If you’ve been living under a rock, EDM-wise, for the past decade or so, you might not know of Luciana. The rest of you can skip this paragraph, wherein I asked her to give me the thirty-second précis of who she is, and what she does. "They’ve coined me – and I don’t know who coined it – the queen of electro. I don’t like saying that. Thirty seconds? All right. Dance music. Electro. I write quirky dance songs that make people want to get on the floor. There you go, that’s like ten seconds." What more is there to say?

Quite a lot, in fact. Since beginning her music career, Luciana has worked with nearly everyone under the sun, from Tiesto to Will.i.am to Cazwell to Mark Knight, and churned out infectious, glam-infused electro tracks that tear up as many charts as dance floors. Her music, as she said of one of her most recent singles, U B the Bass, "does what it says on the tin."

More than a tin, Luciana’s brand of music would likely come more from a prescription bottle, with a list of unpronounceable ingredients and heart-pounding, breath-shortening side-effects as long as your arm, all driven by a bombastic stage persona, and lyrics that are contagious and spontaneous. She often quotes David Bowie as one of her sources of inspiration, and truth to tell, the influence is a good deal more than stylistic. Speaking of her songwriting process, Luciana told me, "I’m inspired by the way Bowie did his ad hoc writing. What I saw him do in a documentary was cut up some lyrics, and then you’d piece them all together, and you make a strange and wonderful sentence. It doesn’t make sense, and it does make sense. I’m constantly doing that, I’m constantly writing ideas and sentences taking from things I see in magazines or on billboards or lines from films, or something that somebody said in a conversation I’ve overheard. When I put them all together, weirdly enough, some of them make sense."

I asked if this style of writing lends itself more to a personal meaning, or whether she leaves interpretation to her audience. "I think a bit of both, actually. The best part of creating for me – when I do the ad hoc approach – is the not thinking. The not thinking is the spaces in between, and the spaces in between are the things that create the magic. Thinking too much about it, it becomes contrived. So when I’m creating now, I’ll do whatever comes naturally, and then I’ll start looking at it as a piece of art." Of course, the writer of Shut Your Mouth, I’m Still Hot, and Party Animal doesn’t always succumb to her highbrow inclinations. "[Sometimes] I’ll look at it and say, that’s a powerful message. Or it might just be words, random, about sex or about dancing or about being in the moment. When you are on the dance floor, you are in that moment. You’re not in the past, you’re not in the moment before, and that’s what I tend to write about."

Perhaps it’s by dint of her focus on the now, the immediate, that Luciana has managed to learn something that many artists struggle with for their entire careers. "Sometimes when I push and force it, it doesn’t work. I’ve learned that when you’re creating something, if that starts happening, just to walk away. Make a cup of tea. Go into the garden. Do something else, and then come back to it."

An artist of eclectic tastes, styles, and influences, Luciana nevertheless remains all but wired in to the musical consciousness of the moment, and it comes across in her unvarnished enthusiasm for the sounds that inspire her. "Who am I inspired by now? There’s a guy called Tinie Tempah, I love him. I’m inspired by Jay-Z and Kanye. I love punk, I love the stuff that’s coming out now in London that’s a bit more indie." Being a musical hotspot for more than half a century certainly gives Londoners like Luciana a wealth of inspiration to draw from. "Yeah, that’s why it’s great to be from London when you’re in music, because you can go back and plug into the source, and find out what’s up-and-coming." Find out about it, and get up to her elbows in it. Just recently she has co-written a debut project for a young pop artist by the monicker of Tiny Dancer (no Sir Elton involved), about whom she couldn’t be more enthusiastic, and told me how delighted she’d be to work alongside Calvin Harris.

Reading this far, one might be tempted to brand the Queen of EDM a hedonist or libertine, but her attention to the moment, and to the people she cares about, generates a de facto social consciousness that is soundly on the right side of history. Luciana has been entirely unequivocal is her support for the LGBT community. In fact, while talking acronyms, she quickly jumped, in solidarity with her queer audience, upon my personal favourite ever-expanding acronym for the queer community, or Queer/questioning, Intersexed, Lesbian, Trans, Bi, Asexual, and Gay. "Do you know what, Nick, I’m a total QUILTBAG." "You know that’s gonna be the headline, isn’t it? Luciana: I’m a total QUILTBAG." I’m not quite sure whether she was serious, but it seemed like the right decision in the moment.

QUILTBAG or ally, Luciana’s love for her friends and her fans have made her a fierce voice for equality, even if not entirely by design. "I think, because I have so many gay friends, that’s very close to home. All I know is that I have a lot of gay friends who never had the same rights as [straight people], so that’s what I’m there for. There’s my voice." In recent interviews, she spoke about her support for marriage equality in the US and Australia, and decried recent legislation in Russia that is posed to strip queer people of rights and protections under the law.

The relationship between Luciana and her queer fan base certainly seems to be a reciprocal one. When we were discussing playing to gay clubs and gay audiences in specific, Luciana waxed ecstatic about the seething energy, the heat, the physicality of a crowd that’s really into one of her performances. "When you’re in a gay club, you can totally taste the club dirt. And I’m all about the club dirt, Nick."

Queer or straight, she told me, the EDM scene shifts dramatically when moving from Europe to North America. "When you come over to America, the tracks that are coming out in England just don’t work. They’re too British, they’re too sharp, they’re too tart. Whereas in America, EDM works alongside R&B; that sound has been sort of fused together." This is a boon to Luciana’s art, as she sees it. "It’s great, because you get somebody like Deadmau5, who was underground, or Skrillex, who was underground, ... [who have] crossed over because they’ve had such big success. When things like that happen, it’s easier for me as a songwriter, because that’s my music, that’s what I do. People speak my language. A lot of the time, I’m mostly underground, so it opens up doors to me for something to go ‘overground’ and be a bit more commercial."

That tension between the personal and commercial is something that Luciana appears to feel keenly. "I feel ready to move forward and do something a bit more avant garde, but people tend to want me to be ‘quirky.’" Speaking in the voice of a studio exec, she says, "We want you to be quirky but we don’t want you to be too quirky. We want you to appeal to middle America. We want what you are, but not too much of it. So I’ve been choosing my projects a bit more selectively. I always feel like I’m slightly underground and I really like it that way." Just as she’s reluctant to temper her songwriting in pursuit of broader appeal, she’s dismissive of the idea of doing a song or a collaboration just for the recognition it might bring. "If someone sends me a track, and I like it, I’m gonna do it. If someone sends me a track and I don’t like it, I won’t do it just because it’s got a name on it. That’s a classic case of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, or trying to do something just to appeal to the masses. For what reason would that be?"

Irreverent, incorrigible, and quite possibly inimitable, Luciana will be blowing out speakers at PURE Pride at the end of the month. And you can very likely find me, bouncing and sweating and seething with the rest of the room, on August 31st.