Pietro Sammarco is a musician/artist from Vancouver who plays trombone in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? He’s also a graduate from Emily Carr, and for a school project, he composed a short opera, complete with libretto that doesn’t make a whole hell of a lotta sense to me. This album is seriously messed up. If you are one of those twits that complain about how samey today’s music sounds, check this out. This music makes me feel like ants are crawling all over me. Pietro’s falsetto rockets up and down the musical scale like a roller coaster. The Midi horns and strings pop in and out at unpredictable times, buzzing and droning in an unsettling manner. It’s a wonderful mess, absorbing and disturbing, and almost without meter. The first time I heard this, it was right before bedtime. I thought that it was an opera in the classical sense and that it would ease me into sleepiness. I lay awake until 6 in the morning, playing it over and over. It is a tough listen for some (most), but Pollination is an Opera is a bold, creative musical exploration that is quite inventive in its approach to form and everything else.
-Mairliv M. Jordalters
Pollination Is an Opera actually is an opera, or at least a series of linked, classically influenced tracks with verses and choruses and some sort of continuing story or theme. It's performed, primarily by Pietro Sammarco, with an array of fuzzy, movie-soundtrack-like washes of sound, swelling and rushing around its fragile, lo-fi song fragments. It's as odd and eccentric as self-released works come -- and that's saying something -- but it has a mysterious sheen of beauty, too. The lyrics are elliptical and evocative, rather like the fleeting images in a surreal film. For example, consider the words "This man is alone / though his collection of jars is a crowd / with different postures and different coloured hats on / But their empty bodies reflect his old age. A child would fill this morgue / with warm jam." They are sung against a frantic and fuzzy background of drums, chimes and telephone sounds, oddly obscured yet somehow powerful. Again, in the fifth untitled track, against a swell of movie-house violins, Sammarco sings elusively "I waited one second, and forty years passed," and there's something real, something unattainable, something beautiful, tucked away in the corners. I'm at a loss for comparisons. Pollination Is an Opera is its own weird, gorgeous experience. You have to hear it for yourself to understand.
-Jennifer Kelly
Pietro Sammarco
Pollination is an opera
Independent
I imagine that it is not a simple task to write, perform, and produce an opera all by oneself. However, in this day and age, we can probably do most anything musically on our own, as long as we are inspired in the most subtle way by the muses of everyday life. Mr. Sammarco has been inspired, and I, grateful for it. He has not only written, performed, and produced an opera all by his lonesome, but he has managed to make it one of the most touching and commanding records created by a Vancouverite in, well, maybe ever (dramatic lincense).
The story is told by two characters and a choir, and goes like this (from Pietro’s website):
A sad old man locks himself out of his house. A boy passing by helps the old man by climbing up the tree and jumping through the window to unlock the door from the inside. When the boy finds the old man still crying outside, he is confused. The old man explains that he is interested in taking a certain lady out to dance, but cannot open himself up because he thinks he's too fragile and boring to be liked. The boy discovers the old man's collection of empty jars inside the house and decides to "fill this morgue with warm jam". The boy's acts of compassion show the old man that taking the lady out to dance shouldn't be about executing flawless dance steps, but the fact that he's dancing with the person he wants to, with the body he has, and that they're having fun.
Sammarco has taken a simple tale of self-realization and peppered it with delightfully fractured voices, delicate musical accompaniment, and crackles of a sunshiny lo-fi choir. The lyrics balance the obvious and the abstract, expressing one’s most basic thoughts as they plod through the course of a day—through one’s life even—thinking and wondering about why things are the way they are. In one instance the choir describes the scene at the dancehall: “There are people taking over the music/which comes from the speakers/that regulate the volume of their voices/and how close their faces should be.” I am blown away by this image, for I know it so well. The obviousness of the lyric is astoundingly beautiful to me, and I’m at a loss for words to explain exactly why I feel this way. It’s just contemporary poetry in its most simple and resounding state.
Now, I’m not by any means a drooling groupie, because this recording does have its flaws, but to pick it apart too much would only serve to reveal the mouthwatering cream on the inside. The more one attempted to prey on its weaknesses, the less one would be able to resist the sugary sweet filling that is at the core of this delightful piece of, well, cake. So if you’re interested, you can order this album on Mr. Sammarco’s website: www.geociies.com/pietrosammarco/pollination.html
-Sean Travis
Pollination Is an Opera is the eerie and enigmatic debut by Vancouver’s Pietro Sammarco. Divided into eight separate parts, it is a conceptual piece or opera, if you will, depicting the interaction between a young boy and an old man. The story is a triumph of the heart over the mind, or rather, the old man overcoming his own imperfections and asking a woman to dance with him. Acting as the catalyst is the young boy who runs into the old man and, upon noticing a collection of empty jars, decides to fill them with “warm jam.” Of course, this wouldn’t be apparent unless you read through the lyrics, because Sammarco’s presentation of the story is situated in a pool of dilapidated sound clips and layered vocals.
Nearly reflecting the moral of Pollination Is an Opera, Sammarco tried to create the music in a manner that could be deemed intimate, emotional, or unquantifiable. Mainly, what was done was an overall collage of backdrop soundbytes (supposedly from movies) upon which was added “chance” musical compositions via a keyboard. To tell the tale, Sammarco sings what the characters are thinking out loud (the words are divided into three parts: The boy, the old man and the choir). His recording styles for vocals vary from single to multiple layers, as well as the use of various filters and distortion. The effect Sammarco has created with this ambitious piece is both enticing and scary. It brings to mind Phil Elvrum’s Mount Eerie as well as Mayor McCA’s “Barfly – A Tragedy in ½ An Act,” on Welcome to McCALand. It’s necessary to add that the people I just mentioned have achieved more basic forms of songwriting prior to and after creating said pieces. After listening to Pollination Is an Opera, I’m interested in hearing what Sammarco's more basic forms of songwriting might sound like. If it’s anything like this concept record, I’m sure he’s going to be golden.
