I have history with Dimitri From Paris. It’s just that he didn’t know it. When I arrived in Paris, in August 1997, I bought myself a cheap CD player and Dimitri’s peerless debut album Sacrebleu, which I knew was the perfect disc to ease myself into the city.

I’ve written about Sacrebleu before: I called it “the ultimate French Touch not French House album” and I will stick with that description with a vengeance. The album is incredibly, sophisticatedly French. In an interview with Muzik magazine in 1996 Dimitri said that Sacrebleu was supposed to be “a play on everybody’s stereotyped ideas about Parisians… like a musical version of Inspector Clouseau or Pepé Le Pew” and he filled it with easy-listening, exotica, reggae, house and more, dusting down with some of the most kitsch Gallic samples possible, including - right at the start of the damn album - someone playing the Marseillaise on a xylophone.

It’s not a serious record. In fact, as Dimitri says below, Sacrebleu was a kind of a joke to trip up Americans. But it’s certainly not a stupid one either.  More than anything, Sacrebleu is a wonderful record, beaming with light, funk, style, melody and élan. Sacrebleu is - as I mentioned before - light hearted but never throw away, its brilliantly varied production labyrinthine in a way that makes me think of The Avalanches’ sample patchwork.

And it was perhaps un-repeatable. Dimitri didn’t make another album until Cruising Attitude in 2003 and he hasn’t really made another album since, concentrating instead on remixes - something he is insanely good at - DJing and producing 12 inches.

I caught up with Dimitri in Barcelona in May 2026, just before he DJed at La Paloma in Barcelona, an old music hall / dance house that was absolutely perfect for his stylish sound. And, of course, I had to start with Sacrebleu….

Ben Cardew

When I arrived in Paris in 1997, the very first album I bought was Sacrebleu. Because for me, it felt so French, you know?

Dimitri From Paris

Good - you know, it was a joke? It was meant to be like a Monty Python kind of joke - like, that is how French people are or how people think the French are. It was just all cliches. And then a lot of people - good young people, like you were in 1997 - took it on the very first degree, I was really shocked because, for me, it was so obvious it was a joke that no one would deem that I was serious about this. 

And then everybody thought it was so French, which was like, okay. I mean, it did help my career, but it was meant to be like, you know, I am joking about all the cliches - people like Pepe Le Pew or Monty Python, like having that French accent on the show, or whatever. So it is funny you said that to me, because I thought old people and Americans would deem it French, but then if a Scottish young person thinks it is so French, then alright.

Ben Cardew

But I think the thing was - and obviously it was your record - there were some very overtly French elements. There was a humour. But at the same time, the music itself was brilliant.

Dimitri From Paris

I didn't try to make the music particularly French-sounding but it was more all the packaging and putting the Eiffel Tower on it was like the big signature. Okay, we are trying to make this full French, you know? 

The whole thing was like, it is a fake French thing made by someone who is not - that was the idea behind it. And it sort of became a very, "Oh, it is so French" everywhere, but that is fine. I mean, I like the music and I am 100% proud of it. But I was really not expecting that kind of reaction, so it still makes me like, wow, okay.

Ben Cardew

This is one of the things I find so interesting about you, because you were born in Istanbul, right?

Dimitri From Paris

Yeah.

Ben Cardew

I wonder what your relationship is with France. Do you feel very French?

Dimitri From Paris

Yeah, probably. I mean, I was raised in France. I arrived there when I was three years old, so being born in Istanbul is more of a technicality than anything else. Both my parents are Greek and they were in their early 20s when they moved to France with me as a newborn, not a newborn, but a toddler, let us say. So I got all my education in the French system and all my friends were, you know, wherever they were - some were more French, some were from other countries - but we were all in the same French system of schooling. And I guess, more than French, we could say I am more Parisian, which the rest of France hates.

Ben Cardew

I grew up in the '80s and '90s, and for a long time French music wasn't really appreciated, and I was quite a Francophile.

