Ali Najdi is a DJ, curator, producer and writer living and breathing in Chicago. Ali’s sets are guided by a playfulness and spirit of musical freedom that is bursting at the seams with energy. Equal parts flirtatious, revelatory and challenging. Ali’s maximalist musical sensibility point’s directly to their textured and dynamic upbringing from the Middle East to New Orleans.

As a student of dance music history and club culture across the ages, Ali synthesizes new and old school stylings into their sets, narrativizing dramatic arcs that leave you curious, breaking the mould of underwhelming dance floors and imploring a closing of the perceived spatial gap between dancer and DJ.

In 2021, Ali threw the first Pleasure Club at a dive bar in Avondale and the rest is history. They now act as Podlasie Club’s co-director of programming, with the intent to contribute to the rich ecosystem that is the Chicago dance scene.

They’ve most recently launched multiple club nights across the city including PHLIRT and the latest edition of Pleasuredrome right here at The Whistler; where rigid genre conventions are abandoned in favor of a more intuitive approach to leading a dance-floor ceremony, centering joy, pleasure, and transcendence through movement.