Earlier this year, as a wave of lockdowns surged around the globe, many touring musicians watched their livelihoods collapse. For Ahmed El Ghazoly, the experience was particularly stark. Living in Cairo, he quickly saw that he wouldn't be able to reach his mostly Europe-based audience for at least a year.

Having studied Computer Science, he started brushing up on his coding skills, with the intention of finding a job as a programmer. "But it just never happened," he said. "Being healthy and rested and having daily access to my home studio was just too inspiring, so instead I just started making lots of music and recording lots of mixes. The requests for guest mixes and remixes and compilation tracks also kept coming in and it's all been exciting and interesting stuff. I'm having too much fun to stop and focus on something else."

Some savings, the low cost of living in the Egyptian capital, and a recent grant for Arab artists affected by the pandemic, have helped him to muddle through so far. "I guess you can say I'm being irresponsibly optimistic about being able to sustain myself until things go back to normal," he said. "Also about things ever going back to normal!"

Not that he would necessarily be happy if the old reality suddenly returned. Since ZULI and I last spoke, in March 2019, his touring schedule had got busier than ever, and things hadn't been easy. "The sleep deprivation, jet lag, poor diet and all that stuff took its toll on me both physically and mentally. Even though I was quite literally travelling the world, I was having a terrible time. My anxiety was through the roof and by December I started having psychosomatic reactions. The doctors told me I had to change my lifestyle; I would have never imagined the stress to manifest physically."

It might seem odd that on-paper success could be "terrible" while Covid-induced precarity brings with it a new lease of life. But it makes a kind of sense that ZULI would thrive creatively in the conflicted limbo of lockdown, even managing to bounce back from the loss of two EPs' worth of music in a theft last year, finishing off his best and most club-ready record to date.

An introverted and sometimes oppositional character, when we met in Berlin in 2019 he voiced frustrations with the scene and doubts about whether he deserved his success. Things were going better then—he'd been living off his shows for a couple of years, and had a long European visa and a contract on a two-bedroom flat in a nice part of Cairo. Even so, he seemed aware of a tension between isolation and connection, as spells of travel would alternate with productive, but psychologically tough, alone time back in Cairo.

At the time, he identified the long periods of self-imposed isolation which fed into Terminal, his head-turning 2018 album, as bringing their own health risks. "That wasn't good for me at all. Psychologically it was bad. I'd rather not do that from a health perspective. But when I don't do it, to be frank I'm not as creative. I'm hesitant to admit this to myself, but it's becoming more and more apparent that this type of unhealthy isolation is kind of necessary for me to be in top form, to create."

The album's title has two meanings: one, as in transport terminal, referring to ZULI's status at the end of the line, on the fringes of the international scene; and a darker meaning, as in terminal illness, hinting at the effects of a life lived in constantly shifting gears. "That isolation coupled with travelling a lot has contributed to my growth," he told me. "Not necessarily upwards or in a positive way, just that I've changed a lot. My foundations—I keep demolishing them and building again."

ZULI's music, too, demolishes and rebuilds itself as a matter of course. I first met him in 2015, while writing a feature about VENT, the Cairo club he had set up with friends. Back then I heard two strands to his music-making: the queasy hip-hop he made as Swag Lee, in the early days of the Arabic hip-hop scene (his collaborator, the rapper Abyusif, is now legit famous); and hissy, Actress-style techno—then under the name XULI—which caught the ear of Lee Gamble.

Since joining Gamble's UIQ label, ZULI's music has touched on zombified trap, crepuscular IDM and body-horror techno, among other things. Terminal was half a triumphant return to hip-hop, half a kind of troubled ambient. His forthcoming EP on UIQ, due later in the year, is speedy and club-ready, but finds ways to keep you guessing: fakeout codas, surprise rap verses, whiplash tempo changes. Probing that tension between dance floor connection and loner headtrip, ZULI seems to enjoy antagonising club norms. He said he's never seen dance music as "tied to dancing or going out. I grew up listening to dance music indoors, on my computer; it's always been an end in and of itself, never a means to the end that is 'raving' or 'clubbing' or whatever."

The upcoming EP is also ZULI's most direct confrontation yet with UK sounds: particularly jungle (on the rinse-out "Tany" and "Where Do You Go") and grime ("Penicillin Duck"). These styles have often lurked in his music, not least on one of his standout tracks, 2018's busted hardcore epic "Trigger Finger". ZULI's UK connection runs deeper than the tunes, though. He spent the first nine years of his life in the North London suburb of Burnt Oak, and still has the English accent to match. "[My father] was a journalist," he explained. "He got a job in London around the time I was born, so my family all moved there. I moved back to Cairo in '93 when I was nine."

In those nine years, London got a grip on his subconscious. "The smell, especially. The weather, the Underground. I've kept the accent somehow, none of my siblings have. I think it's also a psychological thing, 'cos ever since I moved back to Egypt I've had this like, 'No!' stance. Holding onto my identity."

I'd asked ZULI about the move to Cairo when I interviewed him in 2015. He'd described it as "such a shock, and I think I'm still suffering from it. Residuals are still going on. I just came to Egypt and everything was so different. And my dad isn't class conscious at all. So the place I grew up in in Cairo was really poor... My parents aren't religious at all, and everyone around me's parents were really religious. I go to their houses and their mums are in Hijabs and they're praying and stuff. And my parents are having house parties with their gay friends. Really confusing!"

