How Sasami Got Blood On The Silver Screen

Portrait by Andrew Thomas Huang.

Going into SASAMI’s lore, quickly you find out how vast her musical resume is with credits that include, scoring films, producing, composing, vocals, studio albums, music teaching, as well as playing synth, bass, and French horn.  

The more I read about her the more layers I found within her resume, from working with Bright Eyes’ Nate Walcott making score, playing in orchestras to playing synth in the Los Angeles-based indie-rock band Cherry Glazerr from 2015 to 2018. After her departure from Cherry Glazerr her main musical endeavor has been her solo career as SASAMI, making music that takes a pop route with some nu-metal and folk rock influence sprinkled in for good measure. 

Curious to know more about her experiences and how they all have now culminated into the music she makes now as SASAMI, I called her while she was at a Korean Spa in Los Angeles to find out more about her wild journey to her third and latest solo album, Blood On The Silver Screen. 

Blood On The Silver Screen is out now via Domino Records.

What type of music do you remember your parents listening to when you were growing up?

I had a very split listening upbringing, my mom was always playing classical music and my dad was into normal boomer music like, Fleetwood Mac, Dire Straits, The Beatles.

Was that where your connection to classical music came from?

Well, I, like most good young Korean kids, took piano lessons from age five, so it was kind of built into my lifestyle that classical music was what was around. My parents were in this interesting religious movement and in the church my mom had sung in the choir and my dad played in the bluegrass band, so they weren’t professional musicians, but both were very into music.

My dad was one of those very obnoxious people who at Christmas time would make us all sing Christmas carols around the piano while he shittily played the acoustic guitar. He definitely wanted us to be musical.

Your brother makes music too, right?

Yeah, my brother Juju is also a producer.

How is it having your sibling both working in music? Are you regularly working together and bouncing ideas off each other?

We go through different phases, he and I produced my first record [SASAMI] together, we’ve worked really closely in the past. He does a bit more techno and electronic music now, even though he still will produce music for a lot of guitar rock bands. Last night I did a listening party for the album, and he DJ’d. We are still friends, but we do our own thing and collaborate when it makes sense.

Portrait by Crystalline Structures Studio.

Was your parent’s classical music listening what led you to studying classical music at university?

It’s actually so random because in middle school I chose to play the French horn because I was a kind of random person. It would’ve been way more normal to play clarinet or flute, but from a young age I guess I had an inclination towards different, random shit. Not a lot of people played French horn and because of that I got into a lot of opportunities and ensembles where I wasn’t necessarily as proficient as the other people in the groups, but they just needed anyone who could hold the French horn. Then I got into summer programs and after school programs, I bailed up in a lot of ways. Getting into these programs pushed me to get better because everyone around me was so good. I went to an arts high school in Los Angeles and then I decided to go to music conservatory for French horn, so I took it pretty seriously for a long time.

Are you still playing French horn now?  

Yes! This is actually the first album cycle where I am playing French horn on stage, so it is an exciting new era for me.

How is playing the French horn on stage? I could imagine it being so different from being in an ensemble or orchestra.

It’s interesting because when I was in conservatory and playing in orchestras, I was playing French horn six hours a day, so I was really in really good shape. It is an easy instrument to mess up and miss notes on. I am not in shape the way I used to be. I mess up a lot more than I did before. Part of being a classical musician is striving for perfection, playing rock music. I've enjoyed that the standard for perfection is lower and the standard for having fun and being theatrical is higher. Trying to bring that ethos into French horn playing is new to me, it is hard for me not to get upset or feel cringed out if I miss a note but I’m trying to be a lot looser with it.

How was it going from playing classical music to playing in Cherry Glazerr?

It was invigorating. After finishing at conservatory, I felt really detached from classical music. I got more into a post-punk scene and was really into angular guitar music that was very dissonant, harsh, and kind of dark. I was really into Wire, Television Personalities, and Sonic Youth, bands that used a lot of distortion and dissonance.

Did you feel free being able to not have to be as strict and have fun with music?

Yeah, and by the end of being at music conservatory I had a negative relationship with how competitive music felt. Being in this new scene where so few people were virtuosos and everyone was a little sloppy but that was a part of the style of it was so nice. It was fun to be a part of a new scene where the value wasn’t in the perfection and virtuosity but more in the taste and tones.