Dimitri From Paris

I so agree with you, in its own right, because there was nothing much to be appreciated, to be honest. It was like a French-language, watered-down version of pop music from the rest of the world. In the '60s they were taking US songs and putting French words to them, which retrospectively has its own charm, but back then it was just like third-grade, low-shelf music made for the French people and really just remade more simplistically. So growing up in that environment, I was absolutely not interested in French music and the rest of the world wasn't either, so I felt I was not so wrong.

We weren't even trying to be considered by other people. Personally and with a lot of my friends back then - I am talking early '90s - we had already started making music in one way or the other, DJing some of us, and we were like, yeah, we are doomed, French is never going to interest anyone, especially not the Brits. And we would look up to the UK because so many good genres of music came out of there and they were always ahead of us in terms of catching on to new music. They caught up on house music in the late '80s and before that, there were so many other things, like reggae, I mean ska, so many things that came from other places, but where the UK was catalytic in making them what they are now. So we were looking up to the UK.

I have said that many times we would go to a record store and our biggest fear was to be spotted as being French, because we knew we would get the worst service ever if people knew - just go back to the back of the line for you guys. We had this complex of being really not as good as the rest of the world, basically.

Ben Cardew

This is one of the reasons why I loved your music so much. I know it wasn't entirely serious but at the same time, it was Dimitri from Paris with an album called Sacrebleu, with all this kind of…

Dimitri From Paris

I will give you that.

Ben Cardew

You started DJing really young, right?

Dimitri From Paris

I wouldn't say that young compared to most people. I did have a stint at DJing in a club. When was that? When I was 18 or 19, so that must have been like early '80s, '82 or '83 and I didn't like it at all. I had this idea of DJing like the scratch DJs. I went to this show where they had Grand Mixer DXT and Fab Five Freddy and breakers and graffiti artists. It was slightly before Malcolm McLaren, so there was this time where hip hop was coming through into Europe and there was this notion of DJing as being a creative thing - you could do creative things with records.

And it was just an epiphany to me because I thought you could only play a record, you couldn't do much with it. And everyone had records because it was the only medium to listen to music - that, and cassettes back then. So having this sudden idea that you could actually manipulate the record and become creative with it was really like an epiphany to me. And I started looking up to all the American DJs and trying to learn things but, you know, no internet, no nothing, so it was very difficult to find information.

I was following up on the hip-hop thing and wanted to play the music that I liked and started doing editing stuff. And I put an ad in a trade magazine, the Magazine de la Discothèque, and I got two calls, and I got hired to replace a guy that was calling in sick. And I realised what DJing was about: to play records that made the crowd happy, not the records that you thought were good. And suddenly I realised that this wasn't the creativity I was looking for and I went more towards radio, which was more exciting at the time because, like you had in the UK, there was the pirate radio movement and it was kind of the same thing. There was an early pirate movement, and then very quickly it got legalised, so everybody wanted to do radio and there was a huge demand for DJs - any kind of DJ you could get, like you could get a job.

So I got like a few stints in small radio stations and my goal was to make a mix show, because I was getting also those mixtapes from New York, from DJs like Tony Humphries or Shep Pettibone, who were mixing tracks together, which was something hardly anyone was doing in France, to my knowledge. And I think England was the same. The English DJs were very much like the French; they would talk on the mic, create a vibe, play one record after the other, but they wouldn't beat match and it was very niche. So I was into that very technical thing and I said, if I have a mix show where I can play the music maybe I could get gigs or whatever.

And my main ambition at the time was more to be a remixer than being a DJ. I didn't know that a lot of the remixers that I was looking up to, like Larry Levan or François K or Shep Pettibone - the names that I was seeing on the records, those guys were actual DJs, because I didn't have the information, I just saw a name, so I wanted to be a remixer. I was already some kind of DJ manipulator, doing edits of cassettes and stuff. The main thing was to make something with the music that was my own version of it.

Ben Cardew

If you had to choose between hip hop, house and disco -  you are on a desert island - what would it be?

Dimitri From Paris

Oh, it would be disco, because disco is the mother of both. Even hip hop, I mean, there is slow disco that a lot of the hip hop people sampled and in the early days it wasn't as segregated as it is today, so it was just dance music. So, definitely disco.

