Aurealia Nelson has an intense relationship with a bag of Scrabble tiles. Nothing unnatural or bizarre, you understand, just something slightly more emotionally freighted than the average state of affairs that exists between a woman and a board game accessory. To the uninitiated (and to the barista at the Barnes & Noble Starbucks who watches her shake the small velvet pouch before setting up her laptop on a Tuesday afternoon), it looks like she’s playing. But to Aurealia – who performs as DJ Demoness, who wrote a book called How to Be a Bad Witch, who spent years studying psychology before deciding the occult was just another vocabulary for the same damn thing – the tiles are an alphabet of chaos and order. “I use them for divination,” she says, settling into a corner table with her chai tea (oat milk, always oat milk) and a stack of magazines fanned around her like tarot cards. “Casting the letters to see how the universe is spelling out the next hour. It grounds me because it reminds me that language is just code, and codes can be rewritten.” She is dressed in full Harajuku mode today – layers of black lace and platform boots, accessories that jangle with occult significance – and there’s something about the way she occupies space that makes you hyperaware of your own body in relation to hers. She’s not trying to seduce anyone with this witchy aesthetic in the Barnes & Noble café, but the effect is there anyway, in the deliberate slowness of her movements, the way she makes eye contact and doesn’t break it first. She is very much in the business of rewriting codes.
In Aurealia’s dreams – and she dreams often, the recurring kind that feel less like random neural firing and more like messages from her own subconscious running a night shift – she is walking through a house in Richmond. Not one she’s lived in, but one she knows. “It has endless Victorian hallways and rooms filled with ephemera, old papers, and mirrors that don’t reflect my face, but my energy,” she says, her hands moving as she describes it, as if she could pull the architecture out of the air. She’s usually searching for a specific cat that she can hear purring but can’t find, and this frustrates her in the dream in a way that feels significant when she wakes up. “It’s my psyche trying to integrate the shadow self,” she explains, as casually as someone else might describe their commute. “The cat is the intuition; the house is the mind.” She can still see the cat in her mind, the one she’s never found, the one that exists only in the dream-house with the mirrors that show energy instead of faces. This is the kind of thing Aurealia says without irony or self-consciousness, because when you’ve spent enough time studying both Jungian psychology and ceremonial magic, you stop seeing a distinction between diagnostic frameworks and divination systems. Also, she has an actual cat – Juju – so the metaphor is living in her apartment, shedding on her altar, demanding wet food at 3 AM like any other mystical guardian of dimensional portals.
Until recently – which is to say, until she decided that writing books about reclaiming female power and teaching workshops on energetic boundaries were insufficient outlets for the pressure building in her – Aurealia’s public image has been fragmented across multiple identities. The reporter who covered human interest stories. The psychology student working toward her Master’s degree. The author of empowerment literature. The witch teaching others to draw circles around themselves and say “this is my domain.” Now, at an age she doesn’t specify but that seems to hover somewhere in the territory where women stop apologizing for taking up space, she has synthesized all of these selves into DJ DEMONESS, described in press materials as a Richmond-based producer and DJ fusing the relentless rhythms of Dark Techno with the dystopian atmosphere of Cyberpunk, a veteran of the underground scene who creates sonic landscapes that are as haunting as they are danceable. What the press materials don’t say – because how could they – is that her tracks are designed to force trance states at 140 BPM, that she understands music as a technology for moving energy, that when she steps up to the decks she’s performing a ritual of rhythm.
