LSDXOXO: X Education

It’s only 10:30pm, and there’s already a crowd outside of the Brooklyn club Paragon, patiently waiting in line on a cold, wind-whipped late-winter night. We had hoped that an early arrival would ease a swift entry — we failed to take into account that this party was a key stop of the sprawling Dweller festival, a multi-night, multi-venue affair dedicated to Black electronic music in all of its glorious permutations. Dweller’s been a highlight of the NYC calendar since its founding in 2019 by Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson, and this year’s instalment was particularly stellar, with Jeff Mills, JADALAREIGN, Terrence Dixon, Fred P, and DJ Sliink just a few of the notable names on the bill. But tonight’s Paragon party, it seems, is set to be a highlight among highlights, thanks in no small part to the live US debut of the DJ, producer, and performer Raushaan Glasgow, better known to the world at large — and certainly to tonight’s small corner of it — as LSDXOXO.

Inside, the club’s small checkerboard dancefloor is already packed, and the revellers are lost in a disorienting murk of fog and strobes. (Checking our video archive the next day to piece the night together, we see nothing but a series of red and blue flashes illuminating a crush of silhouettes.) With Archangel, a resident at the NYC trans/non-binary gathering, Body Hack, on the decks, a fun array of sonic snippets zooms by — DJ Flame’s mix of Shardaysa’s ‘Gimme My Gots’, and a version of Juvenile’s ‘Back That Azz Up’ cut through the miasma — until, at 11:30pm on the dot, the Minnie Riperton lullaby ‘Lovin’ You’ begins to waft from the speakers. The crowd, sensing something special is about to go down, pushes toward the stage which, at Paragon, is essentially a small landing on the stairs that lead up to the club’s mezzanine. 

Tight as his allotted space is, when LSDXOXO prowls his way down the steps, he takes immediate and complete control. Donning a resplendent white parka from the Shayne Oliver brand Anonymous Club before stripping down to a skin-tight bodysuit from Telfar, when he chants the lyrics to ‘The Devil’ from 2021’s ‘Dedicated 2 Disrespect’ EP — “the devil, the devil, the devil fucked me good” — he comes off as fully in control, as someone you could picture being the dominant partner in that particular pas de deux. He follows that up with another track from that EP, the ubiquitous earworm that is ‘Sick Bitch.’ The crowd, eating it up, is in Glasgow’s command for the rest of his succinct but fiercely effective set. There was a triumphant, conquering-hero vibe to the performance, and for good reason — born in Philadelphia and now living in Berlin, Glasgow spent much of the 2010s in New York, a time in which he began to hone his LSDXOXO persona.

Many in the crowd were friends; many others knew him from his involvement in club nights like Venus X’s scene-defining GHE20G0TH1K, or the Floorgasm parties, originally held in Bushwick’s Bossa Nova Civic Club and beloved as a haven for clubland’s queer communities of colour. “I had started Floorgasm at Bossa Nova Civic Club with Frankie,” Glasgow, known to his friends and family as RJ, says a few days after the gig. “And Paragon is owned by John [Barclay], who also owns Bossa Nova, so it was kind of like a full-circle moment for me. It felt like a family moment, and it felt appropriate for my first live experience in New York. It was cool.”

Glasgow is speaking to DJ Mag via Zoom from Sydney, Australia; he’s gearing up for a performance during that city’s massive WorldPride 2023 festivities, before hopping between Australia and New Zealand for a series of live sets and DJ gigs. (The previous night, he’d prepped by watching a WorldPride performance video by Kylie and Dannii Minogue — he’s an avowed Kylie fan.) Speaking one-to-one as he chills in his hotel room in an off -white T-shirt, he’s laid-back and amiable as he recovers from the inevitable jet lag. Though many in the Paragon crowd knew Glasgow from his New York days, and though he’s been producing and releasing music since the early ’00s, it’s safe to say that the world at large didn’t begin to catch on till the release of ‘Dedicated 2 Disrespect’ — and in particular, ‘Sick Bitch,’ which in the summer of ’21 was nearly inescapable. And why would you want to escape it, anyway? The track, like the four-track EP, has a razor-focused lyrical theme (“I’m a sick bitch and I like freak sex”) and a teched-up, stripped-down, pop-astute musical template that gleefully invokes the ballroom / bitch-track / ghettotech realms.