Ben Cardew

You started off making music for fashion houses, right?

Dimitri From Paris

Not exactly. I started dabbling in production but most of all I did a lot of remixes, because that was my initial goal. And thanks to the house music show - I mean, it wasn't strictly house, but thanks to my mix show - I got noticed because I was playing a lot of my own edits, so a producer called me like, "Wouldn't you come to the studio and do a remix for us?" and blah blah. 

So I started doing that and it worked, really picked up really quickly because no one else was doing it and I was getting calls literally every week - and several calls a week - to do remixes of a lot of French pop stuff, which wasn't great, but I was so happy to be sitting in the studio and learning the trade.

So I started doing that and that led me to meet a guy that was working at the most exclusive record store in Paris, which was open seven days a week until 2:00 AM in the morning. You could buy records - I mean, I think it is unique in the world, it was unique in the world. It was on the Champs-Élysées and because of all these features, it was attracting a lot of jet-set people and one of them was Karl Lagerfeld. And Karl Lagerfeld was a big client of this shop and the buyer of this shop was the special buyer for Karl and eventually they hooked up and he ended up making... this guy, Michel Gaubert, ended up making music for Karl. He wasn't very technical and he needed someone to work with him and he knew I was more of a technical guy, so he hired me to work with him.

And that is how I started with Michel, to work in the fashion industry but I was totally a behind-the-scenes guy. And eventually that collaboration with Lagerfeld, who was also designing for Chanel, led Michel to be asked to write music, which he didn't know how to do. He didn't have the, you know, none of the equipment or anything, so he was giving me indications, sometimes bits of dialogue that he would take off films and stuff and I would just sample bits and bobs and had total freedom to do whatever I wanted. 

The only brief was: "Whatever you do, just make it stylish." So that is the only thing that I had as a brief and I was making a lot of small modules, like very short almost like jingles, one- to two-minute length songs that were used once every year and after a few seasons I had about 20 of them and that became the base for Sacrebleu.

Ben Cardew

You mentioned remixing a few times. I found that very interesting, that it was remixing that interested you more than making your own music.

Dimitri From Paris

True, probably because I never considered myself as a musician. I never learned any instruments; today, I still cannot play anything, but I can play everything with one finger or two. So, yeah, it is a very paradoxical thing. 

A remixer is like being behind the scenes and I started also DJing because I felt it was a behind-the-scenes job, because back then the DJ was in the dark corner of the room watching everyone. And I always felt like the cat who likes to sit up very high on the... on the library or whatever, and then watch everything - that is kind of my character. And I can see what is happening but I don't want people to see me.

Remixing is like you are not the artist and I had no idea what a producer was. So producing and remixing for me is a bit of the same thing. You just act behind the scenes and you act as a conductor. I would have loved to be an orchestral conductor… You put pieces together and they make something nice. You are trying to make something nice with all those pieces.

Ben Cardew

Your remix of Stetsasonic’s Talking All That Jazz is one of my favourite remixes.

Dimitri From Paris

One of mine too.

Ben Cardew

How did it come about?

Dimitri From Paris

People don't know that most times you don't choose what you remix. People hire you to remix something, because to remix something you need to have access to a lot of the original master tapes, which are not publicly available. So in the case of Stetsasonic, it was the owner of Tommy Boy, Tom Silverman, who reached out to me. He is a very interesting person because he came up with so many groundbreaking records, namely Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa.

And Tom Silverman, the Tommy Boy founder, is also the one who organised the New Music Seminar, where I learned about how doing a mix show could boost my career, so he has always been sort of a guardian angel somewhere. He came to me because I started to become a little bit notorious after Sacrebleu and I don't know how and why he asked me to remix this, but I said, “Yeah, I mean, I love the song. I would love to do it.”

And because it was a song about sampling, I said, you know, "Why don't I do a reverse thing where I make original music from the samples?" And I knew it mostly sampled a song from Lonnie Liston Smith called Expansions and I said, "Why don't I get musicians to replay that and why don't I make those disco records I rave about and go into the studio and make an actual disco record 20 years after disco has disappeared from the mainstream?”

