The citywide renaissance of Trans electronica in this ultramodern day and age
By Jay Ashdown & Andrea Zayan
*audio coming soon*
It’s a devilishly hot July night and the esoteric citizenry of this prolific city have been called upon to flock to where we must make the most of our salty perspiration. Abundant in sweaty assets, bodies gather to redistribute metaphorical riches to hankering coterie. There’s sped-up nightcore blasting through an unladen charcoal warehouse somewhere along Toronto’s post-industrial repository and an idiosyncratic rhythm compliments the clickity percussion pummeling through the aural expanse.
A clammy mob of canine collars, feline ears and fluffy tails perk up into the dark as stiff, squeaky pleather gear rubs up against one another. Metal chains clash with spikes everywhere. Bound-up harnessed bodies caper to the rapid vibrations and leashes entwined with O-rings jangle intrepidly. There are cats and dogs in every corner, everywhere you look, progressively engulfing the mercantile void. It’s a grand, ferocious feast in the chamber which holds all the animalistic freaks of the night, housing an inclination beyond words… ME-OW!
Early in the night, at the DJ booth, a signature thumping bass galvanizes our flesh and blood. On the platform, spinning the disc in knitted cat-ear-chic, is in-house DJ “EMRYSLAZULI.” She’s witness to the tail-wagging from the elevated deck and it’s these glimmering moments of kinship enrapturing her from the beginning.
EMRYSLAZULI feeds off the ridiculously close quarters of a rave — where people are crammed into each other, clawing at an urgency for closeness. She lives for the thrill of bodies convulsing and enveloping the DJ booth, emulating the current flowing through the speakers. The white noise of chatter paired with hard techno and friends barely discernible over an abrasively loud beat is truly and utterly music to her ears.
“I like to have the warmth of people around me,” she says, describing the stark contrast to more highbrow nightlife environments.
From these close encounters, the Trans rave has always served as the utopic space for community gathering. We’re free to be supernatural, gross and compact with one another. In these discotheques, we tread our way forward and tune out the ludicrous moral panic affixed to our humanity.
In the Trans rave, I turn corners to see full-faced dog masks clinking at one another and Trans dykes in wife-pleasers making out passionately in my vicinity. There’s no sight more paradisiacal than the unfettered Trans indulgence fostered in the tract. Everyone’s encouraged to be a freak and nobody gives a fuck.
As a flâneur of the rave, EMRYSLAZULI often sees people come into their own in the pit. It’s the inherent rapport of the space which allows us to flourish, arrive at revelations of self-discovery and develop boundless connections. Walking into the Trans rave can be a lifeline — whether you’re finally witnessing the gender-fuckery you aspire to, or they’re calling you fish at the door.
Wielding a comically large, bulky Polaroid camera in transport, EMRYSLAZULI trots her way down to Pep Rally for her first-ever rave. Clans of cosmically dressed groups gather outdoors for the then-DIY affair. Throughout the night, she meets countless friends, hears a myriad of stories and snaps pictures on her cumbersome camera, which prints them out instantly.
She walks away from the night with the lingering warmth of meeting new people. Under the figurative roof of the DIY, nightcrawlers dance steadfastly and everyone’s overcome by the urge to rollick to ear-shattering noise. EMRYSLAZULI’s first time seeing and being a part of these soldering interactions sparks her fervency for the rave and its salvation. Revering the sheer dedication of crusaders who are working to cultivate these spaces, not long after, she knows it’s her calling too.
Years later, EMRYSLAZULI routinely finds herself at another rave and bumps into a familiar face. She and another girl mutually stop in their tracks as they spend the next few minutes scouring their memories for what’s summoning this severe case of requited déjà vu. EMRYSLAZULI can’t quite put her finger on the uncanny resemblance in front of her but clairvoyantly knows the answer lies within the stills from the iconic Pep Rally night two years prior. Diligently scrolling through her phone, lo and behold, among the priceless vignettes is a striking coven — who are all presently there in accompaniment in her eyesight.
