During the week I spent in Toronto this spring, nearly every question I asked about the club scene was met with a sigh, a groan or a grimace. Nightlife in Canada's biggest city has been squeezed by tough regulations and expensive real estate for years. Venues don't last. Promoters come and go as they burn out or give up. But Cindy Li hasn't lost faith. She only started throwing parties in 2015, but she's already made a lasting mark on the city's scene, becoming a de facto ambassador for—and leader of—Toronto electronic music. Through tireless promoting, school-night residencies and opening sets, Li, as Ciel, has also become one of the city's most exciting DJs and producers.

"People from Toronto think Toronto sucks," she laughed as we sat in a cafe in Parkdale, a neighbourhood where many of the city's venues are disappearing. "It's a chip on our shoulder that we carry. We're the biggest city in Canada. The normies think we're the centre of the world. But the 'real' people are like, 'Toronto sucks compared to Montreal'—or New York, or even Vancouver. That attitude is pervasive in the music community. It's weird that people think that, because I've played in other cities and there are lots that are way shittier than here. Why do people complain so much?"

Li has a caustic sense of humour, both in person and online, but she's also an irrepressible optimist. Her events, including the women-focused Work In Progress series, have booked artists like Octo Octa, Anthony Naples, Courtesy, DJ Stingray and Avalon Emerson. With It's Not U It's Me—a partnership with Brian Wong, AKA Gingy—she tried to bring the sometimes fractured Toronto scene together, throwing labour-of-love underground events in places like strip malls, warehouses and an old power plant.

Li's ascent has not been without its complications. Because of her fast rise and outspoken nature, she's a lightning rod for both controversy and acclaim. As one of dance music’s most vocal advocates for feminism and social justice, she deals with her fair share of hate messages and trolls, and has admittedly rubbed some people the wrong way in her own scene. But she also draws plaudits for her dreamy style of DJing, developed in Toronto bars and opening slots for bigger DJs. She has one lauded EP in the bag, with another on the way later this summer on Coastal Haze.

Though secondary to her music, Li's unwavering moral compass is part of what makes her such a compelling figure. Where others in the scene might simply vent their frustrations or cut down other promoters online, Li has gone out of her way to make a difference through real action, putting on her own events to support marginalized parts of the community and working to improve local bylaws and licensing rules. Though she's now on a break from putting on parties, she remains active behind the scenes, working with advocacy groups to help make Toronto's laws more favorable to creative ventures. Li stands for equality, openness, acceptance and safety, things that many people in the wider scene consider to be core tenets of dance music. Crucially, she does more than just grandstand about them.

Since her first college radio show, Li's beliefs have been an important part of her work in music. Though she's Canadian, she was raised in upstate New York, near Albany, and moved to Toronto when she was a teenager, attending Queen's University in nearby Kingston after high school. She volunteered at the college radio station—the oldest in Canada—which was a lifelong dream. In response to the lack of diversity at the station, Li started a show called Ladyflash, which played only music made by women, from hip-hop to punk and electronic music.

"I've always been an angry feminist, my mom instilled it into me from a young age," she said. "My parents weren't split up or anything, but my dad wasn't really around, he's a workaholic, so my mom would always say, 'Never rely on a man, you need to do your own things.'"

She took that philosophy into her adult life in Toronto—if Li wanted something, she would get it herself. She made friends with people like Brian Wong (Gingy), Serena Passion (Peach) and the promoters-turned-restauranteurs Nancy Chen and Konrad Droeske, who used to throw parties as Mansion and showed Li around Toronto's underground dance scene. One of the most important connections she made was Mike Pesce, AKA Mikey Apples, the owner of Bambi's, a small basement spot that's become one of the city's most influential nightclubs, despite only fitting around 80 people. She asked for a Sunday residency, and she got it.

Li DJ'd at Bambi's every Sunday with Andre E-R (of the Toronto duo Èbony) for about six months, then burned out, unable to balance the residency with her full-time job. She did other parties from time to time—the first out-of-town guest she booked was Project Pablo—and she started an occasional Friday night event at Bambi's with Peach. During this time, Li developed her style of DJing. She was initially influenced by the laid-back house music coming out of Vancouver (particularly Mood Hut) as well as plaintive IDM from the likes of Boards Of Canada and Aphex Twin.

"I hear the word 'dreamy' about my sets and the music I make," she told me. "It's something that I carried with me from my days obsessed with shoegaze and ambient music in university. I smoke a lot of weed, and I like music that sounds like you could listen to it while you smoke a lot of weed. I spent most of university lying on my bedroom floor listening to Slowdive, and I try to bring that vibe with me into how I play dance music."

The variety of Li's sets stands her apart. Once she immersed herself in Toronto's dance musics scene around 2015, she started digging for older records rather than new stuff. She probes record store bins for trance, breakbeat and drum & bass. Other DJs explore a similar cross-section of vintage sounds, but what makes Li's sets special is how everything sounds so breezy. Even in her most banging sets, there's an airy feeling similar to the shoegaze music she loves. She's one of those DJs where you don't want to a miss a single track. Her intuitive style makes it easy to stay rooted to the dance floor.

Li's online mixes are a revealing look into her style. There's the Hugo Ball mix, where she moves gracefully from spaced-out ambient to floaty techno; the ZeeZout podcast, which shows Li in club mode, cruising through trance, breakbeat, electro and techno; her Acid Camp mix, where she highlights one of her favourite subgenres, acid trance. My personal favourite is her Ilian Tape mix, a blazing drum & bass selection commissioned by the Zenker Brothers after they saw her in Toronto. Li's DJing has a way of connecting the dots between trends and forgotten sounds.

