With a career spanning three decades, Dimitri From Paris has pretty much seen it all. A man who prides himself on maintaining a professional approach to each and every aspect of his career from playing records, to producing and the aesthetics of his products – as well as his own personal style – Dimitri is a globally-respected purveyor of good quality music from disco right through to house.
Set to release a new compilation - Dimitri From Paris Back In The House - here Dimitri speaks to The Independent's Marcus Barnes about the mix and the tricks to sustaining a 30 year career as DJ
How did your new compilation for Defected come about?
I have a history of doing mixes for Defected, I think I’ve done five now. The first one I did was for the ‘In The House’ series, and this is called ‘Back In The House’ – in between we did a few different things, we did ‘In The House Of Love’, which is one of my favourites, it’s a take on the romantic side of mix CDs. And we had the Playboy compilations, one by myself and the last one with Bob Sinclar. I think it’s interesting to go back to the first one and focus on house music, because that’s what Defected do – house. It’s probably the only label that has such a long history and credibility with house music, as a generic word as opposed to niche stuff, and I’m happy to be there year after year playing the stuff I like. That was the idea as I hadn’t done anything that was strictly house in quite a while.
You’ve been DJing for 30 years, what would you say has helped you sustain such a long career?
For me its really important that [the music I play] is understandable by the people – I’m not one of these people who’s closed in their world, I like to share my ideas. I like a lot of things, but if you present them all at once they might get a little lost, so I’m always trying to get people into my thing but without going into the most obscure thing straight away – I try to get them into something that they’re not used to because they’re used to all those DJs playing familiar sounds. When I’m in a club I have to seduce them into my groove, I don’t want to scare them away – I don’t want to say, “Well this is what I play, take it or leave it”, because the chances are they’ll leave it.
You have to get people into what your universe is, but you want them to have a good time, you don’t want to bore them with stuff they don’t understand. The same goes with everything that goes with my personality, whether it’s a CD or a mix set, it always has to be accessible. And ‘accessible’ doesn’t have to be dumbed-down, it can be interesting and sophisticated. A lot of people think that to be accessible it has to be the most stupid thing possible, because ‘half the world is stupid and we need them to get it’. It does work if you make it super simple, but you can also make it a little less simple and people will understand and appreciate that.
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Dimitri from Paris Back In The House is out 27th August - pre-order from Amazon
