On this episode of our podcast, we talk with Sargasso (Maria Campos Saadi, Noah Goodman, Thomas Hagen, Soledad Tejada), who just released one of our favorite albums of 2021! In this interview, I ask Sargasso about their new album (As It Surfaces To Meet Me), maintaining the band long-distance (across four separate locations), the importance of cereal, and which oceanic body of water features no land borders. We also talk about the experience of finishing / mixing a record with over 100 tracks on it remotely, and it is just as fun as it sounds. I finish up the episode by springing a pop quiz on the band: “which smoothie are you?”. The results of the quiz are academic and validated by rigorous science, I assure you.
If you’re new to Sargasso’s music, they make playful-but-considered songs, somewhere between Atlas Sound and In Rainbows. And even as I write that, it doesn’t feel like those comparisons do the band justice, as their sound easily slips out of convenient genre markers or structures. Instead, their music is a melting pot of ideas, as Sargasso places pop, indie, jazz, and rock into a cauldron and transmute it into something exciting — something new with familiar ingredients. And while I could go on about how smart or interesting the choices are on As It Surfaces To Meet Me, what keeps me coming back, again and again, is just how lovely, how warm, and how pleasurable the melodies, harmonies, and chord patterns are. The band formed in New Haven while its members attended college there, and even though most of them have graduated, it’s still the band’s spiritual home.
Our interview with Sargasso covers all of this and more! You can find our podcast episode at any of the usual streaming platforms or at one of the embeds below.
listen: https://sargasso.bandcamp.com/
stay up to date: www.instagram.com/sargassomusic & www.twitter.com/sargassomusic_
