Nico posted on instagram about her experience with Beetronics when ordering her Ltd. Blackout 2020 Royal Jelly : "the sun shines through this one. 🐝 i’ve been learning more about what they are doing @beetronics fx and lusting after their pedals for some time. interestingly when i contacted them with some questions for my first order, renato ‘accidentally’ wrote back addressing me as “mr. ferrarilover,” which i found to be quite perfect given that i am a nonbinary femme lesbian with a penchant for androgyny. until now i haven’t been very public about my gender identity, but given the political situation and my own increasing feelings of the necessity of my visibility in this vein, i playfully responded by coming out in full and suggesting he call me “mr. ferrarilover” from now on.

i know i’m not alone in this when i tell you that i was nervous and knew it was a risk. i awoke today to a beautiful, validating response from renato (the details of which i won’t go into but let’s just say he did address the email “dear mr. ferrarilover,”)—- in which he acknowledged what a risk it was for me to be so plain about my identity, and proceeded to assure me that he is one of those wonderful progressive heterosexual males who fights in his own way against toxic masculinity.

while my pronouns are she/her and i identify as a woman, i also very much identify with masculinity and androgyny—the interplay between gender and the many shades of grey in life in general having always fascinated me. i studied philosophy of language/logic and existentialism in college, which led to my love of vedanta and mysticism in my never ending quest to understand ‘the order of things,’ wherein god is portrayed as expressing itself equally and to endless mysterious and symbolic degrees along the spectrum between the two aspects, the divine feminine principle (shakti) and the divine father (shiva).

suffice it to say, in the male dominated guitar world it was truly a special moment to be received with such warmth and accepting authenticity by the peeps at beetronics, and evidence that the unaccepting, stifling and at times terrifying world in which i was born forever alien is indeed changing for the better. playing beetronics pedals will be a thing of true 𝔟𝔢𝔞𝔲𝔱𝔶 as i plan for the next album 💄"