‘You Have to Sit Through the Discomfort of Being Bad’: Bambii’s Rise Is Fueled by Persistence (and Bangers)

Digital audio workstations (DAWs) like Ableton Live and Logic Pro, used by many artists to make electronic music, aren’t necessarily beginner-friendly. One might call them intimidating. Sitting in front of one such program for the first time years ago, Bambii wasn’t convinced she’d ever figure out how to conjure music from it.

“It’s definitely not user-friendly,” she says. “Nobody’s trying to make it easy. They’re not sexy.”

But she was committed, and through a process the Toronto-born artist calls “true trial and error,” she started making things “that sounded like absolute garbage and did not resemble a song. It sounded like [banging on] pots and pans.”

After a year of experimenting, however, she finally had something she knew was good. “It was honestly a little baby loop, but I was so obsessed with it,” she says. “When you have those moments, it pushes you.”

Eventually, in 2019, after fives years of DJing clubs and events, she finally had her own debut single. Her subsequent track and EP releases built up to the third Bambii EP, Infinity Club II. Out last month, the project further establishes a sound that amalgamates club music and the Caribbean sounds Bambii grew up with into a sound she calls “future dancehall.” 

With it, she’s carved out a tour schedule that has included performances at Electric Forest and Glastonbury, British Columbia’s Shambhala this weekend and festivals like London’s All Points East and Miami’s III Points this late summer and fall.

Becoming a buzzy name of the new gen dance world wasn’t an obvious path for Bambii, who struggled in school and never had a clear sense of what she wanted to do. She calls her younger self “not even a [more passive] type B, but a type D. I really had trouble attaching myself to an identity.”

She did have a natural ability to gather groups of people, often hosting dinner parties and eventually organizing an ongoing Toronto block party called Recess, for which she’d invite adult attendees to play double dutch, tag and other playground classics. At a 2014 Recess event, she recalls that “the DJ was not really playing what I wanted to hear,” so in a moment of “bossiness” she took over the decks. It was galvanizing.

“I was affected by the way I was suddenly communicating with people,” she says. As she played more Recess gatherings, she was compelled “by the conversation that happens between DJs and everybody in the crowd.”

With this, she’d found an identity. She started playing around Toronto, then in Montreal and eventually making the jump to New York’s club scene. She went on tour with Mykki Blanco in 2016, finding that everywhere she played “I felt well received.” Her own solo tour followed, although she was still playing other peoples’ music, as making her own “felt scary, or like something I never thought I could personally do.”

But encouragement from her manager got her in front of a DAW, and by the time her first track “Nitevision” was released in 2019. It was clear to her that all those hours spent making making s–tty sounds paid off.

“DJing is pretty oversaturated and kind of intersects with influencer culture and corporate culture,” she says. “Everyone DJs now, but making music still feels revered. People understand that you’ve put time in, so I saw a shift when I dropped my first song. People supported and trusted me in a different way.”

This trust was culled not simply via the act of music making, but because Bambii was also doing something much rarer in the scene — developing a unique sound.

“I was constantly in house and techno spaces, and I was constantly in dancehall spaces,” she says. “‘Nitevision’ touches on those two sonic points, and the vocal is reminiscent of what I grew up listening to in a very Caribbean household where Lady Saw would be blaring in the house.”

This future dancehall sound and it shimmers (and shimmies) across Infinity Club II and its 2023 predecessor Infinity Club. Featuring collaborators including Aluna, Ravyn Lenae, Jessie Lanza and Yaeji, this latest project was released via Because Music, the home of artists like Shygirl, Justice (Because is the parent company of Justice’s longtime label Ed Banger) and an esteemed group of fellow indie and electronic artists. Because is the only the second label she’s ever been signed to, and she calls the French imprint “honest” and “artist centered.”

This jump to a bigger label co-signs her ambition to make music that connects electronic music and global club music, a goal she adopted after experiencing division between the scenes she’s come up in.

“It felt like house and techno spaces were almost impenetrable,” she explains. “I was very bent on creating the relationship between all these genres and doing something that felt experimental and genre-breaking. That conversation is in the forefront of DJ-ing right now, but at the time in the spaces I was experiencing, I didn’t see it.”

She feels her position as a Black female producer, a demographic that’s been historically sidelined in a genre that’s come to be dominated by white men, gave her a competitive edge; it put her outside the purview of standard industry machinations. “Everyone was trying to adhere to some traditionalist way of playing house and techno that wasn’t important for me,” she says, “because I felt like I was never considered in the first place.”

“In a way you’re at a huge disadvantage, because when you’re coming in as an outsider, those can be really s–tty, male-dominated spaces,” she continues. “On the other hand, I don’t have to follow any rules or adhere to any cultural codes of these spaces. I’m just going to do what I want.”

Her current desire is to focus on music, and despite having just released the 12-track Infinity Club II, she’s already working on her next releases. The idea is to shorten the length of time between releases, with the two years between Infinity Club and Infinity Club II being a function of still honing her skills as a producer. Now, she foresees being able to “push forward faster.” The goal is also to use her growing platform to spotlight new artists, and she calls out London rapper 3monzo, L.A. rapper Vanessa the Finessa and producer 111SYRI as artists to direct your attention to.

She plays equally as much in Europe and the U.S., but says the American market is harder to crack: “It feels so celeb-focused, whereas Europe feels more artist-focused. Things are a bit more sensationalized in American markets, so it feels like concept is coming after numbers. Not to over-romanticize, but Europe feels like a reprieve for artists, because it feels like people are searching for concept more than buzz or numbers.”

In any case, she has no illusions of skyrocketing to fame via a viral track or moment, instead considering her career thus far to be cumulative: “Other people can point to a single moment where they’ve had something that feels meteoric. For me, all the things I’m doing collectively are building this narrative.”

Doing things incrementally, however, has worked very well so far for an artist who once struggled to make pots and pans sounds on the computer, and who now creates hits.

“The feeling of being terrible at something is enough to turn someone off and make them close the laptop,” says Bambii. “I teach DJ workshops now, and one of the things I try imparting is that you have to sit through the discomfort of being bad.”