There’s a spritz of magic coursing through this thread of connection and these gratifying bonds push EMRYSLAZULI to her breakthrough. She knows she needs to finally take up what she’s been contemplating since she first saw the deck — DJing. Years in the making, her epiphany arrives alongside her desire to make sure other Trans people have the space to flourish too.
“[Raving] helped me come into my own and discover my own personal identity and my gender identity,” she says.
Now, the Black Trans DJ has an unmistakable swathe of genres attributed to her sets. Techno, psychedelic trance, hard groove and all things electronic reverberate wall-to-wall whenever she’s twisting knobs and sliding crossfaders. EMRYSLAZULI anchors the trills of the bass into her mixes — for her, it’s the best way to guarantee everyone’s shuddering the floor.
Every cliché about Queer authenticity is amplified and subverted at the all-Trans dance floor. Our bodies are allowed to breathe, move and converge while synthetic patters suffuse our molten forms. In the Trans rave, warped kinesis is the only way of being. There’s no pretense or precedent to dictate how our bodies are in flux. As the clicks of the sharp BPM saturate the atmosphere, we collectively coalesce into a single living, breathing organism.
In her aptly titled book Raving, media theorist McKenzie Wark describes the rave as a “situation.” “[A] situation is where agency meets concrete forms that shape its expression,” writes Wark, “the ravers bring their freedom: their moves, raw need, and their arts of copresence.”
Just as the four walls of a venue enclose its attendees, so do its attendees morph the setting. Each thumping beat and its audience’s collective gyration acts as the ripple that keeps the party flowing.
The situation at play could be seen as a microcosm of our state of living outside of the rave. Though we live in the pressures of our concrete world — made to assimilate to our standards at work, school and decent public life — liquid Transness nevertheless cascades independently of the mould designed to shape it.
That flow rises and falls with abandon throughout the ever-expansive sound of Trans techno. It could be categorized as indescribable, but it’s easily recognized by veterans of the scene.
Take ear-popping squelches, peaky drum hits and sped-up falsetto vocals and combine them into an art dance-pop EP. You have SOPHIE’s Product, the late producer-songwriter’s first mixtape. Before and since the 2015 release, the SOPHIE sound acted as the undercurrent of her pared-down collaborative tracks with Vince Staples, Madonna and celebrities of the like.
In 2017, however, SOPHIE got the chance to shine in her debut album OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES. The cover, a self-portrait of her doll-like form sitting gracefully in a pool of water, glimmers with a brush-stroked blend of purples and pinks from the cloudy sky above her.
That etherealism is there elsewhere in the five-roommate-household names of the Trans electronic scene: in Arca’s gnashing metallic samples, 100 gecs’ hyper-pitched vocals or Knife Girl’s cunty bass wobbles.
The vocal embellishment of an ultra-soprano autotune sculpted the Trans-teeming genre of hyperpop as we know it. Adorned with brash synths, the synthetic resonance of hyperpop is indicative of its very online origins. During the quarantine-induced prevalence of hyperpop, Discord streams, online listening parties and VirtualDJ sessions light up monitors and brew the notorious thrashes of artifice.
Noodling their yellowed MIDI keyboard in the midst of it all, crafting distortion right out of their bedroom with digital company is Palestinian Transmasculine artist and producer Edward Abu-Nuwar. The gothic, witch-pop sensation’s chantilly yet grisly persona weaves into their artistry unequivocally, evident by the name of their musical project “Feralbats.”
At the heart of Abu-Nuwar’s creations is a mish-mash of different corners of the web. Like many other nerdy Trans kids with internet access, Abu-Nuwar cut their teeth online watching anime fan edits and Vocaloid music videos (think Hatsune Miku). “I remember finding GarageBand on one of my old family Mac computers, finding out how to use autotune,” they remember, “and [would] make covers of Vocaloid in my badly pronounced Japanese.”
On their own, in 2018, Abu-Nuwar downloads Ableton — a commonly-beloved music production software by electronic producers — to their computer, but quickly becomes overwhelmed by the indistinguishable knobs and sliders on-screen. The program remains on their laptop for months, idle.
