Revised recipe

Parisian DJ/producers Don Rimini
reboots the rap and rave

ENTERTAINMENT FOR MEN AND WOMEN: Don Rimini

By JACK OATMON

Born Xavier Gassemann, Parisian cocktail-mixin’ masher mixer, remixer and hit-count hit maker Don Rimini is a 32-year-old Internet vedette of an interesting background. His incessant mixtape posts and blogospheric favour have landed him in the strange but true category of international touring DJs that owe virtually their entire marketability to Web gadgetry. And among the ever-swelling community of Euros discombobulating hip hop clichés into four-on-the-floor toe-tappers, he’s a gem. Though it’s generally somewhat difficult to swallow ghetto hyperbole when it’s layered over chromatic square-wave crescendos and bleeping hooks, something about Rimini’s nail-biting, sonically scattered loops and distortion makes a nice fit for samples of cocking glocks and throaty shout-outs. His schizophrenic remix of Young MC’s classic “Bust a Move” is a perfect specimen of the current digital nostalgia wave.

Producing Cubase jams for four years now, though DJing since he was a teenager, his story of inspiration is not altogether unpredictable. “All the changes in electro inspired me,” says Gassemann. “The music had changed and a lot of the stuff being released here in France was electroclash and later the Ed Banger stuff. So that made me ask, why not try something myself?”

His most recent EP Kick ’n’ Run is further evidence that house is still back with a vengeance in the hipster universe. “Nervous Breakdown” kicks off easy and builds to an ear-piercing rave explosion. His first real musical journey other than some classic piano and jazz classes at a young age, Rimini produces in the studio and mixes largely CDs and a bit of vinyl at the club. “I’m not sure if I subconsciously incorporate that in there, but mostly this is my only musical project.”

Perhaps even more telling about his style is that the combination of club rap and house come not from the recent Baltimore craze happening from NYC to Paris, but from the fact that he’s put his time in on both sides of the dancefloor, with years spinning both hip hop and rave tunes. He’s got several fresh remixes now including an upcoming Sinden track and a thudding vocodered chop ’n’ crop banger for L.A.’s Kennedy that sounds like a futuristic butt-rockin’ computer hacker’s muscle-car stereo. “I’ve got a new original release coming up, as well as a mixtape for Playboy that they’re going to put on their Web site.”

The perennial bachelor’s rag literally heard his tunes and called him up to see if he’d make them something. Naturally, it doesn’t hurt your reputation when name-dropped bar stars like 2ManyDJs, Tiga, Diplo and fellow don of Paris, Busy P, are throwing your tracks at crowded nightclubs every weekend. Big friends, bigger sounds and disorienting, intoxicating production style make this guy a sort of MSG for the club, simultaneously cheap, plentiful and unhealthy but strangely satisfying and habit-forming. Expect to hear more as the year winds down.

WITH CHERRY COLA AND NU RAVERS
ON THE BLOCK AT SAT ON SATURDAY,
SEPT. 6, 10 P.M., $15