Introducing: Demi Riquísimo

To the naked eye, Demi Riquísimo’s ascent seems meteoric. In the space of five years he’s launched a wildly successful vinyl-only label, released on house music’s most revered imprints and lapped the world a handful of times. But the truth is, Demi’s been plugging away behind the scenes for decades, and his unstoppable rise is simply a well-earned medal for all that hard work. When it comes to house music, Demi does things his own way, and that’s a direct result of an unconventional upbringing that forced him to be dynamic.

Born in Kent in the UK, Demi moved to Detroit when he was four, thanks to his father’s job as a car technician. He remembers feeling like a misfit, so he took up tons of activities to compensate, including basketball and recorder. He moved back to the UK when he was 12, where he was thrown into the social fire pit of British secondary school. “I don't think I've ever really stayed at a school more than three years,” Demi says, chatting from his flat in Brixton. “So that's always helped me learn to make new friends and learn new ways of life and environments.”

Music was always part of his childhood, so he felt like a kid in a candy shop at university in Bristol. It was 2006 and drum & bass, jungle, house and techno were all jumbled up into one vibrant underground scene that Demi instantly became part of. He spent the majority of his first year lying in bed with glandular fever, and whenever he had energy he’d practice mixing drum & bass on the pair of vinyl technics he’d bought for cheap.

Once recovered, Demi got together with friends to launch a club night. “We’d start the night with house and electro,” Demi says. "And then we’d build up to jungle and drum & bass, so it was more of a progression of music throughout the night.”

Demi was so distracted by the music scene he decided to park his degree in business, and signed up for a music production course called Access To Music instead. “I wanted to learn the art so I could go on and make the music,” he says. “I wanted to take the elements that suited me.”

When he graduated, he moved to London where he joined forces with a friend to launch a DJ-vocalist live act, and then set up a more techno-heavy project with another friend. “I was just trying to learn the art and the scene,” he says. “I'd spent so much time in Bristol trying to prove to everyone that I was going to do this. But all this was just the first step.”

By 2018, he felt burnt out. He was stretching himself too thin and working on multiple projects with no clear purpose. Nothing felt cohesive; and nothing felt like his own. “I had no real vision of what I was trying to do,” he says. “So I decided to take a step back and create something new. I took a good 18 months making music with no agenda, not thinking about labels, not making music for anyone else but myself.”

He locked himself in his studio and fell in love with production again, letting his creativity flow freely, and feeling happy with his productions for the first time in a long time. “And suddenly I had twenty tracks,” he says. “They were a little bit different, but they had legs, and I just started to build on that.”

That’s when the Demi Riquísimo project was born. He sent the tracks to a few labels, but they didn’t pick up on it, so he considered the possibility of starting his own.

He was very thorough. He made a spreadsheet of the nights he’d like to play at and the DJs he wanted to play with. “I didn’t want to move forward with the project unless I knew exactly what I wanted from it,” he says. 

He called the label Semi Delicious and made the risky decision to be vinyl-only. His first release, A Lifetime On The Hips, came out in January 2019 and sold out fast. The four-track project blended house, acid, and disco, and Demi made sure Horse Meat Disco, HiFi Sean, Rex The Dog, Philippe Zdar, and Auntie Flo got first dibs.

Almost immediately, the concept took off. Demi self-released three more EPs after that, followed by an EP with Vhyce, Jive Talk, and a VA featuring Kassian, Black Loops, T. Jacques, and many others. The music just clicked with people, and six months after his first release Demi was playing at Glastonbury. Labels were banging down his door, and by 2020 he’d released on Club Sweat, Glitterbox and HOMAGE.

“I had a risky plan,” Demi says. "I released vinyl-only, but sent promos to all the DJs digitally. I was trying to create engagement with artists I respected, and I wanted the music to be heard so I put it on streaming platforms.”

His tracks started to get play outs on Radio 1, and then DJs hit him up, asking for the music. He’d send it to them digitally, and then they’d have a relationship. And a lot of the artists who got in touch were also on the list of DJs he wanted to play with.

But he’s not an overnight success; he’s the opposite. All of that time spent honing the art of production, working on multiple projects and DJing across the UK led him to this moment. And, perhaps most importantly, taught him what he wanted to get out of his career in music – which turned out to be total control over his creative output.

“My goal with this project is to make the music I like, release it the way I want, and I want to do this as long as I want on my terms,” he says. “I don’t want to be on anyone else’s time scale or tied up to anyone else’s contract; I just want complete and utter freedom to do what I want to do.”

Recently, Demi’s started to release more music digitally. His Windows 95 Anthem came out on Higher Ground in March, with two tracks full of ‘80s synths and rolling disco grooves. He celebrated 5 years of Semi Delicious with a digital EP of five as-yet released Semi Delicious tunes, and he’s pondering the idea of unleashing more of his vinyl tunes out into the digital ether. He has a stacked release schedule for Semi Delicious in the works. “For the rest of this year, it’s mainly remixes,” he says. “And I’m playing after Bonobo and DJ Tennis at Burning Man. I’m trying to prepare myself so I bought onion-cutting goggles to stop the dust.”

He has gigs lined up at Lost Village, fabric, Badaboum and an Australia and Asia tour at the end of this year. So he doesn’t have a whole lot of time to think, but when he does he feels grateful that he took his time to get here. “In a way it feels so much sweeter that it’s happened later in my life,” he says. “I feel like I appreciate it more, and if this happened when I was in my mid-twenties I‘m not sure I’d feel this much gratitude.”