Eventually, the first COVID-19 quarantine hits, their job closes down and they’re rejected from the college animation program they’d been gunning for. Stuck at home, Abu-Nuwar takes solace in finding new friends on Discord and re-discovering hobbies they’d previously cast down. It’s only when they meet other Queer and Trans DJers online that they feel safe enough to re-open the blank grey slate.
With these live DJ sessions, each player mixing from their own homes and cheering each other on through their webcams, Abu-Nuwar’s friends expose them to new musical styles. Soon, soaking in the taste and wisdom of their peers fuels them with enough inspiration to develop their own.
Abu-Nuwar’s own community acted as their tastemaker in the beginning. “I just realized that DJing could be this tapestry of sound that you could put whatever your taste was into it,” says Abu-Nuwar.
“I always had this idea that you’d go to Crews and Tangos [and] you’d just hear Top 40 songs spun into each other,” they say. “That’s all I really thought DJing was for a really long time.”
Strolling along those corners of Church Street, there’s an overwhelming precedence by which whiteness pervades the slender sidewalks. Although there’s plenty of succour to go around in Trans raves, walking into Instagram-esteemed ones such as Metamorphosis is a crushing reminder that white people are still allowed the most legroom at these functions.
Interviews of Queer and Trans substance users, conducted for a recent Bard College paper, “Joy in my Body:” An Exploration of Queer Drug Use, outline the Trans raving experiences of BIPOC participants as more serpentine in spaces which still uphold white hegemony. As a result, there’s a specific animosity tied to predominantly white Trans nightlife.
Leading up to Pride month last year, EMRYSLAZULI encounters disheartening sentiments from men who frequent the village. “A lot of [straight and Queer men] were making fun of the fact that there aren’t really a lot of spaces for Trans women,” she reveals. “Some were saying they could basically push Trans women out of this space if they wanted to.”
For EMRYSLAZULI, the scarcity of Trans-women-focused events in Toronto’s rave scenes is glaring and something she couldn’t overlook. This gap, as well as the influx of Transmisogyny from outsiders and intra-community folks, pushes her to take up organizing in June — creating the annual doll-centred bash, For The Dollz. And from what EMRYSLAZULI observes, once the opportunity arose, they showed out plenty!
“I’ve never been in a space where there were so many dolls… Clearly, we’re here and clearly, there just aren’t events or spaces where we can go and literally all be together,” she emphasizes.
Alongside the salient event, she also begins the collective which hosts it with some help. Huddled around a kitchen table, EMRYSLAZULI and her friends storm up the idea for Bassification — a Trans-focused rave collective. As suggested in its first four letters, the name originates from the bass-heavy percussion of techno. With Bassification, EMRYSLAZULI’s goal is to craft a space where Trans folks can retreat to blossom into themselves, just as she did.
Despite what Spotify’s playlist recommendations might show you, the trailblazers of Trans electronica have always been Black and Brown Queer people — and have always shone, in lieu of mainstream recognition, on the dance floor. The written origins of disco, house and later techno, plus other rave genres, feature scarcely-recorded traces of BIPOC Trans existence, left out of the limelight to favour white and cis party-goers.
For Vice, author Luis Manuel-Garcia elaborates, “As house turns into acid-house turns into techno and all of the other sub-genres, somehow Queer folks slip out of the established narrative and disappear.”
What documented and oral histories do divulge is that raving culture among Queer and Trans folks boomed in the early ‘70s, following a post-Stonewall movement for BIPOC Queers to rejoice in nightlife.
In a 1973 Rolling Stone article, Vince Aletti describes Manhattan’s “hardcore dance crowd” to be primarily composed of Black and Latin Queers. As the disco scene had a brief spur among white, cishet, middle-class party-goers in the mid-’70s, it temporarily cast aside the rave’s BIPOC Queer origins. Eventually, the hegemonic mainstream re-realized their puritanical plight by the end of the decade and re-instituted their tyrannical doctrine, vilifying the racialized and Queer quintessence of the dance floor.
