SASAMI Blood On the Silver Screen

Popis:

"Two Sasamis exist in harmony. First is Sasami Ashworth, the conservatory-trained classical French hornplayer, producer, and composer—an artist with a studious approach to craft. And then there is all-capsSASAMI, the fearless performer and protagonist of her three increasingly audacious albums. For BloodOn the Silver Screen, these two sides fused for her most epic and realized music to date: the all-outSasami pop record. “This album is all about learning and respecting the craft of pop songwriting, aboutrelenting to illogical passion, obsession, and guiltless pleasure,” Sasami says. “It’s about leaning into thechaos of romance and sweeping devotion—romanticism to the point of self-destruction.”After establishing herself with the poised melancholia of her eponymous 2019 debut, Sasami embracedvolume and control on 2022’s Squeeze—touring with a metal band—but her goal on Blood On the SilverScreen was to speak her truth with conviction by singing. Working with co-producers Jenn Decilveo andRostam, with Sasami as sole writer, each Blood On the Silver Screen track viscerally captures a differentthread of love, sex, power, and embodiment. “Pop music is like fuel,” Sasami says. “It’s justinvigorating.”She came to that fact while training to tour Squeeze—shows that required her to run around with herMockingbird guitar, mosh, leap off amps—at the gym. Sasami found herself fascinated by the high-octane music that sustains physical activity. “The gym became this place where I would exercise and bestudying the music,” Sasami says. Eschewing today’s pop zeitgeist, Sasami gravitated towards late aughtsand 2010s pop a la Britney Spears’ Femme Fatale and Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, plus Kelly Clarkson,Katy Perry, and Sia. She was influenced by modern country storytelling, mixing vulnerability withhumor, and the mood board also included Prince, Japanese city pop, and the stadium-sized, denim-cladiconography of Bruce Springsteen.“I’m such a Cancer,” Sasami sings in the first lines of the wistfully optimistic opener, “Slugger,” whichname checks Dolly Parton, Chopin, and Steve Lacy. Though Sasami’s background is in classical musicand production, she doubled down on Blood On the Silver Screen’s lyrics: “I wanted to be more playfuland communicate more with pop culture,” she says. “I’m a classically trained musician, but when I listento music, I think about how I feel, how I want to feel, how I want to move to it. And that’s what’s specialabout music—how it connects to culture, how it connects to different styles of music, how it connects tothe timbre of the voice of the person singing it.”Across Blood On the Silver Screen, Sasami’s lyrics narrate the ecstasies and agonies of being “a modernlover,” she says—writing about “big city dating endeavors” even as she found herself relocating, on awhim, from Los Angeles to rural Northern California. The anthemic “For the Weekend” explores“modern intimacy, where you can get deep without the relationship being defined,” while the irrepressible“Just Be Friends” bottles the dizzying longing that can overtake those in-betweens. The sinister “NothingBut a Sad Face” is about “celebrating Eve as a sex icon” after she’s “banished from the Garden of Edenfor fucking a snake. She’s leaning on the Gates of Eden smoking a cigarette reflecting, well, it’s worthbeing banished to get laid. Eve’s empowering herself, but she can hear the angels singing in the distance,too, and it’s kind of heartbreaking—that combination of feeling empowered and living your truth, but alsohaving grief for what you have to give up for that.”An intense period of touring Squeeze included dates with Haim, Mitski, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Beforetraveling as Haim’s opener, Sasami was actually rehearsing to play in the sisters’ touring band; havingknown Haim since high school, Sasami calls their “elevated pop music” a definite inspiration to Blood On the Silver Screen. The pandemic disrupted the plan to join their ensemble, but through those rehearsals,Sasami met Rostam (at the time, Haim’s music director), who she worked with on two songs for BloodOn the Silver Screen: the grungy closing ballad “The Seed” and the stirringly arpeggiated “In Love Witha Memory,” featuring Clairo. A duet in which “one character longs for the past, another wants to moveforward,” “In Love With a Memory” drew inspiration from traditional Japanese pop ballads. “Rostam andI both studied composition, so he wanted to bring out more of my classical side,” Sasami says.Another crucial collaborator was director Andrew Thomas Huang (Björk, FKA Twigs), with whomSasami began conceptualizing the new record’s visual world before the music was even recorded. “I likethere to be a union between the visual and musical world,” she says, care that shines through the corporealvideo for “Honeycrash.” The song is a panorama of longing: Sasami’s widest-screen rendering of theprocesses of love in all its devastation and expansiveness. A stadium-sized ballad that swells withcinematic grandeur, this is Sasami as an auteur of heartache, mixing the epic sweep of a romantic eraopera with sci-fi action to say, “This is how I feel, I’m going to let you figure it out. But don’t give up onus.” It’s another moment where she drew on her classical roots: “I still long for those expansions andcontractions, swells and whimpers. For me, the oscillating feeling is, ‘Okay, I'm somatically groundingand self-soothing—and then all of a sudden I’m completely devastated.’”Now in her early 30s, Sasami didn’t grow up listening to much pop music, and even felt pressures toavoid it. “I was always a weirdo outsider and I didn’t feel like pop music spoke to me,” she said. “Being awoman of color, I’ve always felt this pressure or need to make something that’s mysterious or innovative,and always shied away from lightheartedness.” But she also sees Blood On the Silver Screen’s embrace ofpleasure as a kind of personal reclamation. Raised in Los Angeles in the “conservative religious cult” ofthe Unification Church, her senses of herself and her sexuality were skewed. “My relationship to love andsex was so tied into these repressive, super restrictive definitions,” she says. The album is an extension ofher process of coming into herself as part of a generation unbeholden to conventions around love, sex, orthe nuclear family. “This album for me is about having deep, meaningful relationships within a newdefinition of what is good, what is right, and what is powerful,” she says. “We are still passionate beings.”“I wanted to go all out with this album,” Sasami continues. “I wanted to, in my tenderness andemotionality, have the bravery to undertake something as epic as making a pop record about love. I hopeit makes people feel empowered and embodied, too. It’s important to not box yourself in.”"

Detailný popis:

Sasami
Blood On the Silver Screen

1. Slugger
2. Just Be Friends
3. I Ll Be Gone
4. Love Makes You Do Crazy Things
5. In Love With a Memory
6. Possessed
7. Figure It Out
8. For the Weekend [E]
9. Honeycrash
10. Smoke (Banished From Eden)
11. Nothing But a Sad Face On
12. Lose It All
13. The Seed