If You Can’t Find the Scene, Build It
Kelsea Pinkston, aka Hip Stir, learned to DJ in Hanoi because a collective of women left the door open. She came home and built Austin a bigger one: BABE ATX, a school, a stage, and a family for the city’s femme and non-binary selectors.
The story starts with a Facebook ad in Hanoi. Kelsea Pinkston, a lifelong music kid who’d taught herself piano and guitar, was teaching English in Vietnam when an intro-to-DJ course crossed her feed. The course was Pho the Girls, a collective for women and non-binary DJs led by Maggie Tra. “It wasn’t until I saw a DJ space specifically for women and non-binary folks that I realized I could do that too,” she told CanvasRebel.
She fell in hard: bars, clubs, and festivals across Hanoi through the pandemic. Then she came back to the States, landed in Austin, and went looking for the same kind of room. It didn’t exist.
Her sentence doubles as this publication’s ethos, which is why she’s Profile Nº 001. What she made is BABE ATX (Bad Ass Bitches Elevating), a home for women, non-binary, genderfluid, and genderqueer folks in Austin’s electronic music scene. Intro-to-DJ courses at Femme Rock, $150 or barter. Vinyl classes. A Discord family more than a hundred deep. And it’s grown well past a single founder: MEA CULPA co-leads BABE Records, Saint Spicer co-leads BABE Meetups, and Amanda Koontz and Alejandra Herndon co-produced Babestock Rave 2026, the night that filled the warehouse floor until sunrise. Movements that depend on one person aren’t movements yet.
The rest of the résumé follows the community: official SXSW 2023 artist. Regular rooms at Cheer Up Charlies, Neon Grotto, Coconut Club. A radio show, Stir Crazy on Shared Frequencies, chasing global rhythms she picked up somewhere between Southeast Asia and East Austin. The sound: house, breaks, garage, electronica, played like someone who learned to read a floor in a language she didn’t grow up speaking.
Which brings us to June 19th, and a secret warehouse on the edge of town. When Babestock filled the floor until five in the morning, the bill was stacked with BABE family and Hip Stir’s b2b sat at the top of it. Look around that room, at the courage on the floor, the women behind the decks, the strangers becoming friends, and you’re looking at what she built, multiplied.
Movements are built before they’re recognized. Consider this recognition.
This series runs on nominations. Tell us who’s building something Austin doesn’t know about yet.