‘Dedicated 2 Disrespect’, which followed the release of a kaleidoscopic mixtape called ‘Waiting 2 Exhale’, was produced at the behest of mega-indie XL Recordings, which was commissioning a series of dance music EPs. Despite XL’s reach — the label has released music from the likes of the White Stripes and Adele over the years — Glasgow wasn’t expecting the record to be accepted as widely as it was. "I basically just really wanted to make something playable for clubs and also had this pop consistency", he says. At the time, in 2019, he was in the beginning stages of working on the music for an album, which he describes as “a bit heavier, and a bit more removed from how I was DJing at the time, in terms of the aesthetic and sound.” But the EP provided a breakthrough — among other things, after years of collaborating with other vocalists, it was the first LSDXOXO release to feature Glasgow’s own voice.

“My goal in making ‘Dedicated 2 Disrespect’ was to create a piece of music that kind of mirrored the way I was DJing at the time,” he says, “but that also kind of gave listeners a taste of what I was working on as a vocalist and songwriter, even though the writing on those records is quite simple.” It's a far cry from Adele, but the EP’s pop sensibility was key to its success. “I’m quite infatuated with the process of, or just the idea of, making an earworm within music,” Glasgow says. “No matter how simple the writing or production may be, if you can create a piece of music that people just want to listen to endlessly and don’t really get tired of — that’s an art form, you know?”

But the thought processes behind the EP went far beyond the idea of crafting an addictive pop hook. “I think it was me wanting to kind of claim that space of being a musician who just doesn’t take any shit, a musician who is just really free in expression when it comes to my sound, and when it comes to what I want to say with my music,” Glasgow explains. “It’s always been really sex-positive, and a celebration of the queer identity, and celebration of femininity.”

Growing up in Philadelphia, Glasgow remembers hearing the R&B and pop that his parents were into. Dance music wasn’t part of the equation yet — but the airwaves helped to fill in the blanks. “Being from the tri-state area, dance music is heavily played on the radio,” he says. “It was something that was woven into just regular pop music. Even underground dance music like Baltimore club, for instance, or Jersey club — there would be like an hour or two dedicated solely to that particular subgenre of music on the radio in Philadelphia. I guess that’s why I aligned to those sub-genres of dance music early on.” Those were among the sounds that informed Glasgow’s earliest attempts at production in his early teens, which took the form of club edits of extant tunes.

“I had a group of friends who kind of knew that I was toying around with music, and they would give me requests for edits of songs that I could turn into Baltimore club music,” he recalls. “It’s a theme in Baltimore and Jersey club music to kind of take sound bites from pop culture — whether it be from commercials, TV show themes, video game themes or whatever — and bring them into their soundscape. And that’s what I would do.”

Those early tracks didn’t circulate far beyond his circle of friends at first — but by his third year in college, he began posting his efforts online. It was then that the LSDXOXO concept began to take shape. “Me and my boyfriend at the time would just sit in my bedroom, get stoned and he would give me ideas for making edits, and I was slowly beginning to post them on my Tumblr,” Glasgow recalls. “I think the first one that I did under the name LSDXOXO was this remix of M.I.A.’s ‘XXXO’, and then there was another one that was like a Rihanna and Crystal Castles mash-up. (A mini-epic titled ‘You Da Best’, it’s worth seeking out.)

Before long, Glasgow was making the transition to full-blown production, with his ‘Softcore’ mixtape coming out in 2013. Ranging from the loping R&B of ‘OMW’ to the eerie hip-hop of ‘Truth Tella’ (with Cakes Da Killa on the mic) to the club rhythms of ‘Burn’ (featuring none other than future Jersey club queen UNIIQU3), it’s an array of sounds that could have been the work of a seasoned producer, rather than a relative neophyte. ‘Whorecore’, another mixtape similarly loaded with a wide-ranging variety pack of bangers, soon followed. “The idea for those tapes came about because I wanted to basically bring other artists into what I was doing with my music,” Glasgow says, “so I made some demos without any vocals on them, and I just reached out to who I was listening to at the time, who I was a fan of, to kind of gauge what the response would be, to see if people would even want to collaborate with me at that time. I mean, I was essentially a no-one producer. I hadn’t really released anything. But I had a few friends who were down.”

