Being featured in the new iPhone campaign isn’t even British-Pakistani DJ Ahadadream’s greatest achievement

In a parallel universe, Ahadadream — whose real name is Ahad Elley — doesn’t exist. Instead, he is Ahad Ali and he lives in Karachi. He’s an accountant and his parents are very proud. He also produces music on the side, in his bedroom, whenever he gets the time. He probably plays a few underground gigs too, because he’s not one to settle. But Karachi isn’t exactly the club central of the world. If only Ali knew what Elley was cutting his teeth on, perhaps he too would move to the UK.

In this universe, Ahad Elley is a British-Pakistani DJ who, since moving to London, has brought his polyrhythmic madness to Boiler Rooms, established a label called More Time, played festivals, including the Glastonbury Fest and Coachella, co-founded a festival for the South Asian diaspora called Dialled In, collaborated with Skrillex, and, most recently, had his song ‘TAKA’ with Skrillex and Priya Ragu featured in the new iPhone 16 ad.

Now, before you call me a hater, ask yourself, would Ahad Elley have achieved everything he did had he stayed in Pakistan? Probably not. But has he made Pakistan proud? Certainly.

At the risk of stating the obvious, there is no harm in accepting that some things don’t work out here, while others work all too well. To start with, club music isn’t mainstream in Pakistan because we don’t have nightclubs and likely never will. We have underground raves and DJs who are great at what they do and it’s best if they do it, well…underground. The Jaffer Zaidis and Atif Aslams of this world will always rule our playlists and our nightlife — whatever little of it we have in the form of concerts and food festivals.

So it’s probably for the best that Elley moved to the UK and put brown people with mad DJing skills on the map. If you’re still confused, check out Ahadadream on YouTube, Apple Music, Spotify or Soundcloud, and wait for that beat to drop. In the meantime, Ahad tells Images what drove him to the pinnacle of nightlife glory in London, and to Skrillex’s doorstep.

Part I: Pakistan, the UK, the dream

“I was born in Rawalpindi, my family moved to Islamabad when I was just a baby. Then we moved to Karachi when I was eight and to the UK when I was 13, just after 2001,” Ahadadream told me over Zoom.

“I’ve always had a passion for music. But you know, as immigrants, you want to make the most of the education and opportunities at your disposal. So my parents were pushing me to potentially, you know, become a doctor or an accountant,” he said with a chuckle.

Whether his dream of becoming a DJ led to his stage name was my next, rather obvious, question. “My name is Ahad, yeah?” he said, with a tone only a Brit could pull off. “But the way British people say it makes it sound like, ‘I-had’. Some say, ‘Ah-had’. They mispronounce it all the time. In school, my name became a knock-knock joke. It was always, ‘Knock, knock. Who’s there? Ahad. I-had, who? I had a pizza.’ So, I went with ‘I had a dream’.”

But was Elley originally Ali, à la Hocane? I asked. “[It] used to be Ali, like maybe a couple of generations ago, but then they changed it,” he replied.

“When I was at university studying chemistry I became a part of the student radio. They had events and there I performed my first DJ set.” Ahad started DJing in 2010, and around the same time, he began producing music. “After uni, I was playing at my own events. Then I started working at Boiler Room full-time. That meant I got access to people in the industry. I learnt how it works. There were these little stepping stones along the way.”

Following this, he started More Time Records with Sam Interface in 2017, and a festival, Dialled In in 2021 with Ahsan-Elahi Shujaat, Dhruva Balram, and Provhat Rahman. The festival champions the South Asian underground in the UK. “Everything is built into momentum but people don’t see that when you finally become famous. They just think it happened overnight. But I’ve been doing this for over a decade now.”

Part II: More Time, Dialled In & Boiler Room

With his unrelenting percussive energy, Ahadadream’s beats haven’t only resonated with audiences worldwide but also carved a space for South Asian sounds in the electronic music landscape. Today, his tracks are an electric blend of UK bass, Pakistani rhythms, and the vibrant beats of the African diaspora.

