Sasami w/ Condor & Jaybird
The Mill — Sunday, July 21 at 7:30 p.m.
Sasami Ashworth, known professionally as Sasami, will be coming to The Mill on Sunday, July 21 at 7:30 p.m. as she tours to promote her debut, self-titled album, released earlier this year. Tickets are $15 ($18 at the door).
Sasami is a guitar-heavy album influenced by the ’70s and ’90s music Sasami was listening to while working it. The album combines Sasami’s two instrumental focal points — French horn and guitar — and mirrors both the classical music her mother listened to and the rock her father loved when she was growing up.
The album is also Sasami’s first solo release, forcing her to move from the group dynamic she had in the band Cherry Glazerr, before she left in 2018. Sasami was a side project at the time, and when the time was right for her to leave she, it became a larger thing.
“I played in orchestras for a really long time … which is really centered in knowing your place in the piece and in the orchestra … and playing the parts exactly as they’re written,” Sasami said during a phone interview with Little Village. “Five or 10 years ago I never would have imagined touring my own stuff.”
Thinking visually was another change for Sasami as she went toward a solo career and began marketing her own music. These inspirations quickly connected to what drives her in music: nature, human behavior and their influence on one another.
“That’s the thing that’s really awesome about the ocean and nature, like even though we’re fucking it up with plastic and shit, it’s pretty much the same thing it has ever been,” Sasami said. “It’s interesting to think about what parts of human nature are eternal and unaffected by technology … I’ve been thinking about which parts of me have been written into my DNA for hundreds of years and which parts are nurtured by my environment.”
The music Sasami put on her first album is emotional and raw, she said, and she hopes that listeners can apply the emotional outputs to their own lives and use them as needed. This is also reflected in the album’s recording style — though Sasami wrote the music digitally first, the final product was an analog recording.
“I think that crying feels as good as laughing, feels as good as screaming … kind of like cleaning out an emotional clog,” Sasami said. “I just hope that my music can create a channel for people to experience the emotions they’re already experiencing even deeper.”
Both collaboration and solo work are ambitions Sasami hopes to move toward in the future; it is emotionally easier to be in another person’s group, she said, but feeling in control is a refreshing experience.
“The touring and creating feed one another. You share your music and it makes you miss making it, so you make it and you want to share it,” Sasami said. “I am grateful to be in that cycle right now.”
