Fat, urgent tribal beats and crazy techno squelches fill the sweaty, smoky, thick air at Karma on a Saturday night. You can see through the glass-walled DJ booth a head of brownie-colored hair, which is constantly bopping in sync with the bass. Every now and then you also trade smiles with the DJ who has teeth so perfect, so white that she could be in a toothpaste ad. And the smiles aren’t just the fleeting eye contact kind, but rather the kind of smile that you hold for a while because it feels good and it feels real. Misstress Barbara, 24, of Montreal totally feeds off a crowd’s energy.

She’s super-energized and hyperactive like the Energizer Bunny, and that helps to create the groove that keeps us dancin’ ‘til the club closes. Asked if her interacting with the crowd is something she thinks about or if it’s a reflex, Barbara says, “Ohmigod, it’s just a reflex.” She says, “You think I’m all on dope,” but it’s just her energy naturally kickin’ into overdrive.

“I get in a state of trance just by the music. It’s so much, it’s too intense. I love it too much,” says Barbara, who lived in Sicily until she was 7 ½ and then moved with her family to Montreal, where she still lives.

Although Barbara isn’t easily impressed by other DJs, she’s been turning others’ heads with her wax-fondling ability. Lately she’s been booked every weekend for three or four months ahead, with most gigs in the States and Canada, plus gigs in Europe, South America and Asia. She also has rocked Karma regularly, having played there three times in less than a year. And in March she’ll have put out 12 records in one year on various record labels (including three on Relentless, her own record label) as well as co-producing a couple of tracks with (techno producer) Christian Smith on the Sweden-based Tronic label. Songs like “On the Phone in Paradise” and “Three Balls” on her Sagittarius EP (on Zync out of Sweden) are darkly appealing songs that chug along in a smooth, sweet way and should be hugged closely to the decks. And she also has gotten an offer to make music for a video game company and plans on making music for films. Look out for her most recent records: “Dammelo, Mi Piace” EP under the Barbara Brown name on Strive, her “For All There’s Left” EP on Relentless and her “Goldrush” remixes on Strive.

“I work hard. That’s all I do,” she says. Even when Barbara is falling asleep, her toes move like little basslines in the making. “When I wake up, I’m stressed and I’ve got to go to the studio and work there 13 hours a day, she says. She can’t stand making a mix tape or a mix CD at home, though, because she doesn’t have anybody giving her feedback by screaming or dancing: “I hate it.” She says that when she’s mixing by herself, “I think I suck. The only way (I know how I’m doing) is that I see people dancing and they’re excited.”

When asked what folks say about her DJ style, Barbara says, “Two years ago after a performance in Vancouver, some people came up and said “You are so relentless.” She didn’t know the meaning of “relentless” at the time because she didn’t know much English. And they told her again, “You are so relentless in the way you play, the way you touch the records, the way you touch the buttons. You are so relentless.”

“I said ‘Relentless—I like the way that sounds,’” Barbara says, sounding as if she’s tempted to try an exoctic-sounding food. She filed away the word in her head, and that’s where Relentless (www.relentlessmusic.com), her record label name, came from.

Yep, she’s fierce and never lets up. “People see me playing three turntables and I’m playing effects and I’m jumping around” and playing with all the buttons in the DJ booth. If there were a fourth turntable, she’d use it, too, because she always needs something to do or to touch while she’s playing.

If she’s into something, she’s totally into it. Barbara talks about how she “really, really” likes or “really, really, really” hates something. There’s no in-between. “I used to really, really, really hate HATE with all my passion everything that was all boom, boom, boom,” she says through a lovely accent, which is hard to place since she speaks Italian, French and English. For seven years she was a drummer in punk and rock bands, and she had the jeans-with-holes look going on. “I was a bit fucked up,” she says.

Then she heard East Coast DJ Nigel Richards spin at a party. “One day I heard a techno set (by Nigel), and I really fell in love with techno,” she says. She realized then that there was more to dance music than just the lame-ass tunes going boom-boom on her radio. Barbara—who has a degree in communication studies and also a glider and plane license—was buying mix CDs and mix tapes, and she says, “It’s in my personality that if I start going (to do something), I have to just upgrade it.”

So, she followed her heart: She stopped “that rock thing” about four years ago, and she sold her beloved drums because she needed money for decks and records. “I was too much in love with techno. I fell in love with it, and I felt I had to go higher with this passion,” she says.

After being a drummer Barbara naturally favors tribal, percussive tracks with bass so strong, she feels it in her stomach; she likens the feeling to the way one feels when the passion in a love relationship is so intense, it burns. She also plays and melds together a healthy mix of techno styles—organic tribal techno with techie house and deep, hard techno—that makes techno more accessible to partygoers. She describes her main style as “drummy, funky, pumpin’ techno.” Since one can find tribal elements in house, trance or techno, Barbara reckons that playing tribal techno for a not-so-techno-oriented crowd won’t scare clubbers away as much as the more minimal, harsh techno would: “If they hear congas, they know what that is.”

Two things that Barbara says she will not do are 1) play trance (“I HATE trance.”) and 2) play at all-women parties. She’ll only play at such an event “if they have talent that I really, really respect” or if it’s to meet up with a friend she hasn’t seen in awhile.

Her confident-sounding voice lets you know that she won’t take any b.s. from anybody. If somebody says, “You’re a good DJ—for a girl,” she won’t say “thanks” or smile. And she says that if someone starts to question her DJ-ness and call her a girl DJ rather than a DJ, she’ll correct the person by saying, “Hey, I’m a DJ, you know? Not a girl DJ!” Some girls are “good and insecure” as DJs, and some are just plain bad, she says. “But you know what?” Barbara says. “There are many bad male DJs.” Not including her favorite DJs, of course, which would include Christian Smith, Laurent Garnier and Marco Carola.

Barbara is too sweet to mention any names, but she says, “Many of them are really poor (at spinning)” and still get killer bookings. “I’ve played with most of them, and I’m so not much impressed.”

But she’s not gonna argue about it for long. “No matter what, I really believe if you really, really love something, if someone has a passion for something, it makes no difference. There is no way you are not gonna be good,” she says. “Or what you do, it’s not going to work! Just believe in it, and it will! I’m not gonna sit on my butt and smoke joints and complain like most people do instead of working seriously. That’s not the way to do things.”