When she decided to throw the first Jerk party in 2013, just as the trees in Toronto were beginning to cast off their leaves, Bambii was a 20-something university dropout with pink braces who had never DJ'd a party in her life. Her early gigs were a procession of little restaurants, dingy bars, shop openings and yoga studios—casual endeavours with low stakes. Back then, she couldn't just go rogue and play whatever she wanted. Total freedom wasn't part of the deal. But what those gigs did offer was a suggestion of possibility, the faint outline of something like a direction.

Bambii was professionally adrift at the time, cycling through a series of unrelated jobs in order to keep above water: "terrible" but coveted retail positions (it was the age of American Apparel), rote call centres and nonprofits that worked with queer youth, for which she occasionally organised music events. She inherited a wide variety of musical tastes from her culturally omnivorous Jamaican mother, who listened to a blend of reggae, house, jazz, classic rock and '90s dancehall. She'd dropped out of a primarily white arts high school where she harboured a secret love affair with punk and indie rock, then later returned to an adult school that was mostly Black and brown immigrants who listened to hip-hop and R&B. She would stroll around her South Asian and Caribbean neighbourhood and hear Bollywood scores pulsing from the passing cars.

Her childhood was a montage of disparate sounds overlapping organically, fragments of global music accumulating like gold bracelets as she matured into young adulthood in one of the world's most multicultural cities. By the time she'd finally worked up the confidence—or perhaps the impatience—Bambii was primed to curate something that stood apart from what she was used to in Toronto's emergent nightlife scene. "Honestly, I just wanted a party where I could play Vybz Kartel and Disclosure together," she laughed. "I just wanted to play my tracks!"

Bambii's debut EP, Infinity Club, is buoyed by that same clear-eyed, uncompromising vision of club music and its elastic potential. The introductory track—a dozen snatches of overlapping, multilingual voices welcoming us to a fictional Infinity Club—scans as an invitation into the musician's own universe, where social and geographical borders are trembling lines that dissolve into mist. The project is a distillation of what's drawn many to Bambii's sonic world for a decade now: a sexy, rollicking trip to a cavernous rave soundtracked by skittering jungle and UK garage, drum & bass, murky R&B, future dancehall and shades of pop. Warbled synths bloom like neon signs flickering in the dark. Vocals get pitched up or down, or otherwise distorted beyond the human register, warped into an ethereal sci-fi soundscape like dispatches from outer space. There are bouncing Jersey club kicks, echoing, metallic grime synths and shuffling breakbeats, though Bambii isn't afraid to slow down time with lush, emotional interludes. Infinity Club unfolds like a dusky, compact homage to Black dance music, with one eye firmly affixed to Bambii's ancestral homeland of Jamaica.

At 11 PM on that first night of Jerk, though, Double Double Land, a DIY performance space that used to be run by artists out of Kensington Market, was nearly empty. "I remember being like, 'it's a wrap,'" said Bambii, her eyes doe-like under the brim of a pink cap. "Like, I quit." Eight minutes later the party was packed to the walls, and the venue had reached capacity. There were plates of steaming hot jerk chicken being passed out for free, all cooked by Bambii herself. She'd done all the promotion on her own too and had sent the flyer out to everyone she knew on Facebook.

"My set was really terrible—I was so new," she admitted with a smile. But there it was in front of her: a party she'd organised all on her own, a space she'd made to explore new sounds with her friends, the whole thing looking like a feverish family affair. "The music expanded our social boundaries," said Farhia Toto, an old friend of Bambii's who was at that first party. "For hours everyone was shaking and whining their body down, shouting, smiling."

Bambii's new EP Infinity Club unfolds like a dusky, compact homage to Black dance music, with one eye firmly affixed to Bambii's ancestral homeland of Jamaica.

Bambii couldn't believe it. "I had never felt the way I did, looking at that party, and when I had that feeling I knew I wanted to DJ," she said. "My whole life I was super flip-floppy. But this was the one thing that I did [where] I did it. And I felt this focus, this drive and motivation. In some ways, DJing feels like the longest relationship I've ever had: I can always return to it, and it's exactly the way I left it."