Beyond the idea of collaborating with vocalists, and the simple desire to get some music out there, there wasn’t much of an end game in mind. “It was done in recreation, but also it was an exploration of genre, and experimentation for me in music making,” Glasgow explains. “I was just doing a lot of different things at the time. There weren’t any specific goals; I kind of just was throwing things out there to see what sticks in terms of my own sound, while trying to be bold in the choices that I was making. That’s why at the time everything was quite… not underdeveloped, but it was definitely a bit more freeform than it has become.”

Whatever the intention, the seed had been planted. After graduation — originally taking visual arts classes, he ended up with a degree in business management — Glasgow packed his bags and headed up the New Jersey Turnpike to follow his passion in Gotham.

By this time, after making a bit of a name for himself via those mixtapes, Glasgow knew he wanted a life in music — he just needed to figure out a tactic that would allow him to make that happen. “If you’re a producer, and you’re not a vocalist, and you want to bring your sound out into a space where people are able to come out and enjoy it, then there has to be a way to do that,” he says. “There has to be some kind of delivery system, and DJing was my means to get my sound out there. I had zero experience as a DJ, but I had friends who were DJs.”

The first person who put Glasgow on a pair of CDJs was Joey LaBeija, the DJ, producer and all-around clubland presence behind the Legendary parties, among numerous other claims to fame. Glasgow would hang out at LaBeija’s place and practice for hours. By 2014, he was beginning to take on gigs, selecting from a wide-ranging palette that centered on club and house-fueled sounds but took in pretty much what would work, from radio pop to hip-hop to rave. “When you’re going out, and you’re hearing everything in the span of eight hours, and it’s not really frowned upon to do anything and everything with your sound… being in that setting helped me to realise that, ‘OK, I don’t have to restrict myself to a few different genres of music,’” Glasgow says. “I could just go balls to the wall.”

Glasgow was a regular at parties like GHE20G0TH1K and Legendary — and it was more than the music that attracted him to throw-caution-to-the-wind parties like that, and to NYC nightlife in general. “I just like the theatricality of nightlife in New York,” Glasgow says. “It’s always an extravagant experience, and that resonates with me because I just love anything extra, anything grand, and anything that feels like a fully-lived experience.”

It’s a period of his life that he credits with helping to solidify the ideas behind his work and his image. “At first, I still was quite introverted, and not leaning too much into an LSDXOXO persona. It was just a moniker for me to release my music. But once I began to attach more of my own personality to the name, it became more of a personal statement. It’s definitely helped me to build my own identity within music.”

By 2018, that identity had helped him to get to the point where Glasgow was regularly spinning not only in New York, but overseas as well; Berlin was one of his regular stops. A move to the German capital seemed like a logical career move from a logistical standpoint, and though in the midst of gentrification, it was more affordable than NYC — where even after finding some success as a DJ, he still found it necessary to work a day gig at Venus X’s streetwear shop Planet X to make ends meet.

“I guess by that time I knew that I wanted to move from New York,” Glasgow admits. “I’d been there for three or four years, and I just wanted to be living in a space that felt a bit more sustainable for creation — and also for self-exploration. I felt like I still had a bit of growing to do as a person. I just wanted to kind of step away from New York, so that I could take a moment to step within myself and decide what I wanted to do moving forward, now that music making had become more of a real option for a career.” He made the move to Berlin in the summer of 2018.

LSDXOXO’s profile was soaring ever-upward. The DJ gigs were coming, the productions were proceeding apace, and he was now helming the Berlin edition of the Floorgasm gathering, which he had launched pre-move in 2017, on a regular basis. “Our approach to Floorgasm is very similar to my production style,” Glasgow says. “It’s genre exploration, and just kind of taking genre and flipping it on its head. We’ll have themes for each event, and we generally base the curation of the night, and also the aesthetics of any visuals or set design or film screenings around the theme. We like to have our events feel like a mixed-media experience. But really, it’s about exploration of sound, and bringing sexuality into a queer nightlife space.”

