TRIADIC DREAMS: A Conversation With Three Voices.

By

Donald Brackett



“Architecture is frozen music…” Goethe


Back in the sixties, David Crosby penned a telling song about breaking all the rules of relationships by attempting to have a three-way affair and wondering why it couldn’t work just as easily as the traditional format, assuming everyone involved was in agreement. “But I don’t really see, why can’t we go on as three. So you see what we can do, is to try something new, if you’re crazy to, why can’t we go on as three?” He went on to defy his community’s boundaries, which told him that “you can’t do that, it breaks all the rules, that you learned in school.”
But defying boundaries is the manner in which most innovations occur, and nowhere is that elemental fact more clearly and concisely expressed than in the fascinating multimedia works of Dimitri Papatheodorou, and in his own three way affair with mediums that most people assume are distinctly separate: visual art, architectural design and musical composition.

Mr. Papatheodorou (a beautiful Greek name that is easier to read than it is to say) not only actively works as a creative artist in the three mediums of paint, sound and structure, he also manages to explore three distinct stylistic languages or vernaculars within each of those same mediums. That makes three triads, each one revolving around the other and affecting its own orbit.
In painting: an abstract image, a hyper-real interior, a hybrid tree-like object. In building: a private residence, an institutional site, a public space.
In music: a raw love song, a quirky dance score, a piece of musique-concrete. The Greek god Janus has nothing on this contemporary artist, who in true polymath form turns his attention to the medium which can best express a particular idea at a particular time.
If that strikes you as incongruous, perhaps the easiest way to adapt to such a degree of diversity is to imagine yourself sitting in a certain building, looking at a certain painting, while listening to certain music. Now imagine the same thing three times. His songs are small monuments to short breath, little buildings one can live in for the duration, while hearing the colours emerge from insights which are very easy to call sonic paintings for the ears.