I am very proud of it because I put together a band - it was the first time ever I worked with a band. We went to the studio, we recorded everything, everything was live and it was a real and a true labour of love. And I wasn't really expecting anything much out of it, because the song wasn't really a hit - it was just one of those very appreciated hip-hop songs but I didn't see that as a hit - and it became quite famous and thanks to the remix as well. 

So I am very proud of that and it did teach me that it is possible, if you put the means, to make live music. And at the time everyone was sampling - it was the beginning of French Touch and French House and it was a lot of loops - and I said, "No, I don't want anything looped, I want everything to unfold naturally." So that was really my reaction to the loop thing as well.

Ben Cardew

I read that you actually lost money on the remix because you were offered this fee and you got a band in.

Dimitri From Paris

Probably, yeah. I don't even remember. It was definitely not a money issue; I just wanted to make it happen.

Ben Cardew

You mentioned French Touch. How did you feel about all that?

Dimitri From Paris

It has been reduced to filtered house music, which is what came up most importantly out of the whole movement but people like Air tend to be forgotten. It was a wide variety of things when it started. And because Daft Punk were at the head of the biggest successes, this sort of imprinted that sound to the rest of the... of the name, which is... it is what it is, you know?

I was part of the whole scene of young French producers, getting interest from the UK press and then the rest of the world after that. Everyone moved through his own path and did whatever they wanted. Now there is just quite recently, like the last year or so, a comeback or revival of the French Touch sound and it is only a revival of the disco house sound, which is… it is good for what it is but it was never really what I was about. I am an anti-loop person. I hate looping stuff around because I find it very sterile.

It sounds good for 20 seconds and then it sounds really boring. So, yeah, it is not my thing but people like it. A lot of people got into dance music and house music through that, so I totally respect that. It is part of my history as well and I don't have anything bad to say about it.

Ben Cardew

You didn't release another album until Cruising Attitude in 2003. Why was that?

Dimitri From Paris

I never thought of making an album in the first place, so that sort of happened and then there was pressure to do another one - maybe self-inflicted pressure - and I got a few scares with samples, which totally put me off sampling again. The liberty of doing stuff without caring was gone, because I didn't even think anybody would listen to the first time, so I was like, I can do that, I can do whatever, you know, who cares, no one cares. Now that people actually cared and were watching it, it kind of froze me creatively, so that took a much longer time.

We talked about starting Stetsasonic. I did that soon after Sacrebleu and I was really happy with the experience and said if I would ever do music again, I would want to do it like this. So I started writing the stuff with an idea that musicians will replay it and they ended up replaying it. So it took a lot of time, a lot of money and I think when it came out, the world was not expecting that - they were more into whatever French House was doing. 

I don't regret that I did it and I am happy that I did it but it didn't really put me in a mood of doing albums again because it was too much effort and with not much return. Not even people noticing, really. It is not so much the money, it is just, you know, people enjoying it.

Ben Cardew

To take things to the present day: early this year, you released the Nassau Excursions with François K, which is a great EP. You are referring to Compass Point Studios, I assume. Why? What do you love about Compass Point?

Dimitri From Paris

Well, there was definitely a sound coming out of that, which was mostly due to the musicians that were making it. There are a lot of musical genres that actually originate from one place, one studio, and that studio has the same group of people working in there. Motown is like this, Philadelphia is like this, and there isn't a genre, a Nassau genre, but there is definitely a sound that you can hear on Robert Palmer, you can hear on Grace Jones - you can hear it, if you know.

With Philly, I was thinking that people were copying each other because they sounded the same. No, it is just the same guys playing different artists - same guys, different labels, same guys. And it is the same thing with Compass Point. It is Sly and Robbie, it is Wally Badarou, it is all those guys playing, the same guys arranging and you have a lot of different artists from different fields that have this thing in common, which is binding the sound together. And for a lack of a better word, we call it a Compass Point sound. It has always been a sound that I love without knowing all those details that I am telling now.

