Interview
Mimi Zima is an artist and performer based in Seattle, Washington. Mimi's got her hand in a bit of everything; producing and recording music, DJing, promoting events, and performing drag.
Since March of 2024, Michaela has been organizing one of, if not the only consistent masks-required club affair in the PNW SAFETYDANCE, as a way to create a safe place for immunocompromised people to enjoy the club in light of increased risk of infection. Through this party, influenced by the significant impacts COVID had on her own life, Michaela has become an important voice regarding how the consideration of others’ health and safety can further connect the community.
It’s a pleasure to offer the Peace Portal platform to such a singular artist in the PNW. Be sure to get to know Michaela a little better for yourself via out interview below:
I understand that the COVID pandemic has affected you significantly. Can you share how your life has changed since the onset of the pandemic?
I mean, I think it’s changed everyone’s lives. We’re talking about a period of over 5 years. It has impacted so many of the systems we’d grown accustomed to in the before times, all of them for the worse. You can also plainly see the impact on people’s health. Everyone’s getting sicker, more frequently, and for longer. It has impacted my health significantly, to the point of chronic illness and disablement, but I want to avoid speaking about my health as if I’m some special isolated case. We’re talking about an airborne virus that depletes your T cells and damages your brain and your blood vessels and attacks every organ in your body. I didn’t get my first Covid infection until well after I’d been vaccinated and boosted, and it still fucked me up. The acute infection was always “mild” for me, too. A lot of people are in denial about the source of their recent health and cognitive issues, I think. People wanna blame Tik Tok or ChatGPT or the vaccines or 5G or Mercury in retrograde but it’s like… it’s fucking Covid. It’s obviously fucking Covid.
As far as how it’s impacted my life? I mean, up through the end of 2023 I was regularly playing live shows and flying all over the country for gigs. I was living my little underground pop star life. And I had to basically stop that entirely, because I was getting sick so often. I don’t fly anymore. I had to quit my public facing job at Starbucks and eventually find a remote position so I could minimize contact with the outside world, since so few people are masking now. My energy levels have decreased significantly, I regularly have days where I can’t do anything besides lay down. I have to be very selective about how I expend my energy. When I decide to rave (especially if I decide to do drugs) I usually end up paying for it the next several days. I was a perfectly healthy person 3 years ago.
How has SAFETYDANCE been received, and what has your experience been with organizing this event?
I think it’s mostly been received well. It really depends on the space we throw it. I’m trying to get away from doing it in clubs and bars, because a masked crowd is naturally going to bring in lower alcohol sales. Covid causes alcohol intolerance, by the way. I’d ideally want to do it as a proper rave, in a more underground/DIY type of space. But the parties have generally been super sick. The thing about a crowd of people wearing masks is that they’re naturally inclined to shut the fuck up on the dance floor and to generally respect each other’s space. The crowd at SAFETYDANCE is always lovely. It brings a healthy mix of regular ravers who don’t necessarily mask much in their daily lives and disabled/immunocompromised people who don’t go out much. It’s a cool mixture.
I want to be clear about something, though: I didn’t start this party because I was trying to create a whole separate community of disabled and immunocompromised ravers. I resent the idea that it’s a party “for” any group of people in particular. I started this party because I wanted my existing friends and community to start acting right. I wanted to demonstrate and prove that you can require masks at your party and factor in COVID mitigation strategies and that it can still be a sick ass party and draw a crowd. The fact that so many disabled and immunocompromised people started regularly showing up to the party was more of a happy accident. I’ve had so many people approach me like “thank you for throwing this party, this is the first time I’ve gone out in 4 years” or whatever. And that’s awesome and I’m proud of that and it’s cool to be connecting with new people in that way. But at the end of the day, Covid precautions and masking in nightlife spaces needs to become the norm. None of this is going to be sustainable if we don’t start taking this pandemic seriously. Everyone is vulnerable to long term damage from this virus, it’s not some niche thing that only a small minority of people should be concerned about.
As someone who has been involved in Seattle nightlife for 10+ years, from your perspective, what is working well for the community, and what could use more work?
I want to be clear that I really do love this city and my community and the people around me. Like, nightlife truly saved me, it is where I found myself, it is where I became self-actualized. I owe everything to nightlife. What I love about Seattle in particular, and this kind of applies across different scenes and mediums of expression, is that we’re this sort of cultural oasis. We’re pretty far from any other major city, and there’s no real proximity to industry or celebrity the way there is in New York or LA. Like, no one is moving to Seattle to become famous. And so the culture that develops here ends up being a bit more singular, a bit weirder, because we’re all really just doing it for our immediate community. I think that’s really special. I think the rave scene in particular has such a developed taste level and identity that I feel really lucky to be able to experience. Parties like Secondnature and High & Tight are so consistently delicious. I’ve also been really loving Joosed, which feels like such a special little party that’s kind of just for “us”, and I think that’s important to have.
