Seventeen years into a career built on Bollywood dance floors, first across India, then in the UK since 2022, DJ Toons has spent most of that time being read by his audience before he’s finished a thought. That’s the job: know the hook, know the crowd, know exactly when to drop it. But there’s a quieter project running underneath all that, one with none of the instant payoff. Alakhbaza, his Psy-Trance alias, and arguably the more revealing half of his catalogue.
Alakhbaza dates back to 2015 and currently sits at 13 tracks, folded into a wider body of production work totalling more than 78 tracks. His production journey is visible in releases such as “Cosmo Roads”, his 2015 original mix released through Merockx Records and distributed across major digital platforms, and “Shiva Chant”, a 2018 Alakhbaza release on Infinity-Tunes that pushed further into Psy-Trance at 141 BPM. This is not really the story, plenty of catalogues rack up streams without saying anything. What’s worth paying attention to here is what the project shows about Toons as a producer rather than a performer.
The UK Debut
That question got its first proper UK airing on 9th May 2025, when Toons brought Alakhbaza to Space Monkey, a UK-based Psy-Trance underground music events company, for a live set on their Psy Live Radio broadcast from GrooveTank Live in London. GrooveTank Live operates out of Containerville in Bethnal Green, an intimate, DIY-style broadcast studio and event space built around the idea of streaming raw, underground sets straight from the room rather than a polished studio setup. It’s a fitting stage for a project still finding its footing: no arena lighting to hide behind, just a small room, a live feed and whoever’s tuned in.
For an artist whose reputation was built on reading thousands of people in a room at once, playing to a livestream audience through Space Monkey’s platform is its own kind of exposure. There’s no crowd energy to bounce off, no faces to read mid-set. Just the tracks, doing whatever work they’re going to do on their own.
Two Different Jobs
Bollywood DJing and Psy-Trance production ask for almost opposite skill sets. One trades on recognition, a familiar hook, a vocal line the room already knows, a payoff everybody’s waiting for. Psy-Trance doesn’t work that way. It’s built on repetition, texture and a slow-burn structure that earns its intensity over twenty minutes rather than four. “Bollywood is a big part of who I am as a performer,” Toons says, “while Psy-Trance gives me room to explore who I am creatively.” It’s a fair distinction, and it explains why Alakhbaza exists as its own name rather than a footnote on his DJ bio. The two projects aren’t in competition, they’re just doing different work.
A Catalogue That Hasn’t Settled
The most honest way to describe the Alakhbaza tracks so far is unfinished, not in the sense of being sloppy, but in the sense that they read like a producer still figuring out his own sound rather than repeating a formula he’s already found. That’s not a knock. Technical competence is table stakes in Psy-Trance; a distinctive voice is the hard part, and it doesn’t arrive on schedule. Toons seems to treat the tracks that way himself, as data points rather than statements, each one telling him what worked, what didn’t, and where to push next. Whether that experimentation eventually locks into a signature sound is the open question, and it’s the only one that actually matters here.
His music offers a more revealing picture of Alakhbaza. The 2020 Mahashivratri Progressive Psy-Trance live set is rooted in the hypnotic, driving side of the genre, allowing rhythms and textures to develop rather than rushing towards obvious pay-offs. Lunar Dance, also from 2020, takes a more spacious and atmospheric route, suggesting that Toons was already exploring different ways of building tension and movement within psychedelic electronic music. By the time of the 2023 Melodic Techno Mixtape, the approach feels more restrained, with greater emphasis on melody, texture and gradual progression. Heard alongside one another, the recordings suggest an artist less interested in settling into a fixed genre template than in working out his own electronic vocabulary. The development isn’t necessarily linear, nor does every experiment arrive at a definitive sound, but that sense of exploration is precisely what makes Alakhbaza interesting.
Where the Two Sides Meet
For all the surface differences, there’s a throughline connecting Toons’ Bollywood work and his Psy-Trance output: an ear for how sound moves a room. Years of reading Bollywood crowds gave him an instinct for pacing energy in real time. Psy-Trance just stretches that same instinct across a longer arc, building through texture and repetition instead of a hook everyone already knows. Framed that way, Alakhbaza isn’t a break from where he started. It’s the same question, how do you move a crowd, asked on a different clock.
Production Rewires How You Listen
Making original tracks and remixes forces a different kind of attention than DJing does: arrangement, bassline construction, transitions, sound design, the whole architecture of a track’s energy from intro to outro. A producer’s ear is trained differently from a DJ’s, whose main job is selection and sequencing rather than construction. That shift in perspective might end up mattering more than any genre tag attached to the Alakhbaza name. It points to an artist increasingly interested in how tracks get built, not just how they get played.
What “Beyond Bollywood” Actually Means
The transition implied by the headline already happened years ago. Toons has been operating outside Bollywood for a while now. The more interesting question is what he’s building on the other side of it.
The catalogue points to sustained, deliberate experimentation. The Space Monkey booking and the international reach it followed suggest the music is finding ears outside his established fanbase. Whether that adds up to a fully-formed artistic identity is something only the next batch of tracks can answer, and that uncertainty, refreshingly, doesn’t seem to bother him.
Still Working It Out
Seventeen years in, what’s genuinely interesting about Toons isn’t that he’s moved between genres, plenty of DJs do that. It’s that he’s still visibly testing, still willing to let a project stay unresolved rather than force a tidy narrative around it. Alakhbaza may not be the definitive DJ Toons sound yet. It reads more like a producer mid-conversation with himself, working out a second musical language in real time, and that ongoing process, not a finished statement, is what makes it worth following.
Follow DJ Toons on Instagram: @djtoonsofficial @alakhbaza
Website: www.djtoons.com