“It was a buildup of pressure,” she says, describing the shift from writing to music. “Writing books is cerebral – it’s mind-work. But the emotions, the rage, the ecstasy – they needed a physical outlet. I needed to manipulate frequency directly.” She pauses to sip her chai, considering. “I realized I could write a spell, or I could play a track at 140 BPM and force the trance state. I chose the latter.” The music industry, particularly the electronic music scene, has always been a boys’ club that treats women DJs like either novelties or threats. Aurealia is neither performing for their approval nor particularly interested in smashing the patriarchy today – she’s just here to talk about her fucking music. Her first release, Haunt Me, was atmospheric and introspective, concerned with internal ghosts and the work of self-excavation. Her recent EP, Hex the System, is something else entirely. “Haunt Me was about internal ghosts,” she explains. “Hex the System was about looking outward at the structures trying to crush us. I got angry. I looked at the world – the politics, the way neurodivergent minds are treated – and decided we didn’t need to be haunted anymore. We needed to be the ones doing the scaring.” The EP includes a rap breakdown that surprised some listeners who were expecting pure techno, but Aurealia is unbothered by genre conventions. “That voice demanded to come out. Singing is melodic; rapping is percussive truth-telling. The track needed teeth.”
Walk into Aurealia’s studio on a typical night and you’ll find what she describes as “possessed methodical chaos.” She usually starts around midnight, sometimes later – she’s nocturnal by both temperament and necessity. “I usually have a candle burning, coffee – always coffee – and I’m surrounded by synths and notebooks,” she says. “I’m chasing a sound in my head, a specific vibration. It’s less about composing and more about tuning a radio until the static clears and the signal comes through.” She knows a track is finished not through any analytical process but through a somatic response, an embodied knowing that the mind can’t access. “When the hair stands up on my arms,” she says, holding up her forearm to demonstrate. “It’s a somatic response. If my body doesn’t react, the track isn’t done. The mind can be tricked, but the nervous system never lies.” This is the same logic that informs her divination practice, her boundary-setting, her entire approach to existing in a world that constantly tries to convince women that their instincts are wrong. Aurealia has decided her instincts are data, and she’s treating them accordingly.
By “treating them accordingly,” Aurealia means maintaining sovereignty in a world designed to extract it, which is the entire thesis of How to Be a Bad Witch: Unleashing Your Inner Power and Casting Your Own Destiny, released last October. The book is emphatically not, as the subtitle promises, about pointy hats and bubbling cauldrons unless that’s your jam. It’s not about sugar-coated spells or outdated stereotypes. “A ‘Bad Witch’ is a sovereign witch,” Aurealia explains, leaning forward slightly, her bracelets clicking against the table. “It’s not about being wicked; it’s about being bad-ass. It’s the reclamation of the word No. It’s the refusal to shrink to make others comfortable. It’s drawing a circle around yourself and saying, ‘This is my domain.’” For women who feel drawn to the craft but were raised to distrust their own power – and this is most women, if we’re being honest – she has one simple instruction: “Unlearn the idea that being ‘nice’ is the rent you pay to exist in the world. Your intuition is not ‘anxiety’ – it is data. Trust the data.”
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She learned this the hard way, through years of giving away her gatekeeping privileges to people who didn’t deserve them, through burning out from trying to be everything to everyone. “The hard way. By burning out,” she says when I ask how she learned to draw boundaries. “A boundary isn’t a wall – it’s a gate. And I’m the only one with the key.” The boundary she draws around herself isn’t polite. It doesn’t come with apologies or explanations or softening language. It’s just there, immovable, and if you cross it she’ll cut you off without a second fucking thought. She grew up tuned to frequencies other kids couldn’t hear, in a way that made her stand out. “It wasn’t one moment, but a slow realization that the world was built for a very specific type of neurotypical compliance that I just didn’t have the hardware for. I felt the vibrations of things – places, people – loudly. When other kids were playing, I was analyzing the why behind the play.” Richmond, with its Confederate hauntings layered on indigenous burial grounds, fed her sensitivity early. “I was the observer in the corner, absorbing the frequency of the room. Richmond is a city of ghosts, and I think I picked up on that early. I was the kid who was comfortable in the silence that made adults nervous. I wasn’t necessarily chaotic, but I was… intense. I saw the strings attached to the puppets before I knew what to call them.”
