Episode 10:  “Bananas and Cilantro” featuring Sasami

Sasami: Meklit how do you spell?Oh, M E K L I T. Okay. It just helps me to like, see how things are spelled Meklit.

Meklit: So my mnemonic of choice is Meklit rhymes with beat, you know.

Sasami: Okay. I have Sasami, rhymes of salami, so

Sasami: I'm on the level. People get food. They can pronounce food.

Narration: Talking to Sasami was a constant grounding in earth metaphors, in systems and cycles, especially around food. Sasami is a mycophile, in other words, a person who loves mushrooms. She almost speaks of mushrooms like teachers, unafraid of the dark, dank places that are in need of regeneration. Well, her music is like that too. She goes right to the wounds, both personal and collective, and finds a way to sing about them with the rawness and honesty required to actually compost them into something new.  

My name is Meklit and this is Movement: music and migration, remixed.

Meklit: So this has been a really big year for you. You released your second album, you've been touring all over, and I was wondering if there's something new you've discovered about the music in that time? Or are the songs sitting differently now for you that you've had so much time and so many different experiences with them throughout this year?

Sasami: Yeah, I think that, I always make food analogies all the time because I'm human and that is a large part of our life is consuming sugars and using that energy. So naturally, food metaphors always come to the top of my mind. But, I don't know. I feel like when you're like crafting your album, it's like, foraging all these ingredients and finding magical ways to combine them. Writing a menu and then recording it is like executing the menu and being able to serve it to people. 

And I feel like after you have toured the album a lot, it's like your restaurant's been open for a while and you're really like dialing everything in. And you might not be like, wow, cilantro and bananas, like it's brand new. You're just like, no, we need to source the bananas from this place and we need the cilantro to be picked on this day. Like, you're so like focused on executing, that it's a different craft than forming the menu. So it definitely becomes much more technical about like, physical upkeep, emotional upkeep. It becomes a very different craft when you're touring it for sure.

Meklit: So when you were describing the menu of like the crafting and then the like serving I'm wondering if for you, the studio is the part of it that really, is that the part of it that feeds you in a like, discovery kind of way? In a curiosity, discovery, exploration kind of way. I'm not trying to say do you like the road better or do you like the studio better? But I'm sort of wondering where the juice is.

Sasami: It's very cyclical. It's like you pick the carrots and the zucchini and the broccolis, and then you squeeze them and you get the juice out of them, and then you use the pulp and you make crackers, and then you have like the cracker dust, and then you make a flour out of that, and then you like make a rue with the, with the flower.

 And then, you know, it lives on. It's like, I don't know, it's a very like, cyclical process. Some may say it's a toxically cyclical process, you know, you're constantly chasing the other side of the merry-go-round.But I think that I can only say it's like an extreme privilege and a blessing to have a job where you have multiple phases, that are more similar to like, an agricultural cycle or something. It's not like a typical trajectory. 

And everyone's album cycle looks really different, but there is this kind of planting and cultivating, and then growing and then harvesting, and then cooking, and then serving. Rinse and repeat over and over again. And it really, it is a cyclical thing where you get to ride it around. Hopefully it doesn't ride you. Hopefully you're riding it, but you know.

Meklit: That's where the emotional upkeep comes in

Sasami: Yeah definitely. It's not the only job where this is a thing, but it happens to be a job where personal and work boundaries get very blurred. And it's really hard to separate which part of your heart and which part of your brain you're using when you're working a 24 7 tour. You know, you can't really like shut off, be like, okay, I'm going home now. I'm gonna listen to podcasts. You can think that, but you're really just like in a green room, still surrounded by your coworkers, it's a strange job.

Meklit: It is strange. It is a very strange job.

Sasami: But so's being a pilot or a flight attendant. You know, every job is strange because everything is comp, everything in human existence is arbitrary and made up. So

Meklit: Or like any word. If you think about any word long enough, it disintegrates.

Sasami: Exactly! Exactly, and I think like, I think that's something that really fascinates me is the disintegration point. I like to hang out when things are in a place of disintegration because I think that's where so much discovery takes place when you've kind of breaken down the arbitrary forms of things. And I, am really fascinated by that. 

And that was definitely a huge impetus for Squeeze. Finding the disintegration point between different genres like metal and classic indie rock or like kind of Sheryl Crow inspired country. And I was fascinated at kind of, using an emotional or technical solvent to kind of break down these genres and stir them up into its own kind of solution. It was very much like, yeah, bananas and cilantro. Bananas and cilantro. Like, let's fucking go.

MUSIC: Transition

Sasami: When I was making the album in 2019, 2020, 21, I didn't wanna make happy music. Like I didn't feel happy, like I wasn't interested in skipping to toxic positivity. I was interested in like, getting like, knee deep in like the gnarliest stuff. And that was also the time where I was like, learning about my family history and like, really studying American history and really studying, human history. A very painful, dark, dark time. And I thought that it made more sense for me to just go there instead of trying to put a salve on something that's like, still has dirt in it. Doesn't make sense.

