Sandro Perri, a Toronto-based solo musician, collaborative producer, studio engineer and writer, released his sophomore solo album, Impossible Spaces, last month. His debut album, Tiny Mirrors, was released by Montreal-based label Constellation Records in 2007.
Perri has been quietly making music for more than a decade. His track record spans three labels, two stage names (his birth name, Sandro Perri, in addition to Polmo Polpo, a phrase that roughly translates to “octopus lung” in Italian), and nine solo releases. Despite the breadth of his solo catalogue, Perri often can be heard in collaborations. He is currently in the process of working with fellow Canadian musicians Christine Fellows and John K. Samson, who are scoring a short film about Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula National Park.
Perri collaborates with several other musicians, recording and mixing from one studio and mastering it back at his own studio built in his home. “It’s small, it’s moderate. It is more a mixing and production studio,” Perri said.
Constellation Records discovered him playing a show in Montreal for New Years in 2003. Since then, he has released albums varying in style and complexity, such as Glissandro 70, a collaboration with the talented Craig Dunsmuir. Perri was inspired by The Wordless Music Series, whose creator, Ronen Givony, has combined all that is music, fusing classical with indie, jazz with electronic and instrumental recordings exclusively. Working alongside Givony gave much inspiration to Perri’s recording approach, which often is improvised, with Perri writing, playing and recording simultaneously.
Impossible Spaces, Perri’s ninth solo release (and fourth under his birth name) has been steadily generating buzz for its tasteful implementation of studio wizardry. Successfully merging the traditionally opposite realms of folk and electronica, Impossible Spaces recalls Alexi Murdoch at the height of his powers, or more recently, Wye Oak.
Perri was kind enough to take a few minutes to reveal the process behind his work.
Pop ‘stache: If Marc Bolan, David Bowie and Prince all walked into a room and offered you to collaborate with them, who would you work with and why?
Sandro Perri: I love them all. It would be a hard decision. I think that it would depend on their personalities. I think that Marc Bolan might have been the easiest of the three to collaborate with, personality-wise. I mean, I love Marc Bolan. I love him to death. So I would be happy to go with Marc Bolan. The short answer? Marc Bolan.
P ‘s: Tell us about your actual collaborative projects.
SP: You’re feeding off of each others’ energy, and you’re far less prone to self-doubt, over-editing or over-analyzing. I guess it really just depends on your disposition. … You can be with another person, and you can have a really easy time, work really quickly and have a really great collaborative dialogue happening.
P ‘s: Is there any collaboration you favor over another?
SP: I’ve enjoyed all the collaborative projects I’ve been in. Sometimes more than my own solo music because it has the element of the other person. There’s less me in it and more surprises. There’s more things for me to discover. It’s kind of like looking back at pictures of you hanging out with friends or something. You can see the facial expressions. You can remember what you were doing at that time; you remember how it felt to be in that place with those people, and it’s not the same as looking at a picture of yourself. If you look at a picture of yourself, you’ll get sick of it after awhile. It’s too much you. It’s too much of the self. I never listen to my own music.
P ‘s: You never listen to your own music?
SP: Only when I’m working on it. Maybe I’ll listen to it afterward a few times just to see how it feels. Or I’ll listen to it every couple of years or something. But in general, I don’t like to listen to it because I got my fun out of making it. But I still listen sometimes to collaborative things I did with people. There’s still that discovery process.