So I think once you understand the links between all those things that you have been loving for ages, without being able to join the dots, the moment you join the dots, you want to share this with the rest of the world. And that was our idea. François, obviously, was even part of it, because he did work there [Compass Point], he did record there and met with pretty much everyone that was involved, including Chris Blackwell, the owner of Island. 

It is just tribute, homage - I don't know how you call it - and it is something that is still going on. We have a lot of music, probably six or seven other tracks that hopefully we will be able to release, so it is... yeah, it is a nice project.

I wasn't expecting the reaction that it got, which is a very positive one. I mean, I wasn't expecting it to be negative but I thought it would be much more niche than what it ended up being, so it is great when things happen like that, when you manage to touch people and share something that you really like and they get it. I mean, what... what more can you wish for?

Ben Cardew

You strike me as being someone for whom the details count, if you see what I mean.

Dimitri From Paris

I always said, if you show me a square, I always start to see the four angles before looking at the middle. So, yeah, it is... it is annoying for a lot of people.

Some listening

Julia Holter - Fantasy

A lot of songs involve the word “fantasy”. But few of them sound as genuinely fantastical as Julia Holter’s new one; this is fantasy in the sense of a slightly unreal but very pleasant daydream, one where you imagine yourself with huge birds’ wings rather than an expensive car. 

The song glides in on a gilded cloud of synths, to which Holter adds one of her most perfectly diaphanous vocals, throwing in a brilliantly melancholic melodic twist when you least expect it. She then briefly rocks out, if by “rock” you understand My Bloody Valentine at their most warmly fuzzy.

Black Bananas - Turkey Burgers

…. and right on cue, Turkey Burgers, the first new music from Jennifer Herrema’s other band in 15 years, is like the rotted alter ego of Holter’s Fantasy, a sprawling dream that wanders in stinking, somewhere between Funkadelic, a summer synth jam, Exile on Main Street and Bitches Brew, topped with Herrema’s idiosyncratic vocal, like a vulture crawling out of a sewer. Needless to say it is wonderful - so much so, in fact, that you won’t even miss Royal Trux. And that is saying something.

Kneecap - Cold at the Top (Shanti Celeste remix)

Who had Kneecap down as producing the song of the summer? Certainly not me - unless your summer is more one of rioting in the streets than relaxing by the pool. 

Shanti Celeste, though, had different thoughts, transforming the (OK actually quite relaxed) electro disco of Cold at the Top into a laid-back but totally thrilling Mediterranean banger, bringing a tiny guitar (?) lick from the original to the front of the song, submerging it in congas and basically getting rid of the vocals. (Not that’s there’s anything wrong with the vocals, just that they tend to dominate any Kneecap song.) If there’s any justice in the world you will hear this everywhere this summer, you will enquire who the song is by and you will not believe the DJ when he tells you.

PJ Harvey - Voyager

It turns out that cosmic PJ Harvey is the PJ Harvey we all need in 2026. Voyager, her first new song in three years, is written in the voice of the NASA probe Voyager 2 and Christ is it beautiful, like an orchestra floating off into space with Polly Jean at the helm, looking for another world in which to get over the heartbreak. it’s probably my favourite thing she has done since Let England Shake - and yet totally, utterly different to that record.

Roy Montgomery and Martha Skye Murphy - Cloudburst

Somehow the most unexpected thing about this song, the first fruits of a new album by New Zealand composer / guitarist Roy Montgomery and vocalist Martha Skye Murphy, is the vaguely conventional vocal melody that drops into focus four minutes into the song. 

By this point that listener has been tumbled and floated into orbit by beaming thickets of acoustic guitar and Skye Murphy’s gorgeous operatic tone, in a way that I’ve been trying to avoid comparing to the Cocteau Twins but really can’t any more. The effect is like finally seeing a dolphin in one of those Magic Eye posters from the 90s: shocking and yet kind of inevitable when you finally get there. Needless to say, Cloudburst is far more beautiful than that, though.

The playlists

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026.

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026.

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest.