10. SAM SPARRO ’21st Century Life’ (2007)

My other favourite remixers are Pete Rock, Maurice Fulton, Justice and Mr Oizo. In my opinion, they keep the best balance when it comes to sounding like a proper song/doing computer music. That’s one thing I always strive for. And then there’s the acoustics. The dance-floor factor. The résumé. The class.

This SPARRO track is about the only attempt I ever made to produce a 4/4 house music song. It’s one strange thing to produce (and almost exclusively listen to) a kind of music I never get to play myself in a club when I DJ. This is another head-wrecker of mine, and I have yet to find the solution to this dilemma: should my production style get closer to my DJ bag, or the opposite?

9. HOLY GHOST! ‘I Will Come Back’ (2009)

All in all, I did like about 50 remixes. Included here are those I think resisted the test of time the better.

Then there’s those I’d rather forget: the uninspired (Crookers and Kid Cudi). The badly mixed (Buraka Sound System). Turned down by the A&R (Lily Allen). Turned down by the artist herself (Joss Stone). Those I couldn’t finish (Sorry, Steve Aoki). Those I regret not doing (Amy Winehouse, which kind of haunts me in my sleep).

A-Trak and Sebastian helped me a lot on this Holy Ghost one. I finished it in a Brussels hotel room at 7 AM after playing the Dirty Dancing party in May 2009. I felt very honoured to have a record on DFA because it’s one of my favourite labels. LCD Soundsystem (and Holy Ghost) are also of my preferred remixers.

8. NEW YOUNG PONY CLUB ‘Ice Cream’ (2006)

I almost called this compilation BEDROOM FUN.

Because to me, remixing is really like bedroom producing. Sometimes airport producing. Even cab ride producing. I don’t book a big studio, I don’t hire a sound engineer, it’s almost straight from my own speakers to yours. I love this idea of preparing something in your bedroom that spreads world-wide in a minute. Like HOMEWORK. Or ENDTRODUCING. Or THE GREY ALBUM. I’ve been inspired a lot by those records, and come to think of it, it’s an ironic tour-de-force that they became such household names.

7. DAVID RUBATO ‘Circuit’  (’The Party’ Mix ) (2008)

Which brings me to this: Have you noticed that I mixed this compilation? Mixing records together is something I love to do, and I’m (almost) always having the time of my life when I play in a club with a good sound-system. By the way, what happened to scratching? I used to be a good scratcher. Matter fact, scratching is the reason why I’ve been called “DJ” Mehdi. For some reason there’s absolutely no scratches on this record, and that’s not right. (But it’s OK)

I’ve never met David Rubato in flesh. This is particular to remixing: you ‘work with’ an artist you’ve often never met.

6. STAYGOLD  ‘Justify’ (2009)

I called this compilation ‘Red Black and Blue’ because, being in this remix business since about 1995, I went through a lot of changes. The equipment. The industry. The competition. The state-of-mind. I know it’s going to sound corny to say I feel like I had a ‘Red’ period (before 2001), a ‘Black’ (2001-2006), and a ‘Blue’ one (2006-now) but it is how I feel. Another corny thing I learned to live with is being called DJ ‘my name’. I thought about changing it many times but it’s kinda too late now. Plus, it is what it is, I am a DJ first.