If you go back further, you can hear Li's style developing with Work In Progress, an all-women concept in the vein of Ladyflash. Work In Progress, which put Li on the map, began as a radio show on a local station called TRP. It was a logical blend of passions. Li was finding her way into the electronic music scene through her promoting but felt stymied by the extent of male domination in the industry.

"I knew people were doing TRP radio shows that were like, 'Here's an hour of techno selected by me,'" she said. "I didn't want to do the same thing—because why would anyone give a fuck about me or what I selected? I was a nameless nobody. So I thought that if I gave myself a rule or a limitation, it would make the show seem more interesting, and push me as a crate-digger. And it wasn't easy to prepare that show. It was a full-time job just to keep looking for artists that were women."

The show was a success. It quickly expanded from one hour to two hours with guest mixes. As her profile rose, Li became more ambitious, starting It's Not U It's Me with Gingy. In January 2016 they threw two parties at different venues simultaneously, one house (with Dane and Khotin) and one techno (with Randomer). The series crossed scene divides in a city where conflicts and grudges were part of the furniture.

"We really united a lot of people in the scene," she explained. "Where before, some people were faceless people from the internet, because of It's Not U It's Me we got to meet a lot of them and put names to faces and build that community."

With increased attention came scrutiny. As Li became more visible, she picked up detractors, who bristled against her outspokenness and her willingness to call out what she saw as injustice, sexism and discrimination. One incident collided with the biggest break of her career, when she was invited to perform at Boiler Room Toronto in 2017. A few days before the set, Li posted on Facebook about a certain party's lack of women DJs. At first she didn't name names, but even with diplomacy the thread got heated. Li put her money where her mouth was and made a document of working women DJs as proof that there were plenty of eligible talent that promoters were overlooking.

"I think I have permanent PTSD from that time," Li said. "I started a database of female artists as proof to promoters, like, 'Look at all these artists and DJs!' I worked on it with Chippy [Nonstop] from Intersessions and Brendan Arnott, and I didn't realize publications were gonna post it. It was everywhere before it was ready. It wasn't definitive. I was being harassed by men and women whose names weren't on the list. Women who weren't even DJing anymore were mad about it. It made me think about how media attention can make things more complicated and messy for the people involved."

Li weathered a stressful few days that changed her career, both in status and outlook. On the one hand, she had the biggest gig she'd ever played on the eve of her first European tour. On the other, her mission to improve representation in dance music had imploded, with some friends turning on her in the ensuing frenzy. She even got banned from Facebook for calling out abusive men.

"It's the worst feeling, because you get notifications on your phone but you can't respond to anything," Li told me, with a mixture of humour and exasperation in her voice. "It's absurd now, thinking of all this happening. I played Boiler Room—it was amazing and I didn't choke. The next day I flew to Berlin and my phone was still going off the hook. I'm trying to have fun but going crazy inside because everyone is just slagging me off. I felt completely alone.

"It's not the best feeling to call somebody out," she adds. "After that experience, it's changed me completely. I don't think I will ever call people out like that again. Online callouts don't accomplish anything—they just cause anxiety, depression and alienation. It was really traumatic, dealing with that—with everybody hating me—and part of me wishes I had never done that. But also, I have no regrets."

Li came out of her first European tour a different person, and a more successful artist. Around that time her first record, Electrical Encounters, came out. She had started taking Ableton lessons from her friend Sandro, a behind-the-scenes mainstay of the Canadian electronic music scene, earlier in 2017. She shared her first batch of tracks and they were almost immediately signed by Peach Discs, the label run by Shanti Celeste, who Li had opened for in Toronto.

The three tunes on the EP were remarkably different from each other. They showed the various moods you would hear in a Ciel DJ set. There's the laid-back "Rain Dance," the anxious electro of "Electrical Encounters," and the progressive house-inspired rapture of "Elevate (Go Off Mix)," a track that reflects Li's conservatory training and lifetime of playing the piano.

Li's next record will arrive through Coastal Haze. Even more club-ready, it balances Li's trademark dreaminess with a percussive drive. It was written with Chinese melodic scales, which make it feel personal and wistful.

With records on UK labels and a worldwide touring schedule, Li is increasingly a global figure. But she's not the biggest fan of touring, and she says that being on the internet can be exhausting (at one point she told me that "social media is poison"). She keeps a lower online profile these days. It's in Toronto where Li still finds her drive, her inspiration, and where she wants to continue focusing her attention even as her schedule gets busier. She's uncomfortable acknowledging her accomplishments; she told me several times that she thought she didn't deserve this article. Overall she just wants to figure out how she can make things better for those around her, whether she's in the spotlight or behind the scenes.

"Toronto is my home," she told me as we walked along the Lake Ontario waterfront near her apartment. "I don't wanna be someone whose friends all live in other cities. Having a close bond with a scene keeps you grounded. It's important for me to develop something here, and I can't do that if nobody likes me."

"Being a community leader means something to me," she added. "Right now the next chapter of my promoting career—even though I'm on hiatus—is working behind the scenes with officials from the city of Toronto to try and change some of the laws that make putting on events so challenging. This work is very valuable, and leaves a lasting mark on the scene. If I could make it better for other promoters, how could that be a bad thing?"