But as it was for all, the world of LSDXOXO was put on pause in early 2020. Glasgow, who had just completed work on ‘Dedicated 2 Disrespect’ and had submitted it to XL, worked hard to make the best of it. “I mean, lockdown was hard for everyone,” he says. “But for me, ultimately, it allowed for a lot of reflection, and reflection that at this particular time was really important for me, because I was working on an album, and wanting to do some work in carving out space for myself as an artist. I was DJing regularly and touring regularly — things were picking up for me a lot in 2019 going into 2020 — and I didn't really see myself having a whole lot of time for sitting down with the music that I was making, and deciding what my identity was going to be as an artist, and what I was going to be saying. I think this is when I focused a lot on songwriting and song structure, and bringing a lot more elements into my production style.”

To that end, Glasgow worked to sharpen his musical chops. “I began to experiment with natural instrumentation,” he says. “I wanted to learn guitar, and become better at piano. I felt like that would help me to build out my sound a bit more. I spent that time putting my energy into that — and I was really thankful to have that time, to be honest.” The fruits of those efforts, production-wise, will be trickling out soon. A single, ‘Double Tap’, is due out in May, with a seven-track EP coming out in September. And Glasgow’s been busy refining that long-awaited album, which should be hitting the shops in early 2024. He envisions the single and EP as a sort of link between the bump-and-grind club thump of ‘Dedicated 2 Disrespect’ and next year’s full-length.

“I mean, it’s still rave-inspired 4/4 dance music, some breakbeat mixed with some house,” he says. “I’m just kind of curating what I consider to be my sound right now, and condensing that into a six to seven-track EP. It’s high intensity. It’s very sexy. It’s funny at times. I think it’s the grown-up version of ‘Dedicated 2 Disrespect’. And it will showcase a bit more what I can do before the album comes out, which will be leaning more on my being a vocalist, with a more built-out world of production.”

The focus on production doesn’t seem to be taking away from the gigging, though — and this coming festival season’s dance card is fully loaded, with Movement, Nuits Sonores, Rewire, and the Barcelona and Madrid editions of Primavera Sound just a few of his stops.

“More than particular events, it’s more the places themselves that I’m looking forward to,” Glasgow says. “Like, I’m really looking forward to going back to Asia at the end of this summer. And Movement has been a goal of mine since began DJing, and that is absolutely one of the ones that I’m very much looking forward to. I’m also just looking forward to doing the live experience more often this year. Now that it’s become part of my artistry, it is important to build on my experience as a performer.”

Since the feature-heavy days of ‘Softcore’ and ‘Whorecore’, collaboration has often been at the centre of Glasgow’s work process. Back then, the collaborative urge was borne of necessity — but to hear him tell it, there was an innate desire to work with others anyway, no matter the need.

“Early on, collaborations were how I was able to build the ideas that I had for songs into full songs, because I wasn’t a vocalist at the time,” he says. “It was really nice to branch out and have other artists help me to create music — and also to have this back and forth, and create friendships and relationships with other people who were musicians.”

Since LSDXOXO has become more established, the collaborations have been coming hot and heavy, with Glasgow working in various ways — through features, remixes and production — with artists ranging from R&B singer-songwriter Rochelle Jordan to techno-rave brutalist VTSS to superstars like Lady Gaga, the last via his propulsive version of 2020’s ‘Alice’. But the collab that’s probably gotten him the most attention, at least on the production front, is via electronic-soul artist Kelela’s ‘Raven’, released this past February on Warp Records. Glasgow served as a producer on five of the meditative album’s tracks — Bambii, Kaytranada, Nguzunguzu’s Asmara, AceMo, Fauzia and Junglepussy are some of the other credited names — that serve as a sharp contrast to the sound of ‘Dedicated 2 Disrespect’. Those who only know LSDXOXO via ‘Sick Bitch’, for instance, might have a hard time believing that Glasgow had a hand in the production of the graceful UK garage flow of Kelela’s lighter-than-air ‘Contact’.

“It’s this theme of duality that I like to constantly bring into play,” he says. “I just like to keep people on their feet; I always like to throw a surprise out there, and that’s why people sometimes just don't know what to expect from me next. And honestly, I like it — it intrigues me to keep things exciting within music-making, and just flip things on their toes when they need to be flipped.”

That duality extends to Glasgow’s own output. While his productions as LSDXOXO, as well as his live shows, leaven their intensity with plenty of pop appeal, his recent DJ sets tend to be hard-charging affairs, rhythmically linear and ruthlessly efficient, even with the occasional use of pop hooks within those sets.

