When she was at school, Sasami Ashworth switched from piano lessons to the french horn. “Very beautiful sound, terribly awkward case shape for a middle-schooler to be lugging around,” she has said.
But the unwieldy instrument has been worthwhile for the Los Angeles-based artist. After a spell studying it at the conservatory and teaching in a school, she was signed to Domino last October; in her first video, a mustachioed Sasami busks with the french horn, collecting tips in a bucket labelled “horny but wholesome”. The song is Not the Time, a dreamy, gauzy track redolent of 90s noise rock bands such as Sonic Youth.
But Sasami’s sound – as crystallised in her accomplished debut album, trailed by deliciously eerie lead single Jealousy – is as much indebted to the contemporary scene of leftfield, forward-thinking female rock musicians in which she is immersed. For two and a half years she was “synth queen” in Cherry Glazerr before going solo, and there are echoes of recent tourmate Mitski in her ethereal vocals, slightly dissonant chords, and scabrous lyrics about relationships.
But the best training, she says, was her time as a primary school teacher: “If you can keep, like, 30 kids with tambourines entertained, a room full of drunk adults at a rock show is nothing.”
Sasami’s self-titled debut is released on 8 March on Domino. She plays the Lexington, London, the same day