Jerk is a singular party, in many ways. There was, of course, a slim tradition of legendary underground parties in Toronto's gay village, spearheaded by pioneers like Will Munro and DJ Blackcat. But when Bambii set out to host the first Jerk, it was in response to a main club circuit that was choked and largely stratified, the popular electronic DJs a monotonous pantheon of straight white dudes who, she says, favoured the same kind of music. If you wanted to go to a capital-R rave back then, where the dolls and the gays and the boys from the hood all danced under a sign of global music, there was really only Yes Yes Y'all.

"Those parties were highly addictive to me," said Bambii, recalling with wonder her first experiences attending. "It's where I met all my friends, where I developed my confidence, where I figured out I was queer. I never missed a month."

She and I sat across from one another at a small, quaint café in Midtown, just around the corner from Casa Loma, the oldest medieval castle in Canada, and her apartment. The early July air was warm and humid and spilling in through the open door, ice clinking and melting in our sweating glasses of coffee. Bambii has a vibrant, self-assured disposition, the kind of casual authoritativeness that doesn't seem easily punctured by doubt. These days, landing an interview with her requires some elaborate choreography. It took weeks for us to find the time to meet, until it began to feel like a protracted game of cat and mouse with her publicist caught in between us, trying to forge a connection.

The ramped-up international attention is hardly surprising to anyone from Toronto. Bambii is often invoked in conversations like a mythical figure. "She's made it so much easier for younger DJs like myself… to bring whatever we want to the table and have a better chance of people being receptive to it," said Chinelo Yasin, a photographer and DJ who toured with Bambii last summer. "Everyone in this city knows what Bambii means to us."

Her sets are defiant in their genre-agnosticism, and succeed in locating the connections between various genres as opposed to their differences. She'll take a sprinting jungle rework of a Brazilian folk track, for example, and transition it into a springy, Jersey house edit of a Roy Ayers jazz cut. Or a thumping dance remix of a shimmering Jill Scott classic alchemised into a stuttering Overmono garage track with underwater synths and a breakbeat swiped from James Brown. A journey through Bambii's carefully researched soundscapes is likely to be as charged with R&B, hip-hop and reggae classics as it is with glitchy oontz-oontz electronica. Her sets are a confluence of Black diasporic sound.

Bambii has always conceived of the club as an otherworldly "third space"—an abstract zone between colliding cultures that the scholar Homi K. Babha, in his 1994 book The Location of Culture, describes as a site of becoming, where people can negotiate and renegotiate their identities through performance. She's attuned to the ways that queer Black femmes for example might put themselves together before the rave, the magic of self-invention involved in the time it takes to decide who to be on any given night. And she knows how important nightlife can be to others because of what it means to her.

"DJs have saved my life several times over," she told me, without a trace of hyperbole. "I feel like I've been a real person. I've had to go to work. I've had to struggle. I've had moments where I had no money. I've been a person who knows the grind of what it feels like to struggle to exist. And I couldn't have done that without music, I couldn't have done that without dance spaces, without those shared moments of catharsis with people who look like me, and who feel the things that I do."

Her single Jamaican mother imprinted this outlook on her. "All my political DNA, my values, my instincts towards being intentional with how I curate spaces: all of that comes from my mum," she said. (So does the nickname "Bambii.") Her mother, who grew up working class and used to write and direct stage plays, is a place maker who lectures on urban planning. This has meant that Bambii matured in social justice spaces, where adults were always talking about the shortcomings of the municipal government, problems with youth arts funding, approaches to social housing or policing or transit equity. Those conversations clearly stuck with her, and she's aware of how a party often doubles as an escape route. "It's not something I could ever trivialise," she said.

Bambii has always conceived of the club as an otherworldly "third space," where people can negotiate and renegotiate their identities through performance.

Bambii's great grandmother moved to Canada in the '80s and, like the 100,000 other Jamaicans who were migrating to Toronto around the same time, she carried the family with her. They settled in the city of Etobicoke just a few clicks east of Toronto, and Bambii grew up in a predominantly Caribbean neighbourhood, where there was always music in the streets and in the air at home.