MUSIC: Transition

Sasami: I didn't want to be a metal musician. I wasn't trying to label myself as a metal musician, but I wanted to use this metal vernacular, this new metal language and bring it into the kind of indie rock space that I already occupy with my audience that I've been very lucky to connect with. Which is a lot of like bipoc, queer, fem, open-hearted, open-minded people. And I wanted to, bring the cathartic experience that I feel when I listen to metal and when I go to metal shows to the safe, I think safe environment that's my show. 

And I so lucky to have thrown my, fingernail clippings and, tail of rat and arsenic or whatever into the cauldron and then, big plume of smoke. And then I look out at this crowd that's like my dream crowd and so that experience of manifesting kind of the community tender moshing experience of my dreams, that was just like so incredibly rewarding. And I wouldn't trade that for anything.

Meklit: I was hoping that we could talk a little bit about your family history and I was wondering if we could start with your grandmother. And if you would be down to tell us a little bit about her.

Sasami: Yeah, of course. So yeah, for those who don't know, because the American, global history educational complex is complex. Japan occupied Korea, I wanna say 1910 to 1945. So my grandmother, is a Zainichi ethnic Korean who lived in Japan. She was actually born in Japan during the Japanese occupation of Korea. 

I don't know if anyone, if anyone listening has read or watched Pachinko, there's actually like a lot of, similarities between that family history and my own family history cuz my grandpa owned Pachinko parlors and my grandma owned a kimchi stall and then eventually she owned, a kimchi shop in Tokyo.

And, very similarly, I mean, I guess, my family history has a lot to do with kind of combining these different cultural elements. Because my grandmother was ethnically Korean, but living in Japan, she created a lot of food and specifically kimchi that had this very like, Zainichi flair to it. Which means that it's Korean food that Japanese people would buy basically. 

And Japanese food is way less spicy than Korean food. So it, the way that the kimchi transformed was, she used kombu and doshi in the sauce of the kimchi, which is not really something that is done Korean kimchi. And it was a lot less spicy and kind of, sold more fresh as opposed to very fermented. And so, yeah, she developed this very Zainichi specific kimchi. 

Fast, very, very much forward to the mid two thousands, my grandmother moved to the US to Los Angeles to live with my parents, and they helped her open up a kimchi shop in Gardena. So kimchi and cooking is very much like in my family, family lineage, which is probably why I'm always talking about food.

Meklit: Can you tell us about the word Zainichi?

Sasami: Yeah. Zainichi I'm pretty sure is like a colloquial term because there are more specific, Japanese and Korean terminologies for this diaspora of people, but they're also very like politically and culturally loaded. So I'm not gonna go on the record trying to say them.

Meklit: Got you, got you.

Sasami: The words mean different things to Koreans and Japanese people. And it's still, yeah, basically like Zainichi people were in this very liminal, strange space where like some people didn't have a Japanese or Korean passport. And I think for a long time, people kind of moved. They either moved back to Korea and like, kind of redeveloped their Korean identity or integrated into Japanese culture. 

And even growing up, my mother had a Japanese name. Her name is Miyung Ja, but she was called Maiko in, in Japan. And her mom still calls her Maiko, actually. And my mother was one of four siblings and two of them, or one of them moved to Korea and two of them stayed in Japan.And one of them even like, a completely Japanese name. And, my mom is like, definitely the, the odd one out and moved to America, which was huge left turn. 

But I think it's, it's more of a recent thing, especially as like Korean culture has really come to the forefront of global culture. I think people are really owning their Korean identity, even being Zainichi living in Japan, this is like, kind of a new thing I think. 

And also, like, it's very interesting, I think that even the existence of this diaspora is kind of mysterious even to Japanese people who were born and raised in Japan as Japanese citizens and Korean people born and raised in Korea and Korean Americans and Japanese Americans. It's this very kind of nebulous diaspora of people. 

And I think as I'm talking to more Korean and Japanese Americans, I think more people are realizing that they have ancestors who were actually Korean that integrate in Japanese society. So yeah, it's very interesting cultural juncture.

Meklit: Like as we've talked to so many people who have just a huge range of relation to migration and immigration, there are these themes that come up again and again. And one of them is about like, what are the things that your family didn't talk about that you wished they talked about? And then what are the things that were like kind of cultural touchstones that were like really important that they passed down? 

And I was wondering if you could talk about maybe the one or the other, or both and maybe how it relates to food, because it seems like that's something important to you. Yeah.

Sasami: It's very interesting because my mom, I feel like, because, you know, the whole time I've known her, we've always lived in the United States. So I feel like so much of my growing up as an Asian American was trying to integrate into like white American culture and trying to like, feel embraced by a culture that I was never really going to fully be embraced by, because it's just not who I am. 

And so it took me a long time to really become super fascinated in my own ancestry. And also it, there's another thing that's like as you get older, you become much more, maybe linguistically understanding about your cultural identity. But growing up it's just who you are. And like you don't think about identity politics. You are identity politics, whether you like it or not.

