Olivia Bigelow’s experimental music is the outlet and safe space she created for herself while navigating her identity and gender transition. Photo: Anna Chapman
This month’s SLUGLocalized showcase on Thursday, September 19 features the unique, upbeat sounds of DJs from all across Utah: Olivia Bigelow, AUXO and kimmi! This all-ages electronic extravaganza at Kilby Court, sponsored by Riso-Geist, costs just $5 for entry. Doors open at 7:00 p.m. and music kicks off at 8:00 p.m.
The cover art for Olivia Bigelow’s 2022 album Zex Tape is a smattering of internet junk ephemera on top of the iconic “Dust II” map from Counter-Strike: Source. Just to the left is a pixelated figure holding a JPEG of an AK-47. It’s Bigelow, but the visage is so mosaicked you might not have been able to tell it’s her without already knowing.
Bigelow’s musical journey began with playing jazz in high school. Photo: Anna Chapman
The Salt Lake City-based producer and DJ released Zex Tape in September 2022 and, like a lot of her work, it’s a cacophonous EDM bomb that can’t be defused. It’s full of noisy beats and obscure samples from society’s weirdest corners. Foley, sound effects, boing-oing-oings—for Bigelow, more is more, and her music blasts loud, hard and stupid. It works, even as—and maybe because—it sounds insane.
But Zex Tape, like most of her released music, builds on a different era of Bigelow’s life, before she embraced her identity as a trans woman. The pixelated, hidden Bigelow has a mustache. “I really didn’t like how I looked then,” Bigelow says. “I couldn’t put my face on there, because that wasn’t me.” While she knew she was trans at age 13, she was outed and mistreated then. “I just kind of locked myself away,” she says.
When Bigelow turned 18, she felt like it was too late to start hormone therapy. “I felt like … I was gross, irredeemable—that hormones would only make me a freak and people would hate me more,” Bigelow says. There was nothing stopping her from doing what she had wanted, but now the equation felt different. Maybe she could find another way around.
“I felt like … I was gross, irredeemable—that hormones would only make me a freak and people would hate me more.”
Bigelow played jazz in high school and first turned to producing music at 16. Music quickly became an outlet. “When I made music, that was actually me,” she says, “and people couldn’t say nothing about that.” She knew she was expressing herself, but she didn’t always know or even like how she appeared. In 2020, for instance, she released a project in which she rapped over beats. She ended up deleting it. Move on, try again. Since 2022, Bigelow has started doing more DJing and live performances. “It’s very freeing, being on stage,” she says. “I just love being in front of people and having them captive to whatever I do.”
She sinks her claws deep into your brain to fire as many different neurons as possible. “I try to capture the sensation of just scrolling, scrolling endlessly,” she says. No time for intent or meaning—911 calls, documentary sound bites, “Epic Rap Battles of History,” bingo was his name-o. In every moment, you’re invited like lightning to be in on a new joke. She works on tracks for nine months at a time, layering and gutting and building, anything but sitting still. But even as Bigelow made music a space for herself, her jokes and silly impulses, she simultaneously found it hard to be serious, especially when it came to saying anything meaningful about herself. What if she tried hormones and found everyone had been right, she was just faking it? The music wasn’t enough.
“I try to put as much as I can into everything I make. Because I want the next thing I make to definitely say everything in case I die or I disappear or I stop doing this. I need it to be everything.”
Bigelow’s maximalist music mirrors her discovery of her identity. Photo: Anna Chapman
Around February, she bit the bullet. She was working on music with a trans friend who said, “You can always just stop taking hormones. You’ve already got dysphoria. What do you have to lose?” That conversation made all the difference. “It really took having another trans woman who I’d known for so long tell me I’m not [faking it],” Bigelow says. Now, HRT is going well. “I feel like I’m not hiding now,” she says. “[With] a lot of my older stuff, I was scared to be serious and be open and really say anything about myself. And I think that’s why I avoided making anything with meaning.” In retrospect, Zex Tape reflects a lot of Bigelow’s issues with her body and her identity.
Still, her maximalism endures. “I try to put as much as I can into everything I make,” she says, “because I want the next thing I make to definitely say everything in case I die or I disappear or I stop doing this. I need it to be everything.” Follow Bigelow on Instagram at @olivia_bigelow.