The thing about Aurealia’s childhood is that it wasn’t defined by a single moment of occult revelation but by a slow accumulation of knowing that she didn’t fit the prescribed templates, that her particular frequency wasn’t going to resonate with mainstream expectations. “It’s in the soil of Virginia,” she says when I ask about her first encounter with the occult. “You can’t walk these streets without feeling the history, the hauntings. But finding the works of writers like Tanith Lee – that was the key. Dark fantasy wasn’t just fiction to me; it felt like a history book of a place I actually belonged.” She was the kid who needed music that sounded like a velvet cathedral being demolished by industrial machinery, who found in the driving, repetitive basslines of Goth and Industrial something that felt like a heartbeat. “Bands that understood that darkness isn’t evil; it’s just the womb where creation happens. I needed music that sounded like a velvet cathedral.”
The shift from understanding witchcraft as an interest to claiming it as identity came gradually and then all at once, the way most important transformations do. “When I realized psychology and magick were just different vocabularies for the same thing: changing consciousness in accordance with will,” she says. “My Master’s degree gave me the science; the craft gave me the spirit. The ‘after’ came when I stopped asking for permission to be powerful.” This realization – that the clinical language of cognitive behavioral therapy and the ceremonial language of casting circles are both attempts to hack the operating system of human consciousness – is the foundation of everything she does now, from the books she writes to the tracks she produces to the way she moves through the world. She calls her energy “High Priestess,” which she defines as “sitting in the center of duality – dark and light, sound and silence – without wavering. I don’t chase; I attract.”
Asked if she’s ever hexed someone, Aurealia’s face does something complicated, a smile that suggests the question is both more and less complicated than it appears. “Let’s just say I believe in the laws of physics: action and reaction. I prefer to mirror energy rather than create a hex. If you send me poison, I just become a mirror. If that poison destroys you when it bounces back… well, that was your poison, wasn’t it?” This is not a dodge or an evasion – it’s a sophisticated understanding of how energy works, how intention operates, how you can protect yourself without engaging in the kind of destructive magic that ultimately backfires. She’s thought about this carefully, the ethics of power, the responsibility that comes with understanding how to manipulate consciousness. It’s the same calculation that informs her approach to music: she wants people to feel exorcised when they leave her sets, lighter, like they left their demons sweating on the dance floor. She’s not trying to hurt anyone. She’s trying to liberate them.
We’ve been talking for two hours now, the café cycling through its Tuesday afternoon crowd, students replacing retirees, the energy shifting as the day moves toward evening. Aurealia has claimed this corner table like territory, surrounded by her stack of magazines (fashion, music, occult), her laptop, her phone, her Scrabble tiles. She fits and doesn’t fit, which is probably how she’s felt in most spaces her entire life. The Harajuku styling draws attention, but she wears it with the kind of confidence that suggests she stopped worrying about whether she was “too much” sometime around 2015. When a woman at the next table stares a little too long at her platform boots, Aurealia doesn’t flinch or adjust herself. She just exists, taking up exactly the amount of space she needs, no more and no less.
We are talking about her various careers – reporter, psychologist, author, DJ – and whether she sees these as different chapters or different expressions of the same project. “They’re all the same book,” she says without hesitation. “The Reporter observed the human condition. The Psychologist analyzed it. The Witch transmutes it. The DJ amplifies it. Every skill I learned is on the decks with me.” She’s spent too many years watching other people try to control her narrative, her image, her career trajectory. She’s done with that shit. Every decision now is hers. This includes her time writing for Hustler magazine, which she brings up before I can ask about it, as if she knows it’s in her biography and wants to control the narrative around it. Her time writing for Hustler magazine taught her exactly how the male gaze deconstructs women, how desire gets weaponized, and how true power is owning your image so completely it can’t be stolen. She learned to be fearless in the face of taboos, learned that sex is just another frequency you can choose to amplify or mute. She is matter-of-fact about this, neither ashamed nor defensive, just stating what the experience taught her about power and image and control. It’s the same energy she brings to discussions about her Master’s in psychology, about motherhood (which she mentions in passing, not as definition but as one among many identities she holds), about being neurodivergent in a world that pathologizes different frequencies.