But Ahadadream’s influence goes beyond his own music. His label, More Time Records, champions percussive, forward-thinking club music. Sharing the motivation behind creating this platform, Elley said, “It’s about giving a voice to those unique sounds that don’t always get the recognition they deserve, especially artists from underrepresented backgrounds.

“When it comes to electronic music, you see people incorporating their heritage all the time — we have a rapper from Ghana, and we’ve got this group of Congolese rappers from London who rap in a mixture of Lingala, a language from Congo, and English. Then there’s a woman from Saudi, so it’s quite a global-sounding label,” he explained.

“Drawing inspiration from that, I was like, ‘Okay, why don’t I put some of my influences from home into my music?’ Because growing up, I was always fond of the dhol. That’s the main thing that I add to my music; the percussions from Pakistan and India.”

As for Dialled In, Elley wanted to push the next generation of Pakistanis and South Asians and inspire them to say, “Yeah, I can do this because someone who looks just like me is doing it too.”

When asked about the UK’s electronic music circuit in contrast to Pakistan’s, Ahadadream noted, “I think it’s incredible in London. There’s just such a rich variety of sound because it’s such a multicultural place. A lot of that influences my music. And, you know, there are so many venues, great venues, and if you compare all that to Pakistan, you’ll know that it’s much easier for us to operate here.”

He made a trip to Pakistan back in 2022 to help put together the country’s first Boiler Room as part of an organisation, where he witnessed first-hand the barriers in place to DJing. “Especially the electronic music scene in Karachi. I feel privileged to be here and have all of these opportunities at my fingertips,” he said.

These obstacles include, as he described, restricted venues and restrictions around what can or cannot be recorded on camera. “It was challenging. But in terms of the curation, we wanted to showcase some live music. So we did that in the daytime with acts like Jaubi and Natasha Noorani, and then in the evening, it was, you know, DJs. We wanted to give a little bit more of the agency and the creative control to the people on the ground to platform a local scene, rather than going there and being like, ‘oh, we should play.’”

Ahadadream maintained that the Boiler Rooms in India looked so much bigger and better because of their well-established infrastructure in terms of nightlife. “In India they happen all the time, so they also book international acts for those. The one in Pakistan was a first, maybe it was a bit more grassroots for DIY, but hopefully, it was the first of many.”

Part III: racism, identity, representation

Being a brown person with so much to offer must come with its fair share of struggles — and racism — especially when the UK music industry is heavily dominated by white people. “It’s more subtle,” Elley said. “It’s not racism in your face but you feel different types of prejudices. When you go to the club, they don’t think you’re the DJ, they think you’re the security person.”

“I’ve had times when they took me to the security room and I was going to plug in my USB…they wouldn’t believe it, they couldn’t fathom that I was the DJ. That’s because of lack of representation more than racism, I suppose, because we’re not seen in these roles. And that’s why we do things like Dialled In.”

While Ahadadream is well aware of the disparities experienced by brown people in the UK, he isn’t ashamed of embracing his Pakistani heritage or being called ‘British-Pakistani’. At the same time, he wouldn’t want his incorporation of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan into his sets to become his whole personality.

“The fact that I’ve lived in Pakistan till I was 13 and the rest of my life here, I can safely say that I’m both. I speak in this accent and I can speak Urdu. Some people are both and can represent both. But when we’re celebrating these wins we need to understand that this person had to move here to do it. I’ve also heard people say things like, why is it ‘British-Pakistani’ and not ‘Pakistani-British’? Or the criticism that I’m not Pakistani enough because I don’t live there anymore. But there’s a huge population of people who were born here and have never been to Pakistan. That’s not me. So, there are so many different nuances to identity,” he explained.

When asked if he’s excited about the new Nusrat album set to drop on September 20 (today), especially since he’s utilised his music in his sets, Elley replied, “I’m excited to hear it. I like adding Khan to my Boiler Room, it’s a very nostalgic thing for Pakistanis living in the UK, away from home. Playing something like that in a club setting can get a powerful emotional response. It’s crazier when British people start singing along when they don’t know what he’s saying but they can feel the emotion. So I love that. But I wouldn’t want that to be the only thing I’m known for.”

