If you’ve a passing interest in disco, funk or soul and you’ve set foot in a club at any point in the past 30+ years, the chances are that you’ve probably heard a Dimitri From Paris remix at some point. While Dimitrios Yerasimos’ penchant for reworking the classics is legendary, his passion and affection for preserving the music he touches is nothing short of infectious.
“I like things that I can play in clubs,” Yerasimos enthuses. “I’ve been a collector of 12-inches and remixes since I started and the whole idea of taking a three minute song and putting more music into it and having it extended is something that I’ve been interested in since my interest in music began 40 years ago. It’s usually something that leaves me a bit frustrated – I love the song, but I’m frustrated that it’s a bit too short, or I hear potential that wasn’t tapped into. That’s what drives me to ask to remix a song and those are usually dance classics.”
Born in Istanbul, Yerasimos relocated to Paris with his family at a young age. He swiftly took an interest in music, making his own tapes and mixes from radio recordings, which would later inspire him to pursue a career as a radio DJ in the late 1980s. This would eventually lead to him being asked to rework tracks for a number of artists, including the likes of Coldcut, Yazz and Kool & The Gang. The rest is history.
A remix can be many things – a genre rework, perhaps even a radical reinvention. For Dimitri from Paris, it’s about honouring the feel of the original, expanding on and in most cases extending the mix and its constituent musical components in the process. Inspired by the likes of influential DJs such as Tom Moulton, Shep Pettibone or François Kevorkian whose remixes would go on to become staple selections in other DJ’s sets in the 70s and 80s, Yerasimos’ work represents an opportunity to create longer mixes of songs that never received the remix treatment in their heyday.
“The approach back then was to use whatever the original artist and producer had recorded and sort of rearrange it,” Yerasimos muses. “They would not add new music to it and that’s how I’ve been taught. My approach is to take what’s there and rearrange it, rather than produce a new musical track and keep the vocal up, like most remixes today. Re-mixing back in the day was taking a mix and re-mixing it: mixing it again with a different approach. So this is my approach to pretty much everything that I do.”
The Dimitri from Paris debut album Sacrebleu was released in 1997 and fused an array of influences ranging from bossa nova and jazz through to house, hip-hop and beyond. It also incorporated samples from 1960s film scores, with composer Henry Mancini’s work on the likes of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ and ‘The Party’ serving as jumping off points for Yerasimos to showcase his talent for blending disparate styles and extrapolating hidden musical details. When it comes to remixing other artists, which has come to be Yerasimos’ main focus in recent years, he describes his process as being akin to giving existing older tracks “a new coat of varnish”.
“There’s so many ways to recontextualize something, but the coat of varnish is closer to the reality of what I’m doing,” he explains. “Behind the varnish is the original untouched thing. I don’t want to deform them, I just want to give them a new shine, rather than changing them and making them my own. So for me, my work should be as unnoticeable as possible and what comes out of it should be, in a way, more contemporary. The idea of varnish is that it’s just a little coat, right? It does look like a small coat, but in reality there’s a lot of work done behind the scenes to make it work.”
Preservation and visibility is another motivator too. Through updating classic songs with expanded versions, Yerasimos is eager to ensure that classics from the disco era remain accessible for other DJs to incorporate into their mixes.
“My other goal is to get those songs played again, because I think it’s important for their history that they’re still played in clubs, because they belong there,” he explains. “A lot of those songs are played by real drummers, so they move along in tempo, which makes it difficult for a lot of the younger generation DJs to be able to mix them. Back then, a lot of the DJs knew the songs inside out – they knew where to speed them up and where to slow them down, so they could mix them together. Today, this is a lost art, so either you leave it as it is and a lot of people are not going to play them, or you make them slightly more aligned in terms of tempo and BPM, so they can get played.”
As Dimitri from Paris prepares to headline the inaugural SUZY event at The Prospect Building in Bristol this Saturday, Clash invited him to look back on five key remix projects from his career and the creative process behind them.
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‘Le Chic’ Remix
In 2018, Yerasimos partnered with Defected Records and their Glitterbox label to release a 10-track compilation of his remixes from the Chic canon, including the likes of Sister Sledge’s ‘Lost In Music’ and ‘He’s The Greatest Dancer’, Sheila & B. Devotion’s ‘Your Love Is Good’ and, of course, Chic’s very own ‘Le Freak’. As a DJ, he had always lamented the lack of extended versions and the opportunity to create them himself was particularly appealing.
“In the case of Chic, I was missing those early remixes that could have been done at the time of release back in the 70s,” he recalls. “I only used whatever was recorded and rearranged it. I didn’t add drums. I didn’t add anything. And that’s been my approach to a lot of those classic tracks. The classics shouldn’t be changed. If they’re classic and a lot of people know them, you should keep the spirit so that people recognise the song, but give them a little twist – but not a big one. That’s how I approach remixes – to give them a twist, to try to maybe make them sound a little bit more contemporary, but without people noticing that they’ve been tweaked. Usually if you listen to a remix of those old songs that I’ve done, it feels quite close to the original, but if you play the original and then you play the remix, you’d notice that the difference is bigger than you thought. It’s kind of like a sonic illusion, making them as close to the original as possible, but as different without it being noticed.”
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Prince – ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover‘
Perhaps one of the most striking examples of a Dimitri from Paris remix that re-contextualises existing material without radically altering its DNA, Yerasimos’ version of the lead single from Prince’s self-titled second album sees the original reimagined using a live version from 2002’s ‘One Nite Alone… Live!’ as a segue into its full album version. In its live incarnation, Prince utilises call and response in the song’s chorus, omitting the word ‘lover’ for the audience to sing back, which left audible gaps that Yerasimos had to fill in order to make his version work without additional context.
“That was super frustrating,” he states. “I actually did all the fake crowd vocals myself because it needed to be there. I recorded myself 20-30 times with different pitches and stuff and tried to make myself a crowd so that the call and response thing would work… A lot of people don’t know about this because it’s not obvious, but if you listen closely, it’s the same voice – mine in this case – multiplied a dozen times. That’s how you get the thing to work: you need to find out what’s missing and create what’s missing. And then we added a few drums and pasted the original album version, but that new intro created a lot of drama for the original version to kick back stronger when it comes in.”
While the track exists online in bootleg form, it remains unreleased officially and with Prince’s estate having changed hands multiple times since his untimely death in 2016, that remains unlikely to change.
“That’s unfortunately the norm with those old songs,” Yerasimos concedes. “In the case of Prince, his estate has changed hands at least two or three times and it’s a very slow process. Every new owner has their own ideas of how they want to exploit the catalogue and they usually stick to just reissuing albums… Honestly, I don’t even know who to ask, because I don’t even know who owns it now. They usually show very little interest in things that happen in the clubs and usually they just say no, because it’s easier to. So far, it’s been a no go for that one.”
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Jackson 5 – ‘I Want You Back‘
The officially-sanctioned Dimitri from Paris remix of ‘I Want You Back’ sees the Jacksons’ classic, originally clocking in at just under three minutes, doubled in length. Yerasimos was inspired by its strings, which though present on the original version were previously buried much lower in the mix. In his version, they appear front and center throughout.
“It all started with this idea of going from the strings and then moving into the song,” he recalls. “I mean, if you listen back to the original, you really have to pay attention to notice them… It’s such an amazing song anyway. You obviously have the amazing Michael vocals and the backing vocals, and then the rhythm section really kicks. And I also wanted to have a nod to ‘O.P.P.’, the Naughty By Nature song that sampled the piano from ‘I Want You Back’. There are always little nods that you can do to songs that sample the original.”
The song’s ubiquitous nature also presented an opportunity to tease listeners familiar with the original, creating new and unexpected movements that toy with its original structure to rapturous effect.
“Because it’s such a famous song, you kind of know that people are going to react to it,” he continues. “The moment they recognise it, you want to tease them with something they don’t know and then when it kicks in to the piece that they do know, they go, ‘Oh my god, this is the song.’ So it’s kind of fun to play around with this idea of dropping the part that they know… I love playing this in the middle of my sets, because it’s not a house track. It’s downtempo. It’s not what most DJs would play at peak time, but it’s such a huge song that if you break it down and you start with those strings that create drama when it comes in, people go mental.”
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The Joubert Singers – ‘Stand On The Word‘
In 2016, Yerasimos was invited to remix Stand on the Word by his friend, fellow musician Julien Jabre, who was granted the rights to re-record the song by its original writer and choirmaster, Phyliss Joubert. The 1982 original had been recorded live in a church using just two microphones, which made remixing it virtually impossible. With Jabre’s help, Joubert subsequently set about putting together a new choir to remake the song from scratch, which Yerasimos then re-worked and expanded.
“It was done in an extremely faithful way, so it sounds almost identical to the original,” he explains. “So I did get separate stems to do that, which is always better, because you have so many more opportunities to shuffle things around and create what you really want to create. It was re-recorded with a band – with a new drummer and a new piano player. Some of the people involved were the children of the people who recorded the original, so there was a true connection and it was the same choirmaster conducting it. That’s why it sounds extremely faithful, because a good portion of the people who remade it were involved, in one way or another with the original. I mean, most people don’t know it’s a re-recording. It’s quite undetectable.”
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Jamiroquai – ‘Cosmic Girl‘
Yerasimos’ 2020 remix of Jamiroquai’s 1996 classic stemmed from his desire to create a version of the track that he had always wanted to hear.
“For me, ‘Cosmic Girl’ is a disco record,” he states. “There was no disco version of it outside of the album version, so I just asked the label. They said, ‘Listen, you can try. We’ll ask them, but a word of warning: Jay Kay is very into checking everything and he’s very picky, so chances are they’re gonna turn it down because they don’t like remixes.’ This is something that I really appreciate, because it means that they’re really into the music themselves. As a musician, I felt I could talk musically to them. I knew I wasn’t going to destroy it, so I had a good feeling that they might like it.”
While previous remixes had leaned into the song’s electronic elements, the Dimitri from Paris remix once again sees Yerasimos dialling up the strings to create a sprawling eight minute mix reminiscent of a 70s disco anthem.
“None of the remixes were using much of the original recording,” he recalls. “They were using the vocals, but a lot of the music, and specifically the strings, hadn’t been used in a remix… When I got the parts, I was so amazed. It was beautiful. The strings were amazing. It had a lot of small bits that were not used in the original, so I was in heaven. I was really, really happy. And I did the version I always dreamed they would have done, but they didn’t and their feedback was great. I mean, they really loved it. I had really great feedback from management and that’s what allowed me to do Canned Heat a few months ago because they loved ‘Cosmic Girl’ and they know what I’m about. It’s great.”
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Dimitri from Paris headlines SUZY at The Prospect Building, Bristol this Saturday.
Tickets are available here.
Words: Paul Weedon – https://bsky.app/profile/paulweedon.bsky.social
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