Here in Toronto, during the late ‘90s to early 2000s, raving experienced a mass crackdown from multiple facets of enforcement — from municipal authorities, the police force, health care workers, various media and public intellectuals. As Charity Marsh outlines in her academic journal, ‘Understand Us before You End Us’: Regulation, Governmentality, and the Confessional Practices of Raving Bodies, this citywide antipathy was led by mass hysteria and panic from mainstream society and institutions, which sensationalized the rave to be “an object of concern to be researched and studied.” This subjugation was likely following the surge of countless Queer discos pulsating through Church Street and warehouse raves popping up in the city throughout the decade.
Black and Brown Trans folks have had to weed out the constraints of surveillance and pathologization from cishet society since the beginning of time. The provocative implications of the rave — where we can rejoice, where there’s substance use and harm reduction in tandem, where there are networks and opportunities for us to cultivate resistance — threatens the authority of the state. Nevertheless, our resilience has lasted generations, all from collective organizing to pave a path forward for ourselves.
Luca Huising-Torrese grasps their controller with both hands, holding it up to their webcam. In their dimly lamplit bedroom, the buttons’ orange glow illuminates their face and gleams off their septum piercing. After three years of DJing in Toronto, transforming into “Dysphoric Butch” by night, they tap the keys with muscle memory. “All I have to do is press record and then start.”
On a practical level, the gear is the tallest hurdle to becoming a DJ. As a kid, Huising-Torrese naturally gravitated to the GarageBand software on their parents’ laptop. “I would fiddle around with that and come up with songs.” Today, their go-to mixing deck goes for about $400 and the party setups they play at organized shows can go up to the thousands.
Sometimes, organizers can’t afford it. Oftentimes, newer Trans artists play for free. But with enough people together, the tech ends up falling in place/into the right hands, naturally.
Huising-Torrese feels connected to the community-building efforts that first formed the genre-blazing Queer and Trans raves in Detroit, New York and here in Toronto, decades ago. Out of the pure necessity of finding a musical outlet without breaking the bank on lessons and gear, the city’s marginalized DJs seek help from each other. Looking back, Huising-Torrese remembers learning how to mix tracks in their friends’ apartments, slouching over tech setups on desks and beds under the watchful eye of scene insiders.
Now, with their own gear, they share the knowledge with another crop of newbies. It’s part of Huising-Torrese’s vision for what they call the “booming” Toronto Queer music scene. Where the most marginalized DJs have the hardest time accessing music and tech training, Trans folks help each other out.
More organizers have taken that at-home experimentation out of the bedroom. “DJ 101” workshops have been popping up in Instagram flyers and on Queer community centres’ corkboards. Queer and Trans-centred raves sometimes add one or two hours to their start time, for newcomers to step behind the podium and play around with the unfamiliar knobs and buttons in front of a sparse 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. crowd.
Huising-Torrese tends to wax philosophical on the rave’s collectivist foundations. “Queer people, sometimes we forget where we come from, which is caring about community, first and foremost. Prioritizing your community, not prioritizing money.”
Last Spring, a flurry of acceptance letters flood folks’ inboxes for Pride Toronto’s grand annual corporate fête. The TD Bank-sponsored extravaganza follows in conjunction with their previous 2010-2014 ailments with grassroots organization Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. TD Bank holds stock with Israeli Occupational Forces’ weapons suppliers in Elbit Systems and General Dynamics. This partnership is only exacerbated by Pride Toronto’s wish-washy statements that year, never outrightly condemning the genocide.
Among these parade participants are some fellow Trans DJs formerly in Abu-Nuwar’s circles. Abu-Nuwar, baffled, immediately works to convince their acquaintances to back out of the paid gigs, posting their call-to-action on their Instagram stories. Lamenting excuses that they’d already spent the paycheque supplied to them, the DJs take to social media in response, to defend their decisions to play. Weaponizing neoliberal identity politics, the statements plea along the lines of “Well, Trans people deserve platforms” or “They’re giving me $200 and a huge stage to play on and that’s more important to me,” Abu-Nuwar recalled.
“I was like — why is it Palestinian rights or Trans rights? Some of us are both.”
Vocalized by Queer Palestinians in the city, the consensus was clear. Pride Toronto’s long-held corporate prioritization, pinkwashing and as a result, neglect of the liberation of Indigenous peoples across the globe, meant a boycott and imminent action quickly organized, disrupting the main Pride Parade route. The dogma from activists toward parade participants is that they actively took part in an event obstructing Palestinian liberation.
