You've been DJing around Dubai for four years now - what made you start the live project, and how does it work?

An Aussie promoter got in touch about a drum and DJ duo who he wanted to put in my night. I looked at their Youtube clips and loved it - but also thought that I could do it better. I'd also just got involved in the SAE Ableton boot camp, which gave me the tools to create my own mashups and edits.

I got in touch with a good mate and the best drummer in town, Matt Grieves from Sound, and we sat down together and worked out a 2ManyDJs style set, with a live rock drummer over the top. We've now added the silly-talented Swerte on MC duties, and we'll keep adding more people and playing more and more original material. So basically I DJ, and the set is designed to give the drummer as much focus as possible, while Swerte does his hip hop hyping thing on the mic.

Massively. But after I heard him singing, I realised we didn't have much to follow (laughs). That set was an hour long, 18 track mashup and we had Blur's 'Song 2' drum rhythm linking a lot of the tracks together. And the last track was a three-remix mashup of that song, which just killed it. The reaction was just incredible - it's a full on club set, with a live music sound so it was always going to be fun, but our last gig supporting Tom Middleton was just insane. People couldn't believe the noise we made and the energy in the club. I had to pre-warn Tom as our last track was a mashup I made of Rage Against The Machine's 'Killing in the name of'. No one wants to follow a live version of that with the club moshing, but Tom did very well.

And you're now supporting Pendulum, which is a bit of a change of pace...

Yeah, it is. The first set was a mix of house, drum and bass, breakbeat and rock and roll, and we've just finished a dubstep, hip hop, drum and bass and breakbeat set for Pendulum. Having Matt on drums just makes the set so much more visual as you've got a drummer thrashing out, and it gives it that live sound. We don't get much live music in this city, so this is a great way to combine a club set with a live band feel. And we've got one of the best MCs in the country on board to keep everyone on their toes.

The stuff we're playing now is almost exclusively my edits - watch out for the MIA remix on the night, it's pretty good even if I do say so myself - and I've started making my own tracks with the drummer in mind. Then we'd like to get live bass, guitars, keys and singers involved with me pulling the strings - it'll take a while to get to that stage, but we've already started planning.

Da:Funct LIVE support Pendulum (DJ set) on Friday February 12 at Alpha. Advance tickets Dhs100 from www.djmag.ae