By Gaby Jimenez

May 21 2025

Decked out in my fur boots, kandi bracelets all the way up to my elbows, and fishnet leggings, I trekked to the Oakland Secret in March of 2024 to see a lineup of electronic artists popular to the Bay Area underground music scene, where Technopagan stands at the forefront of the lineup. Her 2023 album OMG TECHNOPAGAN SAVED MY LIFE is no misnomer; her music really does save lives, or at the very least, create a soundtrack to such.

The emerging new wave of techno-meets-scene rave and music culture finds itself characterized by hyperactivity and aggression: distractingly processed vocals, perfectly placed glitches, loud drums, loud bass, and an even louder close-knit community. The subculture is more than just a sound or a music genre, however. It’s a lifestyle that California-based DJ and artist Technopagan epitomizes. A scan of their online presence brings a sort of sensory overload; typeface chaos; Instagram’s oldest and most dramatic filters; show flyers that emulate the early Internet’s pop-up ad overload; comically expressive poses; rebellious and unapologetically overstyled outfits. It’s the little details that serve as a tangible performance of the scene’s encouragement of wild self-expression, an expressivity that borrows from emo vulnerability and inevitably attracts queer communities.

Accordingly, Technopagan has found her place in the rave and electronic music community: in northern California’s Bay Area. Here, there has always been a strong music scene with unique people not only interlinked with the love of alternative music subcultures, but also in embracing queer people involved in the scene. San Francisco and the Bay Area in general is renowned for being progressive in representing queer communities, encouraging and uplifting voices becoming more apparent in musical spaces. And I’ve seen it firsthand; growing up in the Bay myself, I’ve frequented raves in forests and caves— dust covering every inch of my outfit, throwing it back in a way only true unfiltered and unabashed self-expression could explain.

As a prominent transgender voice in the scene, Technopagan emphasizes her hopes to uplift trans people, to resonate with her younger audience in the ways she was afforded by the Bay’s openness growing up. “It was like, one of the only places where I saw trans people, just like, walking on the street,” Technopagan says as she discusses her soft spot for the San Francisco Bay Area. “This is like 2016 and I feel like transness wasn't, like, super this big, but I had never really met me and trans people. So for me, seeing people on the street, I was like, this is somewhere I need to be.”

With a scene so influenced by a love for the Internet and a nostalgia for the early 2000s’ MySpace emo attitudes and aesthetics, social media has become an increasingly vital part in the expansion of rave culture through connecting masses. Although Technopagan notes that while she may “fucking hate Instagram” and “kind of hate TikTok,” she acknowledges that in our generation, there needs to be a way for subculture communities to interact with each other for the common goal of discovering new and cool events to go to.

Technopagan’s artistry has amassed attention beyond local crowds, expanding from her favorite Bay Area haunts, like Orifice and 3rd and Army, to larger stages in New York. We met her at Brooklyn’s Market Hotel, a nightlife pillar both in Bushwick memes and in the church electronicᶜˡᶦᶜᵏ ʰᵉʳᵉ scene, and had the privilege of hosting Technopagan last month. Gracing the lucky crowd that night, Technopagan weaved her own tracks within her mixes, something she normally avoids doing: “Recently, I've been playing it a lot because people have been telling me that it's really fun to like, see my songs live, you know. And for me, I'm just like, oh, I never want to hear this song ever again, actually, but it's fun. It's fun to see the crowd, like, react to my music.” 

Playing her own music live is merely a bonus (or, for her, sometimes an annoyance) to producing, rather than the goal; instead, Technopagan’s musical process is more impulsive, a means of expressing how she’s feeling. And this stream-of-consciousness thinking is reflected in her unpredictable sample use from MySpace anthem Attack Attack!’s “I Kissed a Girl” to Lil Uzi’s 2-billion stream signature song “XO Tour Lif3.” In consistency, her musical inspirations are equally diverse. First, she developed an obsession with the drums and guitar; at 12, she developed an obsession with Daft Punk, explaining her affinity for insane sample flips, before finding peace in early PC electronic artists à la A.G. Cook, Sophie, and Hannah Diamond.

In building the Technopagan persona outside of music, she’s also found inspiration in none other than queer community favorite show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Her stage name is one she describes as being “trapped into,” originating from Buffy’s Jenny Calendar: who referred to herself as the “techno-pagan” for her ability to marry technology, science, and magic. Hearing the name struck her further than a simple admiration of the show, introducing a new layer of importance from the word coinciding with spiritual beliefs relating to her Native American culture.

“My thoughts and beliefs do kind of coincide with a lot of paganism stuff. I'm actually Native American and [...] I feel like [describing Native practices as paganism] has been put on to us by white settler colonialism vibes. [They] have been historically like native people worshiping the earth is like paganism so it's, like, kind of ironic.” 

Reflecting on her Native background, she emphasizes that the sense of ritualism behind paganism goes beyond a spiritual level, but a level of human nature that Technopagan has discovered within the energy of loud, live music. “I always view parties as like a ritual,” Technopagan says. “It's like we're all gathering at night around these lights to listen to drum focused music. It's, like, very reminiscent of just a lot of human-like, tribal instincts.” 

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Watch our full conversation with Technopagan below.