Super DJ Dmitri
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Dmitri Brill (Cyrillic: Дмитрий Бриль (Dmitriy Bril) born June 4, 1964 from Kiev, Ukraine) is a DJ and a former band member of Deee-Lite.
[edit] Career
Super DJ Dmitri (sometimes spelled Dmitry) was an underground house DJ before he met Lady Miss Kier through a friend in 1986. A year later DJ Towa Tei joined the two of them and formed the group Deee-Lite.
Known for his funky outfits and various ponytail styles in the beginning, Dmitri DJed, co-wrote, and co-produced for Deee-Lite, including the smash mainstream hit "Groove Is In the Heart" from the World Clique album. He also did the same for the subsequent Deee-Lite albums. Deee-Lite disbanded in 1996.
In 1991, he performed a Russian rap on the song "Rap the World" from Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto's album Heartbeat (to which Towa Tei also contributed).
Super DJ Dmitri also has strived to move away from the house music reminiscent of Deee-Lite and into a darker sound. DJ Supa Dmitri has DJed at many house clubs. He also collaborated with DJ Silver and Julee Cruise for the song "Artificial World" featured in the motion picture Scream. He released his self-titled album Screams of Consciousness in 2000.
[edit] Personal life
Born in the Ukraine to a classical pianist, Brill was immersed in music from an early age, but mainly classical due to Soviet restrictions on music. His mother enrolled him at age nine in an experimental music program at a college where she worked. His family moved to New York around Halloween in 1979 with refugee status. In 1981, he began to frequent many dance clubs and was exposed to other forms of music that would later shape his own DJing and music career. He was in a romantic relationship with Lady Miss Kier while in Deee-Lite, but the two split up in 1993, a major contributor to the band's dissolution. Brill currently lives in Berlin, Germany.
[edit] External links
In 1980 Dmitri answered an ad in the Russian Daily newspaper (Novoye Russkoe Slovo) to audition for the amateur punk rock band The Troublemakers as a bass player. All members of the band (Eugene Khananov – guitar, Lyosha – guitar, Michael Iosif – vocals/keyboards and Arnold Lublinskiy – drums) were teenagers who came to the United States with their parents as refugees from the Soviet Union in 1979. The band members set up an audition in Dmitri’s grandmother’s projects apartment in Coney Island section of Brooklyn. After talking to Dmitri and hearing him play they offered him to join the band. The Troublemakers played in an underground nightclub in Brooklyn Manhattan Beach area, which by day was a Martial Arts school and a gym. They first performed on a Christmas night of 1980 and continued through January 1981. Although the band had a modest following of local Russian teens, some band members felt that playing for a group of immigrant teenagers was a waste of time and decided to call it quits.