Like most of the best singer-songwriters, Papatheodorou is a dark mirror held up before our shared feelings and fears, singing of longing and loss, in a uniquely breathy voice poised somewhere between Serge Gainsbourg, Nick Drake and Van Dyke Parks on the vocal-emotional scale.
“Figurine”, one of his best and quirkiest compositions, is a good example of his modus operandi. Like many of his more picturesque songs, it utilizes a sonic technique that also calls to mind the solo work of Syd Barrett, the self-produced Jack White, and perhaps most surprisingly, the relatively unknown experimental work of Paul McCartney.
In it, he seems to celebrate, not necessarily the person he loves, but the fact that he loves that person, in an elliptical poetic style that often recalls the crystallized word-gestures of the great German poet and master of emotional minimalism, Paul Celan, if he had ever performed with Simon and Garfunkel. Such are the triadic dreams of Dimitri.
“Her origin unknown, I cut the groove to meet her, she sits on a window sill, holds the glass, she shatters, its figurine. When the wind meets the earth, what remains to share, if you and I breathe disparate air?….” Now, who among us hasn’t wondered exactly the same thing? His songs are enigmatic expressions of multiple emotions simultaneously, introspective reveries
about the vagaries of a life lived in hope, and in hope’s highest gear.
“Lovely” is simply a lovely song, and essentialist song which verges on being an instrumental, save for the ongoing breathy expression of a lover’s declaration, in which we recognize the struggle to express something inexplicable, which is surely the search of all real poetry. It appears we all implicitly understand that true love leaves us speechless, or should.
“Shrink” floats above the fray of emotions while at the same time asking perennial questions about the love that causes them: it has the tension of an important letter that was never sent, perhaps like Kafka’s letter to his father, never mailed, almost memorized. “If you refuse to panic, and if you decline to respond, it deflates and shrinks you away…”
“Space” is a gritty little groove that lays the foundation for some majestic musing by the musician’s 9 year old nephew, in a natural voice that weirdly mimics his uncle’s own preference for delivering his songs in a gentle tone that makes us lean forward, towards our own feelings as they float away before our eyes.
In “These Dreams” there is a gentle psychedelia wafting in the disparate air: “The seeds of love fall from above like empty thoughts, they resonate in the story of our lives, sometimes I think we’re destined, to forget these dreams belong to me and you…” An ironic reference perhaps to the alluring fact that once a dream is sung aloud, it belongs to everyone else but us.
“Here Comes the Big Sky” is like a psychological photograph with a soft and diffused focus: “When the last summer rose is earth enclosed and dark light comes too soon, here comes the big sky, and the shadows deepen with every breath, I know we’ll talk of love and many other things, here comes the big sky…” Like any other intriguing work of art, it proves impossible to explain how we understand its meaning, yet our right brain nods in agreement while our left brain scratches itself in wonderment.
“Rain” is a strange little trip, not down memory lane but down a lane that has yet to happen at all. For those of us who still enjoy believing that thunder is caused by people in the sky moving their furniture around, and I am one of them, this song answers any question I may ever have about abandonment, yet not in a way that can be quantified in any concrete manner. “To know that you’ve heard, to feel that you’ve made, a field-day of words, still they fall at your feet…..the rubber bursts and shattered dreams fall when clouds burst, sing yeah.”
“Sometimes I Cry” has something of the wistful air of the beached Brian Wilson, attempting to celebrate the simple things in life that can barely be described. “Until this day sometimes I cry...falling in love, falling in love, until this day, sometimes I cry, falling in love, until this day, sometimes I cry….” The paradox of fulfillment and loss both fuel this ode to release.
“Eating The World Raw” takes us to quite a different continent of feelings indeed. Bluesy and existential, it announces, “I’ve been bitten and scratched and rendered flat”, once again bringing to surface certain feelings perhaps that only fathers and sons can fully comprehend. “I fell hard one winter night, came along and swept away all my light, came along and swept away all sight, falling’s not bad when it happens like that….eating the world raw, I see the beauty and draw….” In other words, mail that letter now.
Strangely enough, songs which at first glance (the quiet glance of our unsuspecting ears), seem so hyper-personal can at some point also become utterly universal, if that is, the well of the singer-songwriter runs deep enough down into the darkness of the human heart, down where the invisible underground rivers of sadness and joy both overflow their banks at once.
But overflowing our emotional rivers and cascading over the personal sandbags we all use to keep our rivers in place, is of course the primary function of these songs and this music. Your sandbags, they seem to intimate, can never protect you from the ocean with you.
“Jackie O”, a miniature psycho-drama memorializing a permanent moment of public loss, also feels superbly like a soundtrack song to a Douglas Sirk film, Imitation of Life or Written on the Wind perhaps, in which tragedy and comedy are inextricably linked by our own actions.
But they are linked far down below our conscious and complaining minds, where all distinctions disappear. “She is headed for a fall, there is nothing she can do, the motorcade moves on…..and the world cries in demand, how will she go on to stand alone without her man?…..ancient waters heal the wound….God has found a Greek tycoon, now it’s Maria’s sad toss, to face the music she’s lost…”
Very few of our elegiac feelings around the events on the grassy-knoll tend to take into account the equally sad and tragic life of the great opera singer Maria Callas. Yet her own drama shows us how often the domino effect of chance events can ripple outward across generations, and how connected two widows might be: one losing a president, one losing a tycoon, both becoming major icons of loss in the process.
“Overture” does wonderfully what overtures are supposed to do, whether it is to start up our emotional engines in the beginning or to clutch them down restfully near the end. It is either a big introduction, a big intermission, or a big grand finale, though it leaves us knowing that there is more to come. It is the songwriter’s equivalent to an operatic staircase, leading up, up, up, and over the top. It builds to an intense climax and eventually fades away in a soft lingering note, not unlike the lives we all lead and the songs that illuminate those lives with a vigilant light that keeps watch.
This whole song cycle, each one separate and unique but also tied like pearls on a necklace, might very well be suggesting that it is all of our fates to face the music, not of what we have now but of what we have lost.
But that very same music then helps us celebrate where we are and what we have: these songs imply that if we are brave enough to also celebrate our losses we will then be lucky enough to celebrate our rewards.
Usually, the natural process known as dinergy is a binary one that feels somewhat dialectical: a new thing is being created by the collision of two existing things or conditions. However in the case of this artist, designer and musician we have an active tripolarity at work, with surprising results.
Realizing that I’ve both watched the pictures in his songs and lived in the temporary buildings of his music, now makes me want to listen to his paintings. His personal triad in action is practically an open invitation to synaesthesia: to hear the colour, see the sound and touch the physical poetry.
Morton Feldman was another sixties composer who once explored the realm of what he called triadic memories, suggesting through his elegant and somber tone clusters that they were events that had happened, or might have happened.

In the case of Dimitri Papatheodorou, his emotional clusters of song are more like suggestions that something, or someone, is possible, even if that something might be inexplicable, or that someone might be far away.
Each song is an event waiting to happen. Each song is a dream that becomes a memory, once we have lived inside it long enough to notice the habitat of the human heart.


Donald Brackett
Toronto-based art and music critic.