds, with a style designed less around staying neatly inside genre lines and more around understanding exactly what a crowd needs next. Her sets are dynamic and crowd-moving, and she has become a familiar presence across Vancouver’s club and festival ecosystem.
There is plenty of evidence of that approach in the mixes she puts online, where rap records, club edits and familiar songs become material for something built specifically for the dance floor. Her own flips and combinations make clear that she is not interested in simply presenting records untouched.
For MUSE, that versatility matters. A night spanning R&B, hip-hop and Afro-influenced electronic music needs somebody who understands that the journey between those sounds is as important as the records themselves.
Afropick: Come for the recognizable records. Stay for what she does to them.
SAANZ: Rhythm Before Everything
SAANZ approaches the dance floor from the body outward. “My body naturally responds to drum-led rhythms,” she says in the MUSE release, describing African electronic music as something physical rather than simply something you hear. That distinction tells you a lot about her lane.
Her sound moves through African electronic music, percussion and the kinds of rhythms that make the body react before the brain has finished identifying the genre. It is a relationship to music that treats the drum not as decoration, but as architecture.
For a platform trying to build a night around distinct creative identities, SAANZ matters because she does not arrive to supply a generic idea of “Afro” to an otherwise mixed-format lineup. Her sound points toward the enormous electronic worlds developing across the African continent and its diasporas, where rhythm is the foundation rather than the accessory.
Afropick: For the people who hear a drum pattern and immediately stop whatever conversation they were having.
Ashlih-Iman, aka DJ bombae’s story in the MUSE release begins in British Columbia in 2017. She remembers entering DJ culture at a moment when she rarely saw women behind the decks — particularly women of colour — while also navigating how music from different diasporas could be flattened, misunderstood or treated as though entirely different cultures were interchangeable.
Her own musical world developed differently. Growing up between African, South Asian and SWANA influences, “bombae” describes learning how sounds can coexist without losing their identities. That makes her an interesting fit for a night like MUSE, which is deliberately refusing the idea that a culturally expansive dance floor needs to sound like one thing.
For Ashlih-Iman - DJ bombae, the night also carries a more personal sense of return. “That is why MUSE feels so full-circle and meaningful to me. To see a women-centered event concept built around safe, supportive energy and the celebration of our individual sounds and expressions feels special. It reflects a kind of visibility, community and representation that I could only have dreamed of when I first started.”
Diversity in nightlife means very little when everybody gets booked and then expected to play the same five records. bombae’s presence makes the case for something much more interesting: let artists bring the complicated musical worlds they actually come from.
Afropick: The selector for people whose playlists stopped respecting borders a long time ago.
Something Bigger Than One Night
Three DJs are enough to build a party. Ragiste is thinking beyond one. She does not want MUSE to become one event copied and pasted every month. Instead, the intention is to build experiences around different ideas and different combinations of women working across creative industries. That makes MUSE N°001 less of a finished statement than an opening argument.
RAEDIAMENDZ brings the instinct for the crowd. SAANZ brings a physical relationship to percussion and African electronic sound. DJ bombae brings a musical identity shaped between cultural worlds.
Behind them is a creative director asking a useful question about nightlife: if you could design the room differently from the beginning, what would you change?
MUSE is about to find out.
MUSE N°001 takes place Sep 11, 2026 from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. at GRIO, 520 Alexander Street in Vancouver. The night features RAEDIAMENDZ, SAANZ, and DJ BOMBAE alongside pole performances, flash tattoos, tooth gems, beauty activations, functional mocktails and a full bar.