This hypocrisy is something Abu-Nuwar’s long had to contend with while navigating the waters of Toronto’s Trans raving scenes, as most people don’t know how to navigate their identity as a Palestinian. In real-time, they’ve observed people’s haphazard attempts at bolstering their activist status and have been personally approached with puzzling inquiries. In all the disastrous instances they’d seen of raves co-opting and aestheticizing events for poorly organized “fundraisers,” some organizers have reached out to them with repulsive offers. “White event coordinators come to me and are like, ‘Can you be our Palestinian consultant?’” they recollect.
Strange encounters with rave organizers, paired with disingenuous, sporadic messages from foes in the local scene pushed them to a realization — shared identity isn’t everything. “Just because I share a label with someone — like we’re Trans, we’re Queer — doesn’t always mean that those are the people with your best interest and well-being in mind.”
Invigorated by these embarrassing inquiries and cognitively dissonant attitudes, it thrusts the motivation behind Abu-Nuwar’s latest musical pursuits.
In the packed bar housing their second DJ set of 2025, Abu-Nuwar’s wisps of hair fall in front of their eyes as they hunch over the deck. Their fingers fly over the knobs as they key in bits of a sped-up Siri voice track over their thumping beat. Some audience members start to clue in and perk their ears toward the deck. Then, Abu-Nuwar cuts the noise and lets the sample sing: “Fuck Boiler Room / Free Palestine.”
This set especially speaks to those outraged by the Israeli-tied Boiler Room rave, which played in Toronto just days before. Hyping up their audience with the evocative set, Abu-Nuwar’s show is consistent with their continued no-holds-barred outspokenness of Queer Toronto’s mistreatment of Palestinian artists. They’ve cut hedonistic ties out of their life and are carving out a niche following.
Now, off the heels of their sophomore album, Valley of Dolls, Abu-Nuwar leaps into the next phase of their career. In their shows, promo photos and their latest album cover, Abu-Nuwar is seen matching their white-goth garb with their girlfriend and co-producer, Christie Halsted while — literally and metaphorically — being stabbed in the back. The two have been side-by-side, T4T, through their collective musical growth and the tribulations of Toronto’s Trans music scene.
In Valley of Dolls, Abu-Nuwar’s lyrics and song titles, like “twist the knife” and “armored heart,” lament the betrayal they felt from their peers in the electronic scene and the connections they’ve lost since last year’s treachery. Their muffled vocals, often battling to be heard among their echo-y instrumentals, envelop the listener in a secluded haze.
“The Valley of Dolls is sort of where we were left when it felt like everybody chose their own paths,” Abu-Nuwar says.
In the creative process of their new LP, they found themself reflecting on their past. To layer over their synth and ductile noise, they made a point to pick up their childhood passions, including violin and piano. As a tribute to their late mother, who played in a Jordanian rock band in the 80s, they sampled her voice over their acoustic guitar-playing in “(Aida) عايدة.”
More than a year and a half on testosterone, Abu-Nuwar also worked their transition into their creative process. “I wrote my first album pre-vocal changes and now, my voice is much deeper,” they say. In the process of production, they’ve trained their body to work with their sound — warbling their melodic vocals while maintaining their speaking voice in everyday life. At live shows, they switch through their pre-programmed vocal patches to pitch their voice higher or lower at will.
Fully leaning more into the hyperpop side of production lately, Abu-Nuwar recognizes how the genre’s squelching pitch plays a big part in gender euphoria for themselves and others. “I think Trans people just really like to be able to hear themselves in a way that gives them that gender euphoria. It’s just so cool,” Abu-Nuwar says. “I really like the idea of us being able to take that into our own hands.”
Trans artists have found an idyllic haven in these modes of electropop and the apparatus that comes with it. There’s a specific allure to be able to modulate our voices and make them malleable — perhaps it’s our innate desire to augment parts of ourselves.
“We’re kind of forced to acquire these tools to reach the identities that we vibe with,” says Abu-Nuwar. “I just think we’re brilliant.”
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