This was a point of commonality with his old friend and co-conspirator in VENT, Asem $$$TAG$$$, who spent part of his childhood in the US. The two of them met in around 2000, as school kids, at "a really bad rave"; Asem recalls being impressed by the older ZULI, one of the only DJs he knew. They went on to form a string of bands together, including one called Foreigner. "The theme was, 'We're always foreigners wherever we go,'" ZULI recalled. ("I'm so glad we never released any of it," Asem laughed when I mentioned it).

ZULI's upbringing might help explain his complex feelings about place, and his resistance to the identity markers people try to put on him. It's not that he rejects all associations with his home city. In 2018, he made a piece for CTM's Radio Lab which used audio vignettes to capture Cairo's social and political flavour, and Terminal's artwork featured photos of some of his favourite haunts around the capital. But he's skeptical of the labels often attached to Cairene or Egyptian artists. The album came with a statement primed to thwart lazy European journalists:

"In a world that feels like it's regressing into tribalism, many of us who don't fit into any one specific group identity feel sidelined at best. When people talk to me, whether it be the press or peers in the scene I operate in, I am often approached with a preconceived notion of pretty much everything from my influences and taste to my politics and lifestyle, solely based on my nationality. It is a caricature that has proven very marketable, one that makes for a more interesting read/conversation/booking, apparently, than a multi-faceted (hence unique) human personality just like each and every one of us. Ever since this came to my attention I have been making a point to be as vocal as possible about how unfair that is."

ZULI and his crew have been critical of Mahraganat, or Electro Chaabi, a high-energy, predominantly working-class Egyptian style which has made an impact abroad in the past decade. Back in 2015, Asem put its western success down to its "orientalist appeal" (unlike much of the music ZULI and his crew make, it is audibly related to traditional Arabic musics). ZULI, in an interview with Stray Landings, criticised Egyptian musicians jumping on the style "just because it's successful and because it's easy... Nah."

"Bro! (Love It)," from the new EP, seems to put this criticism in audio form. It's a broken beat techno tune at first, but morphs jarringly into a slower beat slathered with trad-sounding samples. An American-accented voice bursts in: "Oh my god, this has Egyptian music all over it! Wow, that's hard!"

This combative stance might feed an image of ZULI as a strong-principled loner. But he's spent years working collectively in Cairo's small but developing dance music scene.

VENT, which sprung out of the Kairo Is Koming collective, and was co-run with Asem and the musician Bosaina, tried heroically to bring adventurous dance music bookings to the city. The club struggled to find an audience among Cairo's partying middle- and upper-classes, who were more interested in commercial house music. It closed shortly after my visit in 2015, owing to a disagreement with the building's owners. Finding a new space, with owners who will tolerate creative and financial risks, has been difficult.

"We were aware that we were lucky to find the space, but we weren't aware to what extent it was an anomaly. We don't have enough money, obviously, to do it on our own. And the scene, it's better than before, but there isn't a big enough following for it to be self-sustaining."

ZULI mentioned a couple of nights which have since shared VENT's adventurous spirit, including the now-defunct Mapping Possibilities, a seated audiovisual event. But developments have been faster outside the country: as he notes, Egyptian producers have had increasing success connecting with overseas labels, press and audiences. Asem has released on Opal Tapes and Seagrave; another of the Kairo Is Koming crew has been making waves with killer club hybrids as 3PHAZ.

Cairo's latest community node is irsh, a series of casual DJ sets recorded from the home of ZULI and DJ Rama. Launched in January, irsh came out of a social need first and foremost. "Rama and I are both a bit socially awkward and we were talking about how we always have the most fun with other people when we're being creative. So we thought it would be nice to set up a few nights where we invite everyone we would like to hang out with and ask them to bring a USB if they wanted and we would all take turns on the decks. The decision to film came about so that people would take it seriously enough for it to be fun."

The resultant recordings, uploaded to YouTube, are playful and relaxed, showing a broad spectrum of Cairene DJ talent.

"When the pandemic hit and people had to socially distance we couldn't do any more irsh nights," he said. "Also, every human on earth was doing a live stream and we didn't want irsh to be lost in the crowd. So we thought it might be nice to ask everyone who's played to send us a track if they wanted, something that represents their current sound."

The resultant compilation, did you mean: irish, features Cairo-based artists—like 3Phaz, Itfll, Kareem Lotfy and El Kontessa—plus a few special guests: Ramallah's Al Nather, and Abdullah Miniawy, a virtuosic vocalist currently living in Europe. It's an extremely solid collective statement, moving through complementary facets of what might be a Cairo sound: brooding club heaters, sci-fi ambient, skewed hip-hop and electronica.

Going on the strength of it, quarantines and closed borders may not stop Cairo's producers from advancing further into the global dance music consciousness in the coming years. As they do, you might find ZULI involved, if not exactly front and center. "I blended in over the years, but I've always been this introverted person," he told me. "Whenever I was part of a group I would only appear every few weeks. I'm always on my computer at home downloading music," he laughed. "Always socially awkward."