Richmond comes up again when I ask why she’s stayed, why she hasn’t moved to a larger city with a bigger electronic music scene, more venues, more opportunities. “It’s a city of death and rebirth,” she says, and this is not metaphorical. “It burned and rose again. The James River holds ancient energy. It feeds my art in a way a cleaner city never could.” She means this literally – the soil, the water, the air, the ghosts embedded in the architecture, the way history sits on this city like humidity. Richmond’s underground scene is small enough that everyone knows everyone’s business, and yet Aurealia moves through it like smoke – visible, undeniable, but impossible to pin down. She’s not interested in the scene politics, the who’s-fucking-who, the petty dramas that plague every local music community. The rave scene, for all its talk of PLUR and community, can be just as exclusionary and political as any other social space. Aurealia navigates it with the understanding that everyone’s got an agenda and most of them are full of shit. Her music, she says, is “a survival spell. We’re living in the dystopia we wrote about in the 80s. My music is armor.” Dark Techno, Cyberpunk, Industrial – these aren’t just aesthetic choices but responses to living in a collapsing empire, in a culture that treats neurodivergent minds as problems to be fixed rather than frequencies to be respected, in a world where women are still being told to be nice and quiet and small. “My music is armor,” she repeats, and you understand that she means this both for herself and for the people who show up to her sets looking for something they can’t name but recognize when they hear it.
There is a ritual Aurealia performs before every set, something she does even when it seems small or superstitious, even when she’s tired or rushed or running late. “I anoint my pulse points with a specific oil I brew myself – my ‘Fiery Wall of Protection,’” she says. “It’s a sensory trigger. The moment that scent hits me, the Aurealia who worries about grocery lists or emails dissolves, and the Priestess steps forward.” She pauses, considering whether to say the next part. “And I never, ever speak the intention aloud where others can hear. Words are power; you don’t spill your power before the beat drops.” This is not superstition in the sense of throwing salt over your shoulder – this is a deliberate technology for state change, a way of signaling to her nervous system that it’s time to shift gears, to access the part of herself that can hold space for a room full of people seeking catharsis. The oil is a boundary between her everyday self and her performing self, a gate that only she controls.
Her altar right now is dedicated to the Ephemeris, which she explains is related to her oracle deck work. “There are prints from my oracle deck, a lot of black tourmaline for grounding the electric currents I work with, and fresh offerings for the ancestors. And always, a space for Juju – my cat. He’s the familiar that guards the gateway between the mundane and the magical.”
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When I ask if she’s seeing anyone – the inevitable celebrity profile question – Aurealia’s face does something complicated, a smile that suggests I’ve asked exactly the right question and exactly the wrong one. ‘My primary relationship is with the Muse,’ she says, and the way she says it makes it clear this is not a metaphor. ‘It takes a very specific frequency to harmonize with mine.’ Is the Muse a person? Someone enchanted by her obvious sexiness, devoted, kept chained – literally or figuratively – to her bed? Someone who understands that being Aurealia’s Muse means existing in service to her work, her art, her needs? The imagination runs wild with possibilities, each more intriguing than the last, but Aurealia is intentionally vague, and that vagueness feels like power. Like she’s dangling something in front of you and watching to see if you’ll reach for it.
A romantic green flag, she says, is “comfort in silence. Coffee without nervous chatter.” A red flag is “anyone trying to ‘figure me out’ instead of experiencing me.” She is matter-of-fact about this, neither apologetic nor particularly interested in whether someone finds her standards too high. She’s built her entire practice around trusting her data. She’s done with the kind of men who mistake intensity for availability, who think a woman in platform boots and occult jewelry is performing for their consumption rather than simply existing.
Seduction, in Aurealia’s world, sounds like “a heavy, slow bassline that hits you in the chest” – the kind that makes you feel it between your legs before your brain catches up. Her top three late-night, lights-low songs are Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” Massive Attack’s “Angel,” and “anything by Portishead,” which together form a playlist that would either pull you under completely or send you running toward daylight, depending on your tolerance for emotional intensity.