Was that around the same time you were scoring films?

Yeah, so Nate Walcott who was in Bright Eyes is a film scorer and does arrangements for other projects, he was doing strings for Jenny Lewis and Mavis Staples. I was his assistant and was learning a lot about arrangement and orchestration, almost being bilingual between the classical and alternative worlds. I got a couple opportunities to do some of my own score work and that was before I started writing so I was more comfortable in composing instrumental music – it wasn’t until I was in Cherry Glazerr that I felt comfortable giving song writing a shot.

You also taught music. Do you think you learnt anything from your students that changed your perspective on making music? 

I studied music education while I was in conservatory, so I did have this experience before I finished school. I was teaching early childhood, so I would be working with babies and toddlers with their parents or caretakers. Being in those spaces made me realise how music was a language that could be understood from a very young age and made me tap into how music, creativity, and imagination are inherently a part of children, it still exists in adults, but you really have to actively conjure it. Teaching really tapped into a side of my brain which I really enjoyed that was being comical, theatrical, and playful, which is something I have brought into my live performance and into the music of this album, there is definitely more of a playfulness in it.

Yeah, in a lot of interviews I’ve read with you people are always commenting on the theatrical nature of your life performances and how much they are surprised when they see it as it wasn’t what they were expecting when listening to your music. Where does it come from for you to make a really entertaining, high energy performance?

When I was teaching, I was putting so much energy into each class and teaching the curriculum in a way that felt like we were in this magical dimension and children could really participate in a creative way. Having that semantic memory in my body is something that is easy for me to tap into when I am performing, there are definitely performers who are doing their thing and aren’t necessarily aware of how the audience are reacting to it, which is totally fine and there is nothing wrong with how anyone performs. For me, being able to engage with people in the audience and being able to know that I am actively making an environment that is unexpected or different from a normal rock show is exciting for me.

And people always remember that high energy show that they went to.

Definitely, I think people are ultimately going to a show to be transported to a different place and sometimes it doesn’t matter what the band is doing on stage, and it has so much to do with the sound and vibration in the room. Sometimes the performer giving the audience permission to let go, be present, have fun and be playful is a big part of the show.

Portrait by Andrew Thomas Huang.

Totally. Especially when it is unexpected it is such a nice surprise when you are watching someone perform and you’re having so much fun.

And when people see a performer having fun on stage, they are more likely to let loose and have fun themselves.

Now you’re here releasing your third solo pop album. How did going down the pop route come to life for you?

For me, every album leads to the next thing. When I made my first record, I was experimenting for the first time with using my voice and the way that I sang was more held back, contemplative, and introspective, because of that a lot of engineers at live shows would say ‘Your voice is too quiet and you’re guitars are too loud.’ The rebellious part of me made me turn my guitar louder and it made the show more aggressive. When I got to the end of the first tour, I knew I wanted to make a really loud guitar record, inspired by the maniacal, evil sounds of nu metal. Then touring Squeeze with my metal band, thrashing my voice and body every night I knew that I wanted the next era to be more about singing and less about physical destruction, so that really led me down the path of the craft of song writing.  

Do you feel like you have further freedom to do whatever you want to do with SASAMI being a solo project?

Yeah, I am essentially hiring a new band to perform with me on every album and working with different producers and engineers. It is definitely a blessing of being a solo artist, being able to follow my wings in any direction.

I feel like you are the perfect person to ask this. Do you think genre is dead? There has been so much music that has been made, that there is no point limiting certain artists to certain labels.

I think genre is a language, how Spanish and Italian come from Latin. Everything is referential to something else, morphs into something and becomes referential to the next thing. Genre is kind of like a musical language, there are roots there like classical western music, African rhythmic music or eastern string music and all those things inform the next generation of musical genres and languages. You can easily see how African percussion music influenced the blues which influenced R&B which influenced hip hop. There are all these linages in music so genre is as important as any other compartmentalisation that humans do, so we can label things and understand where the throughline is.

What is your favourite thing about your Blood On The Silver Screen? 

I would say that I am really happy that I made something that is dancey and fun because everything I have made in the past is either sad or kind of aggressive, not very happy [laughs]. Even though a lot of the lyrics can be dark or sad there are definitely more joyful and fun vibes on this record.