Before I begin this review, a few questions.
1/ Has Dimitri ever killed anyone? I know it’s a strange question to ask but, after listening to ‘Probably A Metaphor’, I’m sure you’ll agree it’s a question that needs answering.
2/ Does he drive around late at night, looking to clean the streets of the scum, the filth, the low life’s and the deadbeats?
3/ Has he ever broken into your house late at night when you were asleep and moved your ornaments around, watched you as you slept, took a piss in your toilet and made himself cups of tea in your fine bone china cups?
4/ Is he wanted by the police?
5/ Is he smooth, you know, ‘down there’?
6/ Does he like to peel off dead skin, real slow like?
Strange questions I know, but they need answering.
Anyway, those quandaries aside, I fucking love Dimitri me. I saw him once, shakin’ a tail-feather with the wonderful ‘Adult Entertainment’ in Hebden Bridge, doing percussiony things and playing with knobs and switches, making all manner of *electronic plinky-plonky noises and creating a cascading cacophony of sqealchy sounds that wouldn’t have been out of place coming from a hospital ward stuffed with patients suffering from Inflammatory Bowel Disease. Or IBD as we call it. Anyway, it was glorious, he was glorious.
*Although he might’ve been drumming, which is still a percussion instrument. In which case, his rudimentary paradiddles were fucking boss.
So now, we move on to his insidiously slinky solo stuff. And it’s equally as fun and fabulous as Adult Entertainment, but a little darker. More sinister. More S&M and PVC. Still fun like, but dark fun that’s a bit wrong, like when you’re playing biscuit with your mates. Only with Dimitri you still want to be ‘in’ at the end of the game.
Jesus, look at the time (12.45PM), I’d best get off to bed, I’m still in my fucking pyjamas. Time just goes nowhere, up all night listening to Dimitri, watching grumble and other niche filth and going on gore sites. I’ll have rein it in a bit, it’s affecting me menkle elf. Anyways I’ll finish this review off when I wake up. Unless Dimitri has broken into my house, read my old copies of Hustler then annihilated my family. The sick fuck.
Zzzzzzzz…
Right, time to get up and face the day with renewed vim and vigour. First, Eggs Benedict washed down with a tall glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, a peruse of the broadsheets and a small cup of camomile, then off to review an’ shit.
So, press play, and let’s begin…
“A fact is not a metaphor…” is now going round in my head, on repeat, repeat, repeat. But repeat not in a bad “look at them all, laughing at you you big fat piece of shit kill, kill, kill them kill” kinda way, ya know, what I normally hear, no, no. Repeat in a joyous, ear-worm kinda way, and slowly but surely, the ossicles (the tiny bones in my ear), will amplify that ear-worm and then, then they’ll send those moody, dark, swirling ear-worm waves to my inner ear and on into my fluid-filled hearing organ, then once those dirty, squelchy yet oddly precise ear-worm sound waves reach my inner ear, they’ll be converted into eerie, ethereal electrical impulses and my auditory fucking nerve’ll send those impulses to my fuckin’ brainbox, and then? Well then I’m fucking fucked.
To help assist this review I hopped aboard the Youtube video thingymajig and typed in ‘Dimitri’ on the search bar. Although I was distracted somewhat cos some shite came up on my ‘feed’ and I ended up watching someone kicking off in a restaurant cos they weren’t addressed by their correct pronouns. Bad place to kick off if you’ve not even tucked into your soon to be goff-filled beef stroganoff. Anyhoo, I typed in Dimitri and one of the first things that came up was an ‘ASMR role play’ video, whatever the shitting crikey that is. I mean, I know what ASMR is, but the role play bit, fuck knows. Actually, I get ASMR when I listen to Dimitri, that’s an ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’ to you and me. It’s his dark, moody, lyrically funny, aurally pleasing sounds that float my boat. However, I don’t want to hear him eating a bag of salt & vinegar crisps through my Beats headphones. Although that would be interesting I s’pose.
I’ve gone a bit off-piste now, sorry.
Let’s recap. And to help me along in my recapping let’s use some lazy, inadequate pigeonholing. If you like Playgroup, or the ‘Crazy Love’ of Colder, or the Godlike Trevor Jackson, Jacques le Cont, Aaron Taos or **Biblâ Buyisiwe, then you’ll love this.
**I made that last name up.
It’s simply wonderful that’s what it is. It’s slowmo-disco, chillbient, disgoth, industrial soul, digital R&B, L.A. shinecore an’ any other stupid made-up genre balux you wanna suggest and I just can’t get enough.
Although disgoth sounds quite good doesn’t it.
Released on ‘Do It Thissen’ an independent record label based in Sheffield, who pleasure us with fabulous chunks of limited edition hot wax. ‘Probably A Metaphor’ is available both as digital or touchable, feelable, lovable vinyl. You probably get a download code too if you buy the vinyl, so do us all a favour, and buy the bloody vinyl.
So, I’m summing up, now. You’ll like Dimitri, he’s a multitalented fucker and no mistake. He creates radical noises, uncomfortable squelchy sounds, knows what treble clefs are and uses them with absolute ease to create aural soundscapes that titillate the senses.
Therefore, if I were you, I’d buy his joints, you’d have to be slightly brain damaged not to.
I’m pelican tangerine and I say “be a thinker, not a stinker…”
Fin
DIMITRI is an ex-nightclub owner and reformed businessman based in South Yorkshire, just off the M1, Britain’s premiere highway. Now, more concerned with deeper questions than ‘who sold my nightclub?’, DIMITRI Himself returns with the humanly sincere and phantasmically mechanical Probably a Metaphor. Six inquiries into the connections between the mind and the body, philosophy and computers, love and mythology.
https://ditto.fm/probably-a-metaphor
DIMITRI appears live in person on 30th November 2023 A.D. at Yellow Arch, Sheffield w/ Acid Klaus & Rosey PM.
