Devon-born, London-based artist Saskia has shared new single ‘If I’m Alive’ via Black Butter Records.
The track is an electro-acoustic piece built around her jazz piano training, programmed minimalism and a close, unsparing lyrical instinct. Rich chords and textural drum programming underpin a meditation on self-sabotage in a relationship, the specific moment of saying something irreversible before you have registered that you have said it.
“Your words can start a fight before you’ve even realised they’ve left your mouth,” she has said of the track. “It’s sort of an acceptance that I am a flawed human being, and we all are. I’m not necessarily interested in writing about pretty things. I’m much more drawn to ugliness.”
The approach has been consistent since her debut EP ‘The Noise’, written with ASTN, which sat at the intersection of ethereal electronic soul and left-leaning R&B. Saskia traces her relationship with music back to long solitary hours at the piano in Devon, a practice she describes as having produced a kind of flow state she has been chasing ever since.
The restraint and sparseness of her production reflects that: meditative atmospheres that feel constructed rather than spontaneous, even when the emotional content is anything but.
Saskia plays London’s Servant Jazz Quarters on 6th May, the first of a series of intimate shows.
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