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Dimitris Ventourakis

Music has been in my life and in my surroundings - amateur and as a listening medium - since my earliest memories. I still remember the first time I heard a 3-year-old piece that had electric guitar distortion and I kept asking my brother Nicolas to have me listen to it again and then he taught me on the piano we had at home. I started lessons as a youngster, but the contact was mostly traumatic for the first several years and it delayed me more than developed the motivation and need I had to connect with sounds.

As a child my main innocent and enjoyable contact with music was when I sang in the car whenever we went somewhere (fortunately my parents were kind enough to allow and encourage me to do so, even on longer journeys). Towards my teens I started listening to music all the time and started joining my first bands, so somewhere in there something in me came alive again. Unfortunately I didn't love the piano until late, because it mostly hurt me until a relatively old age, but now the - mostly - toxicity I internalized growing up around the instrument is gone and I see it as my main way of musical expression.

At this stage of my life I am focusing as a musician and music educator on the narrative potential of sound. I am constantly concerned and fascinated by the direct connections between language and music and the expressive characteristics they share. My main instrument is the piano and I find equal interest in improvisation, composition, live performance and recording music, either as a multi-instrumentalist or as a singer - working with musical groups and as a solo artist. In addition, I am a founding member of Athens Arts Collective AMKE, which focuses on developing environments suitable for artistic creation, teaching and research.

Lately I have been working on the development of a new solo project, in which improvisation and composition are combined and explored together and equally as narrative devices. Wanting to utilize voice and piano, I seek to allow a multiplicity of colors and influences to shape these new pieces of music, touching on a spectrum from goth folk and avant-garde jazz sounds, to rock, classical and borderline noise tendencies. At the same time, I organized and participated in the concert cycle 'Cycle of 4ths', a live project and at the same time a collective movement, with the participation of musicians from the avant-garde experimental scene of Athens in four different venues.Currently I am playing in the music and poetry performance 'Finite Time' that I put together with my collaborator Socrates Tsentoglou, which is about the awareness of mortality and the reconciliation with it.

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