Efstratios Dimitriou (Greek: Ευστράτιος Δημητρίου; 22 April 1945 – 13 June 1979), known professionally as Demetrio Stratos, was a Greek-Italian vocalist, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and music researcher, best known as the co-founder, frontman and lead singer of the Italian progressive rock band Area – International POPular Group.

In 1957 he was sent to Nicosia, Cyprus, and, at the age of 17, moved to Milan, Italy, to attend the Politecnico di Milano University at the Architecture Faculty, where he formed his first musical group.

As he later said, the fact that he was born in Alexandria made him feel like a special and privileged "porter" in an international hotel, destined to live the experience of peoples' passages and to assist in the true "traffic" of culture in the Mediterranean area, so full of various ethnic groups and intense musical practices.

His family was of Greek Orthodox religion, so during his infancy he listened to religious Byzantine songs, traditional Arabic music and then the early beginnings of rock and roll.

Stratos noticed by watching his daughter that a child initially "plays" and "experiments" with her or his own voice, but then the richness of the vocal sound gets lost in the acquisition of verbal language.

[1][11] The original line-up included Eddie Busnello (saxophone), Patrick Djivas (bass), Leandro Gaetano (piano) and Johnny Lambizzi (lead guitar).

[3][13][14][15] In 1973, Stratos took part in the eighth Biennale de Paris, and Area released their first studio album, Arbeit macht frei ("Work Brings Freedom"),[16] taken from the inscription that was on the gate at the entrance of Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp.

Stratos gradually became more and more deeply involved in the mysterious world of vocal sounds, resuming and widening his immense work on the importance of the voice in the Asian and Middle Eastern civilizations.

In Milan, he worked together with Gianni Emilio Simonetti, Juan Hidalgo, and Walter Marchetti,[17] founders of the group Zaj (an experimental music and performance art group formed in 1959), in the context of the Fluxus experience (an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines), and he then became involved with John Cage's music when he recorded Cage's "Sixty-Two Mesostics Re Merce Cunningham" in a version for a solo voice and microphone,[17] subsequently performed at numerous festivals in front of large audiences mainly consisting of young people.

He gradually became more and more deeply involved in the mysterious world of vocal sounds, widening his immense work on the importance of the voice in the Asian and Middle Eastern civilizations.

[19] Together with Patrizio Fariselli (prepared piano), Paolo Tofani (guitar and synthesizer), Paul Lytton (percussion), and Steve Lacy (sax soprano), he performed a concert in the "Aula Magna" at the University of Milan.

Stratos spoke at several seminars at the Istituto di Glottologia e Fonetica[20] ("Institute of Glottology and Phonetics") at the University of Padua, in Italy, formulating his own and true "pedagogy of the voice".

In Padua, he worked together with Ferrero and Lucio Croatto from the Centro Medico di Foniatria[21] ("Medical Centre of Phoniatrics"), on research related to language and vocal techniques.

Stratos underlined the link between language and the psyche, and he highlighted the connection between them with the sounds made by his own vocal cords, which he considered to be a musical instrument.

[15] Stratos was invited by the local Ministry of Culture to meet the delegation of Mongolian musicians and to participate in discussion on vocal methods in East Asian music.

[25] He was invited by John Cage to teach a course related to the possibilities of the human voice for the Center for Experimental Music at University of San Diego in California.

[29] Also with France Culture, in the series "Poésie Ininterrompue" ("Uninterrupted Poetry") directed by Claude Royet-Journoud, Stratos had a long interview with Daniel Charles, where he performed many vocal sequences and provided explanations.

It was to become Demetrio Stratos' memorial concert, where over a hundred musicians played in front of an audience of 60,000 at the Arena of Milan, the first great and spontaneous reunion of youth in Italy.

He died in New York City Memorial Hospital on 13 June 1979 at the age of thirty–four, while waiting for a bone marrow transplant (the official cause of death was a myocardial infarction, more commonly known as heart attack).

People wanted to believe that Demetrio Stratos had died due to daring too much and wandering outside the limits of human possibilities, as if he was a modern Icarus, punished for flying too close to the Sun.

This homage review takes place in Alberone di Cento, a city in northern Italy, that is located in the province of Ferrara, in the Emilia-Romagna region.

The effect is particularly striking on the song "Epitaffio", in which Stratos creates a sweet melody with his "Flautofonie" technique, while a subtle beat, harmony and night sounds are provided very gently as not to shadow the voice.

[45][46] On 25 August 2009 in Siena, the remaining Area members, Patrizio Fariselli, Ares Tavolazzi, and Paolo Tofani together with Capiozzo's son, Christian on drums, and Mauro Pagani on vocals and violin reunited for the first time in over a decade during the ninth edition of the festival La Città Aromatica ("The Aromaric City"), dedicated to Demetrio Stratos thirty years after his death.

[11] Recently, the Italian director Gabriele Salvatores announced his intention to produce a movie exploring music and politics in Italy during those years through the life of the charismatic singer.

From the observation of his daughter Anastassia, he concluded that humans have enormous expressive potential that is progressively reduced to just a few socially appropriate functions during verbal development, such as language and harmonic singing.

Using various overtone singing and other extended techniques, he was able to perform diplophony, triplophony, and also quadrophony, the ability to produce two, three, and even four sounds simultaneously (multiphonic) using only the human voice as the musical instrument.

— Janete El Haouli (translated from Spanish to Italian to English) In the years of the desecration and secularization of the Christianity, Stratos proposed a new lay sacredness, in the name of the ancient Greeks, a return to the true rituality.

Perhaps, reading Gilles Deleuze, Stratos had been convinced that the repetition was not the ill-famed co-action to repeat the obsessive neurosis, but it should become a technique to escape from the ordinary, from the temporary flux, to access to another order of truth.

In Stratos' works, we can find the standard-bearer of the lay rituals in the rock mega-concerts, where the audience is not exhausted by the spectacular of the mimetic model of the super star, but in the nearly to religious fruition of the voice-music that allows to feel us in the scene the ice cold shiver chilling of our belongings to life.

Not only because they seemed to be more attentive to the themes outside the world of music ... nor due to their interest in the use of instruments which seemed vaster and futuristic, but above all because ... (of) an incomparable coherence in their everyday work and in the steadfastness (sic) with which they faced even their contradditions."