As we both claim Jamaican heritage, the island and its attendant complexities found their way into our conversation and never left. The country looms large in the global cultural imagination, but the flip side of that visibility is an overfamiliarity that masks a deep misunderstanding of its politics and history. To talk about Jamaica is inevitably to discuss its beauty and its ugliness, its consistencies and contradictions.

One thread that emerged in our exchange were concerns with the nation's outsized cultural impact, how "people have such an extractive relationship with Jamaica but don't seem to respect what it's given to culture and to music," as she put it. Another was about the country's sexual politics, how "everyone wants to talk about the homophobia but not the Spanish and British colonial history, the religious control that put it there; people love to call Black countries homophobic and emphasise that as inherent to our lack of progression." And another, about how raucous, impromptu street parties in Kingston found their way into the electrified, distorted soundscapes of Infinity Club.

In 2018, the year before Bambii released her first song, "NITEVISION," a friend invited her on a trip around Jamaica to learn more about sound system culture. She found herself surprised at the deep basslines blaring from a jungle track on the speakers of a passing car. "I had just started reading about the Caribbeans who entered this hyper-surveilled London in the '60s through the '80s, and how this music they developed became associated with crime," she told me, alluding to how UK police often raided house parties where ska, rocksteady and roots reggae were played. "Obviously, there's something rebellious about jungle," she said. "But it sounds almost like jazz to me. There's something so emotional about it, something that speaks to being young and at odds with the place that you're in."

Bambii started playing with beats back in 2016, but it wasn't until two years later that she really started taking it seriously. In 2019, she tapped the dancehall legend Pamputtae for the first song she would produce, a grimey bashment track which her partner at the time had urged her to move on from. It was suffused with dub sirens and wining synths and missives to your waistline, an early indication of where the artist got her sensibility. She also had a deft touch as a coproducer on half the songs for Kelela's sophomore album earlier this year, Raven, a crying-in-the-club masterpiece.

Bambii's production choices, her quick changes of pace and her sense of narrative drama mirror her intelligence within music. The production on Infinity Club feels agitated, the songs resting on unstable percussive loops that always threaten to shift or speed up with no warning. "Body" is a moody, nocturnal grime track until a Jersey beat suddenly overthrows it. The space around Sydanie's captivating voice on "Sydanie's Interlude" is atmospheric and astral, synths winking and trembling like stars until the whole thing races off balance and into a brisk jungle break.

Today, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who would deny Bambii's influence on Toronto's nightlife scene and its evolution. Bambii seemed to know that, but wasn't quick to claim it. "I'm not optimistic about this city on a municipal level," she told me, scoffing at our regressive city politics, "but I am optimistic about the people around me. I feel like me and my friends, and the people coming up under us… everyone's doing such cool and exciting things that feel like they're pushing the city forward. It feels like our thing."

Some DJs I spoke to for this story expressed that Bambii's freewheeling sets and the passionate energy she generates has opened up space for other people to experiment, too. Her party Jerk is an unpretentious, high-octane exploration of experimental Caribbean music where Bambii's mum will yell on the mic and where everyone is soaked in sweat by the end. It's the sort of party where you leave feeling lighter and more porous. Nino Brown, a cofounder of Yes Yes Y'all and one of the city's most beloved DJs, said part of the appeal is that people feel like Bambii's parties belong to them in some way—a for-us-by-us kind of deal that conjures a passionate energy that feels unique to the city. "She's been my favourite DJ forever," said Brown, "and that never changes."

Sometimes it feels like everyone from Toronto is always leaving or considering leaving. It's part of the reason things here take so long to change. There is chronic brain drain that has plagued the city since time immemorial. Bambii knows this, as she frequently works in Melbourne and Paris, "but I would never leave Toronto permanently," she said. "I only leave to gather these experiences so I can bring them back with me...Toronto wins in community. That's what makes the nightlife feel like that—the energy and love and joy at our parties. In a lot of other cities, the people are desensitised and bored, and so they take things for granted. But because Toronto is so experienced with being overlooked and underfunded, people actually show up when good things happen, in a way that's so refreshing for me." Bambii is always coming home.