And so growing up, I mean there's a lot of layers to my cultural upbringing because I also grew up in the Unification Church, which is a church led by a Korean leader. So I grew up going to Korean school and like going to church that was like partially in Korean and like, you know, doing rituals that were in Korean. 

So I grew up with like a largely culturally Korean upbringing, but also my mom was born and raised in Japan, so there's a lot of elements of her personality that were very culturally Japanese. And of course I was growing up in America with a Western dad, so I had, you know, that kind of obvious foundation for my cultural upbringing. 

And so growing up it's like I would eat food and I wouldn't know, like if it was Korean or Japanese, I would hear phrases. I didn't know if they were Korean or Japanese. I mean, if I was hearing Korean or Japanese, it meant I was in trouble for the most part. So I just associated those words with I'm in trouble. Not I'm in trouble in Korean, or I'm in trouble in Japanese you know? So for, I know how to say, you know, brush your teeth in Korean and Japanese very fluently, but yeah.

So growing up it's like, I wasn't like, okay, this is Japanese culture. My mom is acting this way because she was socialized in Japan. I was just like, my mom is weird and Asian, so she doesn't wanna talk to me about acne and bras. You know? I was just kind of like, just you, you know? It's just like you grow up and you're like, is this a cultural thing? Is this my parents' personality? Is this my personality? It's all mixed. 

You're not really thinking about identity politics when you're growing up, you're just thinking about trying to be less awkward and be accepted by your evil peers. So, you know, it is interesting, like as the fog lifts, you're like, what was my upbringing? Who am I? 

So from like an early age, I learned how to like kind of compartment,  learned or like adapted to compartmentalize certain parts of my identity. So I think it is really interesting growing up and being like, now let's throw those all together, and see what happens. Cuz those are all valid and interesting. They're all fodder for LP three.

Meklit: It's all fodder. Put it in the music.

Sasami: Put it in the pot, put it in the cauldron.

Meklit: Do you wanna talk about the new venture or are you not ready to talk about it?

Sasami: Yeah, I could talk about it

Meklit: Usually it's the last question, but it came up so I'm into following the flow also.

Sasami: Yeah. I am like very fascinated by like, studying different genres and studying my own personal, somatic experience in certain genres. And basically what I'm trying to say is that I've gotten really, really into pop music. And there's this thing that happens on tour where like, I just think it's a universal thing, but like, when you're at the end of the tour and you really need mar, like you need morale boost or like if you, you're going through a storm or something.

There's this thing where like, at least my band mates and I, we always put on pop music. Cuz there's something about it like four on the floor, like bangers from middle school, like that just really like, makes you feel euphoric. And like, and I'm really fascinated by whereas like the last album I was really obsessed with like dissolving ingredients to their molecular core and like bastardizing or depleting the integrity of the ingredients in some way.

I'm like more interested in like these kind of larger flavor profiles and like pop music is just something that is a little bit more universal in terms of being able to reach more people very potently and very like un finically, that's a word. And so, yeah, I'm really, really into pop music right now. And leaning into themes of like ecstasy and joy and guilty pleasures minus the guilt.

Meklit: I love that and I'm curious.

Sasami: Yeah, and I think that part of it also was, I still really feel like I'm thinking a lot about my community and the listener when I'm making these new songs, but I think what I realized was, there was. Kind of a guard put up for me.

 It's like, I think there's this sentiment or this expectation that like, people of color or like femme people have to really like, prove themselves as being really innovative and cool and mysterious, to justify their presence as opposed to just having fun, god forbid, and being cheesy and just being kind of unabashedly present without mystery. 

And I'm kind of, Realizing that there is a new, exciting magic in just creating something that's a little bit less mysterious and a little bit less dark. I've always been like really allergic to cheesiness. And I'm, you know, just self therapizing. I'm like, why this not me? Why is cheesiness bad? Is it because you don't want people to see the, like, vulnerable side of you that just is normal and like everyone else and loves Britney Spears, you know? 

So I always try to start by, you know, here's with the food, again, trying to make something that tastes good to me, something that I enjoy. And then trusting that other people will get something out of it too.

Meklit: And it reminds me of what you were saying earlier, because that also feels very cyclical. Like you make the dark album and then you cycle into another place and it's just part of the circle.

Sasami: Yeah, definitely. And everyone is very different. Like some people are true, like scholars of metal, they only make metal, they go really deep in it. And the nuance that they're able to tap into is, you know, transcending all other metal because they are committed to going deep into the tunnel. 

And I'm, I think a little bit more interested in, yeah, like just knowing, knowing like kindergarten level of like as many languages as possible, and then mashing them all together into some bizarre language

Meklit: That's all your own. Yes.

Sasami: Yeah, exactly.

Narration: That is Sasami, and her latest album is Squeeze. I mean, it’s her latest album, until the next one comes out…

Movement is produced by Ian Coss and myself, Meklit Hadero. Our co-creator and podcast godmother is Julie Caine. Our broadcast partner is The World. We are supported by National Geographic Society and distributed by PRX.