“That’s something that I’m still experimenting with,” Glasgow says. “It’s been really interesting to toy with the back-and-forth between my more pop-structured songs and the dance music that I’ve been DJing in club spaces.” He managed to combine the two sides with last year’s succinctly titled “Dedicated 2 Disrespect: The Remixes’, which featured teched-up versions of ‘Sick Bitch’, ‘Mutant Exotic’ et.al. from the likes of Tygapaw and VTSS. There’s yet another duality that Glasgow’s been working his way through, especially given his rise in popularity over the past few years — balancing the fact that he springs from clubland’s underbelly with the fact that success brings its own demands.

“This is the balance that I’m trying to work out right now,” he admits. “I always want for my sound to be considered underground, and I want for my sound to always feel experimental, and to feel something other than mainstream. And I feel like staying rooted in nightlife and staying rooted in clubland is a good way to do that. It’s also a good way to keep my sound current, and to keep an understanding of what’s fun at the time, of what the new sound is. So I think I’ll always be rooted in dance music and especially club music.”

In a 2021 interview with cellist and vocalist Kelsey Lu in Interview magazine, Glasgow said that “people either hate or love my music, and that’s an achievement to me... That’s better than making something people don’t have much of a feeling about.” It's a statement that he lives by as an artist. “That’s my thing,” he says. “I just really admire pieces of music that elicit a reaction. Whether you absolutely hate what I’m doing or whether it speaks to your core, I just want to get a reaction from you. I want it to make you feel something.”

But when he began making music as a teenager, reactions were the last thing on his mind. “My first goal in making music was essentially just because I truly enjoy making music,” Glasgow explains. “It was something that I knew I would be doing whether it became a career for me or not, because it’s something that makes me feel like myself. It’s really helped me to define myself as a person, and it’s helped me to come into my own. I didn’t see myself ever having the gall to become a vocalist, or bring my sound into a more mainstream soundscape and work with bigger artists, and just become more visible as a musician. All these things, they seemed like pipe dreams. But I definitely didn’t shoot those ideas down. I always believed that they could potentially become something; I never shied away from the possibility of it happening. It’s not what I led with, and it wasn’t my goal. But it’s a really nice bonus, you know?” It certainly is, as is the fact that his parents are supportive of the LSDXOXO project.

“My mom has always been a huge supporter of mine,” he says with a smile. “She’s always been my biggest fan, but it's nice to see how she gauges my success and popularity. For instance, she loves Lady Gaga, so when I did that remix for her, I had the album sent to her doorstep, and I think that was one of the moments where she was like, ‘Oh, wait, you’re actually a thing! You’re working with musicians who I know!’”

Glasgow was understandably a bit wary with how he revealed his hyper-sexed LSDXOXO persona to his family, though. “I wanted to control how much of my artistic persona that my parents were able to see,” he says, “because it is quite cheeky and quite suggestive at times. “And I obviously want to preserve the image that my parents have of me,” he adds, with a laugh. “I feel like I’m lucky, because I know that I can take the piss sometimes as an artist, and your parents want to see you in a certain light, and I really have challenged that.” He’ll continue challenging himself as well, as he has throughout his career. Moving to New York; becoming a key member of the city’s clubbing community; DJing and performing and producing and remixing; relocating to Berlin; the upcoming EP and album — these steps have all played a role in LSDXOXO’s ascent.

“I feel like each of these projects is essentially like a first for me,” he says. “For instance, ‘Dedicated 2 Disrespect’ was my first being a vocalist, and this next EP is the first one with me releasing music with a pop song structure, while still coming from having my own aesthetic and my own production style. And the album will be a piece of music that has a narrative from front to end, which is really important to me, because all of my favorite albums tell a story, and help the artists to build their own world; I think listeners are a lot more invested in your sound once they can understand you as a person, as well as a musician. And so that, for me, is one of the most exciting things — giving people a bit more of myself as a person, so that they understand why I make music the way that I do.”

But first, it’s time to play WorldPride in Sydney, where he’ll undoubtedly be rinsing out ‘Sick Bitch’. After living with that tune for the past three years — four, if you count its production — isn’t he the teeniest bit tired of it yet? “No, I love to perform it,” he says with evident sincerity. “It’s kind of overwhelmed me for the last two years, with people still wanting to hear it, and not being bored by hearing me perform it, so I’m grateful for the run it’s given me.”