The bluff that turned DJ Toshi into a producer

A house party, a YouTube tutorial, and the bluff that started it

The episode opens with Muzamil being honest. He had not really heard Toshi’s songs before, except for the track with Anural, and the moment he mentioned the booking to his team — “full of Gen Z kids,” as he puts it — the room lit up. They had grown up on Toshi’s sets at every event in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. That reaction is what pushed Muzamil to want this conversation on tape.

Toshi’s version of how it all started is funnier than the polished biography you would expect. A friend’s parents were out of the country. The boys had the house to themselves. They wanted to throw a party but nobody had the money to book a DJ. Toshi had been listening to David Guetta and Armin van Buuren on the one shared Android phone in the group since around 2011, so he raised his hand. “I said, yaar, I’ll do it,” he tells Muzamil. The friend asked how. The answer was the most 2016 sentence imaginable: open YouTube, search “how to be a DJ,” watch.

He went further than a stock download. He built his own preset that week, played the party, and got lucky — the mutual friends in the room were impressed enough to pass his name on. There was no turntable, no proper rig. “I was just cutting songs and mashing them together,” he says. That was the entire toolkit. The bluff held.

”Agar tu mera puttar hai, har nahi maanni”

Muzamil pushes into the family piece next, because the timeline only makes sense if you understand it. Toshi failed his A-levels three times. He was the first in his extended family, alongside his brother, to attempt O- and A-levels at all, so his father had already stretched to get him there. The second failure was bad. The third, Toshi says, broke him.

He describes sitting in front of his father, crying, expecting the worst. What he got instead was the line he still carries. “He said, in Punjabi, agar tu mera puttar hai, kabhi zindagi mein tu ne haar nahi maanni. Agar tu ne aaj haar maan li and you don’t clear your A-levels, you will always be a failure.” Toshi tells Muzamil that sentence is stuck in his head from 2015 until now. He cleared them. Then he chose music, and when his father saw the shift — the boy who would not leave his room, headphones on, building tracks — he leaned in. “Hamein bhi to apne show pe bulaaoge?” his father teased. “Bade famous ho gaye ho tum.” If his father had not blessed the choice, Toshi says, he would not have made it.

Friends as family, and the names he keeps repeating

Muzamil notices something the audience will notice too: Toshi keeps shouting out the same handful of names — Farasat, Umair, Demon, Walia, Umar, Khan. He explains the architecture of it cleanly. “Apart from my family, here is my family,” he says. There are two circles, one in Pindi and one in Islamabad. He singles out Walia Najib — known publicly as an influencer — as someone who played the role of the older sister he never had. He singles out Farasat Anees as the person who actually answered the phone when Toshi was a nobody calling around looking for someone to teach him production.

That call is one of the cleanest scenes in the conversation. Toshi was the DJ asking the producer for time. “I told him, yaar, mere paas ek idea hai,” he remembers. He still has the reply saved on his phone. Farasat did not blow him off. He told Toshi his plans were strong and offered to build with him. The pitch Toshi gave back is worth keeping in mind, because it sets up everything that comes later in the episode: “I want all of us to grow together, and when we reach the top, no single person reaches it. We all do.” Some people, he tells Muzamil, find that idea uncomfortable. He does not.

What kind of musician Toshi actually is

When Muzamil asks Toshi to name the kind of musician he is, the first answer is a joke — “I’m a hitmaker” — and the second answer is the real one. The misconception Toshi wants to puncture is that Pakistani producers chase a “gora” sound while expecting to be famous at home. He thinks that math does not work. “Tum reh Pakistan mein ho. Hamari maadri zubaan bhi Pakistan ki hai. Hamara culture Punjab ka hai,” he tells Muzamil. So he reaches for the obvious lever: the classics. He takes Strings, he takes vintage Nusrat, and he fuses them with EDM in his sets.

Most of those edits, he says, are not on streaming services. They are exclusive to the live show, kept off-platform on purpose so the people who come to a Toshi set hear something they cannot hear anywhere else. Muzamil’s reaction is genuine — he had not heard the fusion framed that cleanly before, and points out that even outside the DJ circuit, the underground bands he listens to are reaching for the same move.

EDM with a sitar, drums with a tabla

Muzamil walks Toshi into the localisation question through Coke Studio — specifically the run of releases where Urdu and Balochi lyrics were laid over Western arrangements, and the match was beautiful. Could the same trick be done in pure EDM? Toshi’s answer is matter-of-fact: it has been done, and the lever is the instrument layer. “Ek normal guitar, uski jagah aap sitar use karo,” he tells Muzamil. “Drums ki jagah tabla use karo.” When a local instrument hits in a track, even in Hunza the response is the same — people turn around and ask what is being played.

The deeper frustration that comes out of this stretch is not about EDM at all. It is about live performance in Pakistan. Muzamil’s example is Hans Zimmer in Prague, where the ticket is two thousand dollars and the room sits in suits for a deliberately boring affair, because what they are paying for is four hundred musicians playing in perfect synchronisation. Toshi agrees that “gora yeh samajhta hai. Pakistan mein performing arts ka concept hi nahi — bas lip sync.” Big shows in Pakistan, big stars on stage, the band silent behind them, the vocal playing off a file. The audience accepts it. Until that ceiling cracks, the scene cannot mature into what it could be.

