The evening caught fire quickly. The mansion in the Mist was sitting unused as the perfect setting for a guerrilla-style music event.
Attendees were encouraged to dress up in their street wear—criminal or club-ready—for the Breaking N’ Entering Festival. Cool Cat Crew, the hosts for the evening, only revealed the secret location at the last possible minute.
The team—made up of a crew of 18 DJs, nine content creators, two event organizers, and one producer—got its start as the brainchildren of Nyte Shayd, DJ Quade, and DJ Benzy. Now, Cool Cat Crew’s community brings a bevvy of talent to the club scene in Eorzea and beyond. The Breaking N’ Entering Festival was just a taste of what they offer.
When I arrived at the festival, there were Lalafell already dancing and causing just the right amount of chaos on the floor. Black Pampa had just ended their set a few moments before, and onstage, dancing on top of the DJ booth, was Nyte Shayd. The Lalafellan DJ was playing a smooth mix that felt trance-inspired.
“Anytime I get a chance to play music, it’s basically therapy to me,” Nyte Shayd later said.
“To do it surrounded by my team and my friends makes it even better!”
The energy on the floor was high, and Nyte seemed relieved to see the allnight lineup come together. After his set in the rotation, we sat down to chat some more about music, life, and the Lalafell community.
“It’s tough trying to balance [music, the club scene, and IRL], plus supporting friends, helping to run and support the [Cool Cat Crew], and being able to find some free time in there to sleep,” he joked.
The DJ has become quite the busy Lalafell since joining the clubbing scene a couple of years ago. But even he can wade through all those memories and reminisce about his first few nights out in Eorzea.
“I saw an ad in [Limsa Lominsa] one night when I was bored,” Nyte recalled. “I wandered into the venue and didn’t really think much of it.”
It wasn’t because of the venue that he wasn’t immediately drawn in, though. For someone new to the clubbing scene in FFXIV, it can be strange to see a bunch of people jumping around to either in-game music or seemingly nothing. It doesn’t appear as though much is happening.
It takes being part of the conversation, acknowledging the staff’s call-outs and stream announcements, and asking the right questions to fully get it. And sometimes—like in Nyte Shayd’s case—it just takes having friends drag you out one night and show you the ropes.
Just a couple of days after Nyte’s first time in the club scene on his own, he was invited out again.
“They told me to come and they would introduce me to the community,” he said. “That was Club Penguin. That’s where I fell in love.”
Once hooked on the feeling, Nyte and his wife started falling deeper in love with the clubbing community. Before long, they were working towards opening their own night club. (Not that real estate in Eorzea is ever easy or affordable.) The first attempt at the housing lottery in Foundation yielded no wins. It wasn’t until Elina Shayd, Nyte’s wife, stumbled upon a large plot in the Mist. Out of 120 bids, they got it.
“The Nexus was born.”
Nyte Shayd’s way into the clubbing scene was an interesting pipeline that began with finding the right community, starting their own venue, and then becoming a DJ. However, it wasn’t a completely unheard of pivot from club owner to performer. Nyte is a musician, starting with the piano at 6 years old and later adding on the guitar, bass, drums, violin, and trumpet. In a previous life, they were a radio DJ.
“It was a whole new world [from vinyl to digital], and I basically had to start over,” he said. “Benzy took me under his wing…"
"Three days after I got my deck, a DJ canceled at Nexus, and I got tossed onstage.”
Trial by fire seemed to work for Nyte. With a support system behind him, the novice earned his proper place among the many other talented musicians in the Lalafell and FFXIV DJing community.
“I've now learned how to read the sine waves, the bars that run across my stream… I read the graph to understand what a song is going to do and when, and now I can predict what a song is going to do ahead of time to be able to mix on the fly with no rehearsal,” he said. “I've been known to run tracks I've never fully heard before in my sets.”
That confidence means he can take things at his own pace and not overthink the work he’s doing.
“Honestly, I don’t push too hard,” Nyte said. “I don’t spend nearly enough time advertising myself I just kinda do what I can when people ask and just hope they enjoy it. Two watchers, 200 watchers, I’m good. I just wanna play music and have fun!”
Word-of-mouth advertisement seems to be working for the relaxed DJ, who has lately been considering taking his act out into the real world where he already gets so much of his influence.
“I listen to my recordings of my sets in the car to hear my mistakes, so I can learn from them to get better,” Nyte said. “Thus my kids hear them.”
The little Shayds have already offered pointers that have influenced the direction his music takes, including songs with recognizable lyrics so people can sing along. But with his songs often ranging between the 1980s and 2010s, they can’t help but refer to his mixes as “dad sets”.
It’s been a short but meaningful journey in the FFXIV music scene for Nyte Shayd, with even more room to grow and continue for years to come. That fateful night in Club Penguin still sticks with him to this day. It wasn’t just music that pulled him into the scene. Truthfully, music is everywhere. It was the right place with the right people and the right time for Nyte.
“When Rada took me to Club Penguin, and put me in a big group with like 15 other people, I suddenly realized there was so much more going on in these clubs,” he recalled.
“They were talking about life, they were talking about glams, they were talking about the music… They were just having fun. There was no prejudice, there was no hatred. [It was] just a group of people from all over, from every ethnicity, some from the LGBTQIA community, some not, some support[…] It’s so hard to find a corner in this world without some type of hate these days. In that night, I found it, and I’ve done my best to hold onto it ever since.”
Community matters to Nyte Shayd.
“I’m a veteran, and it’s like an unwritten rule, you can trash on the other services all you want for fun, but if a civilian who never served does it, we all have each others’ backs. The Lalas feel the same to me. We can joke and have fun, but the second somebody has something negative to say about Lalas, they no longer have ankles, shins, or knees.”
Community, time with his family, and his crew. Those are some of the most important tenants of life for Nyte.
So, what’s next for Nyte Shayd? Anything and everything. Bringing his music IRL, more events, more time nurturing other streamers in his community, and more chances to be part of something big.
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