The big thing that needs work, and I won’t apologize for bringing it up again because it actually is that important: nightlife needs to get real about Covid. We cannot just ignore the ongoing pandemic and pretend that everything is going to be fine. Especially the rave scene. Like, we’re cramming ourselves into poorly ventilated basements and warehouses to thrash around to techno for 8 straight hours and no one is thinking about viral transmission? The cognitive dissonance really gags me. As someone who has worn many hats; I’ve been a rapper, a pop star, a drag queen, an event producer, a DJ, I’ve been part of so many different scenes in this city. And I gotta be real, the PNW underground techno/rave community is like, the whitest, wealthiest, most conservative scene I’ve ever been a part of, while also simultaneously having the most exaggerated sense of self-importance and supposed radicalism. It’s baffling.
I’m not trying to deny the spiritual impact of raving or pretend it hasn’t changed me for the better, because it has. Like, that’s all very real. But when people talk so much about liberation and “healing” and “safe spaces” and building community or whatever while ignoring the ongoing pandemic altogether and throwing parties that are inaccessible to immunocompromised people, where people are getting sick with infections that could damage them for life, I have to roll my eyes a bit. It’s frustrating. I’m angry and I’m disappointed. Maybe it’s naive of me, but I kind of do expect ravers to be a bit more principled than like, the average American. How are you going to claim to be about these values and act like you’re resisting fascism or doing anything subversive when you’re also taking the Biden administration’s advice regarding an ongoing pandemic at face value? It doesn’t make any fucking sense. It’s not hard to just wear a mask. Especially at like, the grocery store or the airport. But also, masking at raves should be commonplace. It should be part of the culture. We’re supposed to care about each other.
Another big issue is the lack of spaces. And that’s not really the fault of anyone but the city. It’s so fucking violently expensive to live here, and the commercial rent situation is out of control, so venues and DIY spaces alike really struggle. Throwing parties then becomes very expensive, and so naturally, the types of people who get to sustain organizer positions and who therefore become the tastemakers of our scene begin to look homogenous. It’s mainly a bunch of wealthy, white, cis people in charge of who gets booked for raves, and that frustrates me. Not that these people don’t have great taste, because they absolutely do. I just wish there were a wider variety of perspectives and we got some more unexpected bookings. I think Lotion has been doing a good job of booking more diverse headliners and spotlighting diverse local talent for raves, which I appreciate. But yeah, it just sucks that the financial barriers are so extreme. Save us, Katie Wilson. Let us have inexpensive places to tweak out. Please.
Can you tell us a bit about your recent track “End It”, released last June?
Well, it’s a pretty straightforward track, I think. I’ve been a recording artist for over a decade, and I’m at the point where I’m only interested in making things that feel honest. There’s a lot of music coming out in the pop/club sphere these past few years that feels very dishonest to me. Like, I’m actually quite tired of escapism. It feels like a lot of artists are grasping desperately at threads of nostalgia for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. So I wanted to make something raw and cutting that feels very much like the present day. And obviously it’s a song about how much I want to kill myself. Like, I’m a fucked up disabled transsexual living in America in 2025. I’m not going to not speak on my reality. But I really love the song, I’m super proud of it, I think it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever made. It’s also the first time I’ve ever recorded my own vocals, my first self-produced track since 2017, and my first attempt at ever trying to mix a track on my own. So overall, I think I tore.
What can you tell us about your mix?
I was actually really stressed about getting this mix together. When I know something is going to be published, there’s always this sort of pressure to represent myself accurately, or like, display my “brand” properly, or whatever. But the thing is, I just became a brunette like 3 weeks ago. That’s a major psychological and spiritual shift. I don’t really know who I am right now, and it feels nearly impossible to put something out as a statement of my identity as an artist or a DJ. But I think I’ve learned to just trust my instincts. There’s a scene in the 2013 Ryan Trecartin film Center Jenny, toward the end, this girl stands up and exclaims “I no longer look for meaning in things, it’s not my responsibility.” So maybe this is a document of grief or heartbreak, maybe it’s a snapshot of an artist in the liminal space between identities, maybe it’s literally just a collection of tracks I like right now. You tell me.
What’s next for you?
I’m a brunette now.
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