We are supposed to talk about shadows, about what haunts her, about the parts of herself she’s still making sense of in her darker corners. “Being an infinite spirit in a biodegradable body,” she says immediately, as if she’s been thinking about this already. “Especially on birthdays. I turn that fear into fuel.” This is the work she’s always doing, the alchemical transformation of difficult emotions into something that can be used – fear into fuel, rage into rhythm, isolation into sovereignty. Is there a version of herself she had to kill to become who she is now? “The ‘Good Girl,’” she says without hesitation. “She’s buried. I planted roses on her grave, but she’s not coming back.” The Good Girl, whoever she was – probably someone who smiled too much and didn’t charge enough and let people interrupt her and second-guessed her own intuition – is dead, and in her place is the High Priestess, the Bad Witch, DJ DEMONESS standing at the decks with her protection oil and her intention and her absolute refusal to shrink. That version of herself who apologized for taking up space, who dimmed her intensity to make others comfortable? She’s dead. Gone. And thank fuck for that, because she was exhausting to maintain.
She wants people to leave her sets exorcised, lighter, like they left their demons sweating on the dance floor. This is not hyperbole. Aurealia understands that music is a technology for moving energy, that a dance floor is a ritual space, that 140 BPM is not just a tempo but a tool for forcing altered states of consciousness. Her tracks are designed to hit you in the chest first, then lower, that 140 BPM bassline bypassing your brain entirely and going straight to your hips, your pulse points, the places in your body that respond to rhythm before thought. Her sets are designed to be cathartic, to give people permission to access the parts of themselves that polite society insists should stay hidden. The darkness, the rage, the grief, the feral joy – all of it gets a place on the dance floor, and all of it gets transformed through rhythm and bass and the collective energy of bodies moving in sync. “We’re living in the dystopia,” she says again, circling back to the theme that runs through all her work. “My music is armor. But it’s also exorcism. It’s both protection and release.”
If the music stopped tomorrow – and she doesn’t think it will, but hypothetically – what would she want to be remembered for? “Authenticity. Showing you can be a mother, a scholar, a freak, and a king all at once.” She lists these identities without ranking them, without suggesting one is more important than the others, because they’re all equally true, all equally her. The mother and the freak and the king, all dancing at the same party, all wearing platform boots and shaking Scrabble tiles and knowing that language is code and codes can be rewritten. But the music isn’t stopping. If anything, it’s getting louder. She has plans for the RVA Witch Walk, wants to “turn it into a massive city-wide convergence of art and occultism.” She has a symphony in her head that she hasn’t decoded yet, “bridging orchestral horror and hard techno.” Making music at this level – the kind that bypasses your brain and goes straight to your nervous system – is exhausting, relentless work. It’s not romantic. It’s sitting in a studio at 3 AM tweaking the same four bars until you want to throw your laptop out the goddamn window. She has Scrabble tiles to cast and tracks to finish and boundaries to maintain and a cat that needs feeding and a city that needs someone to transform its hauntings into something danceable.
We’re back to the Scrabble tiles now, which makes sense – we started with them, after all, and every good ritual has its closing as well as its opening. Aurealia is packing up her laptop, gathering her magazines, draining the last of her chai. The afternoon crowd has shifted around us, students replacing retirees, the energy of the café changing as the day moves toward evening. She shakes the velvet pouch one more time, draws a single tile without looking, holds it up to the café’s fluorescent light. I can’t see which letter it is from where I’m sitting, but she studies it for a moment, nods slightly, as if confirming something she already suspected.“What does it say?” I ask, because I can’t help myself. She smiles – a real smile this time, not the professional courtesy she extends to baristas but something warmer, more conspiratorial.“It says what it always says. That language is just code. And I’m the one writing it.” She drops the tile back into the pouch, pulls the strings tight, slips it into her bag alongside her laptop and her phone and all the other tools she needs to survive in a world that would prefer she be smaller, quieter, less intense. But Aurealia Nelson – DJ DEMONESS, Bad Witch, High Priestess of 140 BPM – stopped being small a long time ago. She killed that girl and planted roses on her grave. And if you listen carefully to the bassline that pulses under every track she makes, you can hear those roses growing in the dark, thorns and petals and roots, spelling out a new alphabet, rewriting the code one beat at a time.