The producer problem

Toshi gets sharpest when Muzamil lets him talk about how producers are treated. He uses DJ Khaled as the international reference point — a producer who does not perform vocally, but whose name leads the track and whose features get fifty percent of the credit. In Pakistan, he says, the inverse happens. The producer’s name does not make the title. If you are lucky, friendship buys you a line in the description: “music by Toshi.”

This is the structural fight that explains why his own released catalogue is so small. “Banaaunga to apna gaana banaaunga, apne channel pe daalunga,” he tells Muzamil. The actual labour, he wants the audience to understand, is not trivial. The vocalist hands over a take. Then someone has to treat it, tune it, place it on a scale, produce the music underneath it, mix it, and master it. “Itna bada process kaun kar raha hai?” he asks. “Ek peeche baitha hua producer. Aur usko kya mil raha hai? Kuch bhi nahi.” The kicker — and this is Toshi’s, not a paraphrase — is that the typical thank-you arrives as a five-thousand-rupee meat order. That is the local economy of production, said cleanly on tape.

The Anural song, and discovering people early

Muzamil asks about the Anural track. The story is small and worth telling at the speed Toshi tells it. He was sitting with his Kashaf Boys one night when one of them, Umar, pushed a clip in front of him. “Yaar, please ek dafa sun to le.” Toshi has, by his own admission, an ego — not arrogance, he insists, but the kind of ego that filters most pitches out. This one got through. He sent the girl on the clip a thumbs-up and a “great job.” She had about four thousand Instagram followers at the time.

When he later messaged her offering to produce a song, she did not believe it was real. “No way, don’t message me,” was the first reply he still has saved. He asked for what she had. She sent the only original she had written. It was good, he says, but too romantic for what he wanted to make. He waited. Then, sitting in the fields one day, the hook came to him — “kendi dil de bol ek waria” — and that became the track. It travelled, by his count, to thirty-six countries. The lesson he keeps returning to in this section is that the friends and the small circle are the seed; the fans come and go, the friends stay. He had not even told his friends about his own first show when he played it.

Making BIBA

The making of BIBA is the section Toshi is clearly proudest of. He sets up the technical vocabulary first, because Muzamil asks. Trap is the form of EDM that sits around 128 BPM, with deep house on one side and the heavier kicks on the other. Farasat is more of a trap producer; Toshi is the one who likes playing at 150 BPM with the kicks coming in hard. The two of them, with Umair — known in the conversation as the third partner who came back from China in 2016 — sat around a table with Farasat at the controls. Farasat had an idea. They built around it.

What is unusual about BIBA, in Toshi’s telling, is that it has no external collaboration in the vocal sense. The vocal sample was purchased as a pack, which means the rights sit with the producers. No vocalist to chase, no feature credit to split, no industry middleman. They wrote it, they released it, they own it. Toshi is meticulous about his own share. “Drop pe I helped. Vocal jo uski ek pyaari si melody hai — it’s only Farasat,” he tells Muzamil. He will not take credit he did not earn, even on his own record, on his own podcast.

The numbers caught up later. Two million views on YouTube, two million on SoundCloud, almost a million on Spotify. By Toshi’s count, somewhere around five million streams. No music video — yet. They are making one. What he wants Muzamil to register is not the count but who is listening. “Pehle to industry tak humara naam hi nahi pahunchta tha,” he says. Now the big rooms know who they are. That is the win.

From Ultra to PUBG

The last stretch of the conversation pivots, at Muzamil’s prompt, into something most listeners would not expect from a DJ — competitive PUBG Mobile. The setup is autobiographical. Toshi had been booked for Ultra Music Festival in Dubai, his first international slot, alongside a small run of other shows. He was sad on the way back. Not for the obvious reason — he had played — but because he had seen what every kind of party at that scale looks like, and he could not bring it home. COVID was already closing the local scene. He landed back in Pakistan, played a handful of shows in Karachi and elsewhere, and waited.

PUBG filled the gap. He had always been a gamer — counter-strike and Cross Fire in school computer labs, skipping out to play. The reactivation came through Khan, his close friend from university and, by Toshi’s reckoning, one of the best players in South Asia. Khan pulled him into competitive play and guided him through it. Toshi will not call himself addicted. He will call himself locked in.

He uses the section to make a broader point about the industry rather than about himself. PUBG was briefly banned in Pakistan. He was, by his own account, the first to make a video pushing back against the ban. The case was fought and won. The reason he respects the outcome is that the Pakistani side told PUBG, plainly, that if they were earning this much from the country, the least they could do was open an official office. They did. PUBG Mobile Pakistan now exists as an official entity, with proper casting, proper advertising — Shoaib Akhtar, he notes, was in a recent campaign. He walks Muzamil through the structure of competitive play — national championship, then Pro League, then Pro League Asia, then World League, then Global Championship — and gives top honours to Khan’s Team Qwerty, who have taken PMCO and the campus championship and held a stable line-up while other rosters keep rotating.

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil and Toshi are well past the hour mark. Muzamil thanks him for the depth and asks the audience to comment — agree or disagree — and to flag whether Toshi should come back, because there is more to talk about. Toshi, for his part, sounds like someone who already knows there will be a next time.