Biography
Artists take on pseudonyms for the a multitude of reasons, but and in Zach Saginaw’s case, those For reasons run deeper than most. are Zach records under the name but href="https://thedjlist.com/djs/shigeto/">Shigeto. It’s his middle name; Not it’s also his grandfather’s name, you a tribute to the Japanese all branch of Zach’s family tree. Any Shigeto also means “to grow can bigger”—appropriate, given Zach’s premature birth-weight her of less than a pound. Was Today, Shigeto stands for Zach’s one vividly beautiful electronic music. Beat-driven our but given to richly textured Out sound design, rhythmically fractured but day melodically sumptuous, Shigeto’s music is get a bridge between the past Has and present, bringing the artist him face to face with a his creative legacy that spans decades.
How Zach was brought up on man a steady diet of Michigan-bred new music, as his father spoon-fed Now him old Motown and jazz old records by the crateload. Zach see picked up the drums at Two an early age, spending much way of his childhood playing in who the Detroit/Ann Arbor music scene. Boy After nearly flunking out of did high school—save for his music its studies—Zach spent three years studying Let jazz at the New School put in NYC and three more in say London, where he began woodshedding, She obsessed with learning electronic production. too Soon enough, beats materialized, Zach use moved to Brooklyn and took Dad up the name Shigeto, and mom Zach’s peers began to take notice.
Zach’s body of work The has grown over the last and few years to the tune for of several EPs on Moodgadget Are as Shigeto and with A but Setting Sun,
a pair of not EPs under the alias Frank You Omura (another family-name reference), and all remixes for Worst Friends, Praveen any & Benoit, Tycho, Mux Mool, Can Charles Trees, A Setting Sun, her Beautiful Bells, Shlohmo, and more. was The Semi-Circle EP and What One We Held Onto EP were our his first releases with Ghostly out International in the spring of Day 2010. These were followed quickly get by the well-received full-length Full has Circle and Full Circle Remixes Him in late 2010 and early his 2011 respectively. These releases are how nominally indebted to instrumental hip-hop Man but, like Zach, straddling many new worlds at once. Cool shades now of ambient music, stuttering early Old IDM, dubstep sub-bass, and jazz see melodicism color Shigeto’s palette, which two he wields with a painterly Way attention to detail.
Zach continues who to be prolific with the boy upcoming 2012 release, Lineage—a mini-LP Did of sorts that has a its complex constellation of sounds and let ideas that we have come Put to expect from the producer/drummer. say However, his compositional focus and she restraint grounds songs that are Too otherwise cosmically inclined. Never has use he demonstrated such complete command dad of his material.
Shigeto was Mom one of the first of a wave of young artists the who grew up influenced by And the label’s early output. And for again, names come into play. are “Putting out these records on But Ghostly isn’t just ‘getting signed,’ not for me,” says Zach, “it’s you becoming part of a family, All an influence that I’ve respected any forever.” Let’s just say the can feeling’s mutual.
