Ottawa-born composer, sound artist, and instrument builder. Dimitri’s compositional voice is informed by deconstructing the fundamentals, limitations, and chaotic behaviours of analog electronics, creatively exposing their musical potential through composition and performance. A major focus of Dimitri’s practice is “no-input” feedback music using self-built electronics, presenting works at Electric Eclectics, Debaser’s Pique, Club SAW, Object/Project Art Book Fair, and Tone Deaf Festival.
While studying Electrical Engineering, Dimitri found a creative home at the Queen’s University Sonic Arts Studio. He was awarded the Undergraduate Student Summer Research Fellowship, in which he explored the history and application of electronic feedback as a compositional technique. Along with academic research, interviewing current practitioners, and performing seminal feedback compositions by David Tudor and Ralph Jones, he designed and built a dedicated, analog electronic feedback instrument comprised of original circuitry, which he used for several live performances in the Kingston area. For his dedication to the composition program and excellence in electroacoustics (composition, research, performance, and production), Dimitri was the recipient of the Istvan Prize in Electroacoustics (2020) and the Graham George Memorial Scholarship in Composition (2020).
In 2020, after completing a degree in Electrical Engineering, Dimitri returned home to Ottawa. He was awarded the SAW Prize for New Works, a grant program created as an emergency response to the pandemic, offering critical support to regional artists through the commissioning of new works. Dimitri used this as an opportunity to create and conceptualize an entirely new feedback instrument from the ground up. After designing, prototyping, and building unique and original circuitry, he premiered the instrument’s performance at Club SAW. Since then, this instrument has been the core of his performance practice.
In collaboration with Matt Rogalsky, Dimitri has been performing realizations of David Tudor’s live electronic pieces. With the nature of Tudor’s scores being diagrams of live electronic systems rather than fixed notation, their realization is sustained as much by oral transmission and shared practice as by technical documentation. Recent realizations include “Microphone” with Singuhr, Berlin (2022); a 50th-anniversary workshop and performance of “Rainforest IV”, Kingston (2023); “Rainforest I” at the Newfoundland Sound Symposium (2024); and a live performance and installation version of “Microphone” at the Guelph Improvisation Festival (2025).
Dimitri currently holds a position as a hardware design engineer at Empress Effects in Ottawa.