Part IV: Skrillex, TAKA, iPhone, next

Released via More Time, ‘TAKA’ is an energetic fusion of South Asian influences and UK club sounds, where Ahadadream’s passion for gqom — an African electronic dance music genre — and UK funky blends seamlessly with Priya Ragu’s R&B vocals.

The song was two years in the making and road-tested in the DJ sets of Four Tet and Chris Lake in early 2023 before Ahadadream, Skrillex and Ragu arrived at the final version of the cut, which was first debuted during Ahadadream’s Boiler Room set —where Skrillex made a surprise appearance. The song quickly went viral. Its infectious energy captured the attention of Peggy Gou, Fred Again, Four Tet, Dixon, and Chris Lake, each adding it to their own playlists.

On the day of its release, ‘TAKA’ was crowned BBC Radio 1’s Hottest Record, Essential New Tune, and Track ID, marking a rare triple-crowning not seen since Calvin Harris’ ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ in 2015. I can safely say that I spent the entirety of last year listening to ‘TAKA’. Most recently, his song was featured in the iPhone 16 series launch event and ad.

How Elley ended up meeting, collaborating, and becoming buddies with Skrillex is a story worth telling.

“I met Skrillex at a club. He was playing a set, and a lot of the music was from my label. I was like, ‘oh! what’s going on?’ Then I got introduced to him,” recalled Elley. As a teenager listening to Skrillex, I always imagined him to be an edgy kinda guy — fun, but edgy. I also never imagined him to be open to meeting anyone after gigs, let alone a much smaller Pakistani artist. ‘Make It Bun Dem’ and Skrillex’s hair back in the day didn’t give really that vibe. But Elley corrected my impression — “he just stayed in touch,” the DJ told me. “You know, he’s, he’s one of the nicest guys.

“During the Covid-19 pandemic, he reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, should we do a Zoom call?’ We ended up chatting for an hour during which he asked me what I was working on, my influences, how I ended up in music,” — pretty much everything Elley and I were discussing. “And then he asked me to show him some of my beats. I sent him one and told him it’s not great but he started working on it.”

After the foundation for the track was laid, Skrillex suggested involving someone from the South Asian music scene. Elley had been keeping an eye on Priya Ragu. “I suggested Priya Ragu, and Skrillex was down. So she came to the studio with her brother, Japhna Gold, and the four of us put the track together in a day.”

Despite the quick creation, the song went through several rounds of tweaks and adjustments. “And now it is the song we know as ‘TAKA’,” Elley said proudly.

When asked if collaborating with Skrillex and ‘TAKA’ marked the moment his career truly took off, Elley admitted, “It was definitely a turning point. During the pandemic, I was still working full-time because DJing wasn’t an option with all the clubs shut down.” But Skrillex, who had become a mentor to him by then, pushed him to take a leap of faith. “He came over, and we hung out. He told me, ‘You need to quit your job. You’ve got something special.’ Having someone of his stature say that gives you a lot of confidence.”

Skrillex encouraged Elley to focus on music full-time, and invited him to contribute to his upcoming album, assisting with artist suggestions, additional production, and more. Although that project is still in the works, Elley remains busy. “I’ve been making a lot of music over the last year, collaborating with artists, there’s a lot of that in my DJ sets right now.”

For Elley, seeing ‘TAKA’ featured in a globally-viewed Apple ad was surreal. “It’s pretty crazy, knowing 25 million people have watched it on YouTube alone.”

He also reflected on whether his journey would have been the same had he stayed in Pakistan. “No, absolutely not. If you even think about the main thing that was my break — meeting Skrillex in a club in London — there’s a lot of privilege that comes with being able to get a visa or passport, to move out, because of the wealth of opportunities in Western countries like America, the UK, or even Europe.”

When asked what advice he would give to aspiring DJs in Pakistan, Elley offered a simple message — “Just keep working. That’s the best advice I’ve gotten in my life. Consistency over a long period is key. There’s a lot of luck involved, and that’s outside of your control, but what is in your control is not giving up. Do it for the love of it. If I wouldn’t have had any success, I’d still be doing this for the love of it. If you do that every day or every week, eventually people won’t be able to ignore you.”

Main photo: Boiler Room Toronto via @thetaquinophoto