It’s not every day you see someone that’s making as many strides in the fields of both music and science as local DJ Jayda G. Calling the Straight from her adopted home of Berlin, she broke down her goals to spread environmental awareness through her music and what we can expect from her upcoming homecoming show.

After touring extensively in the more active European club scene, Jayda G is excited to be back. “It’s really gratifying to be able to go back to Vancouver and do the same thing and have people still interested,” she says.

“I try to treat each show with honesty and warmth and love, and I try to be as authentic as I can. You’re going to a club to forget about the day-to-day stuff and connect with people, so I want them to be able to feel free to be themselves.”

Jayda G is touring off of her latest album, Significant Changes, the title of which represents the most frequently used phrase in a thesis on environmental toxicology and orcas she delivered at Simon Fraser University.

Her passion for science shines through in her music as well, blending her eclectic house mixes with a message of activism on tracks like “Missy Knows What’s Up,” a reference to a talk on the effects of chemicals on orcas given by biologist Misty MacDuffee, portions of which are sampled on the song.

“With the left-field electronic house sound, there are so many songs that I’ve heard where people take radio clips, and it’s just like someone talking about the weather or something. I wanted one where somebody was actually saying something that’s important.”

It’s essentially a much less nauseating version of Lil Dicky’s “Earth.” While it might seem a little strange to picture an environmental PSA blaring out over the sweaty masses in a club setting, Jayda G says that she’s seen her message start to break through, recalling a single fan who shouted in delight when MacDuffee’s words were played at a show.

“It’s translating. Even if it’s just one person, that’s all that matters to me,” she says. “The coolest thing is it brings them into the conversation. I’ve had many fans come up to me and be like ‘I also work in sciences, and I love music, and it’s so cool that you did both!’

“That’s all you want in the end, because you can’t tell people what to do, but if you can get people to stop and think and maybe make a bit more conscious decisions, then I’ve done my job.”

Another way that Jayda G combines her passions for music and science is with her live event series JMG Talks, where she sits down to interview scientists. According to her, bridging the gap between her two worlds works both ways.

“The people I’ve been interviewing, they’ve told me how wonderful it is to be able to talk about their project to a wider audience and not have that pressure of needing to come off super intelligent. The questions we get from the audience are questions they never would have been asked at a scientific conference.”

As far as the music goes, you never know quite what you’re going to get mixed into one of Jayda G’s extended, fist-pumping house mixes, with influences ranging everywhere from soulful disco-inspired vocals to traditional Japanese music.

“I just try to open people’s ears to things that I think are cool, I guess!” she says with a giggle. “As I started getting deeper into record collecting, I got into house music, and it’s similar to hip-hop in that it’s been influenced by samples and disco music.”

As a rare woman of colour making waves in the electronic scene – “one out of, let’s say five of them, just did a remix for me,” she joked at one point – Jayda G emphasizes how important representation is when she’s playing her shows, calling the impact she sees that she’s made on others the best part of her job.

“You have a responsibility to the people who look up to you,” she says. “When I was growing up, you don’t see yourself in the greater entertainment world. In terms of music, all you really had was hip-hop and R&B.”

“So the best thing about being who I am is having other girls and black people coming up to me and saying ‘thank you for representing us, because seeing you do you gives me hope that I can do it as well’. And that’s what this is all about, lifting each other up and giving each other voices.”

A remix EP of Significant Changes is releasing on July 19^th on Ninja Tune Records, and Jayda G performs at Paradise on July 5.