Globe Hall presents Shigeto on Wednesday March 4. Shigeto Artists take
on pseudonyms for a multitude of reasons, but in Zach Saginaw’s
case, those reasons run deeper than most. Zach records under the name
Shigeto. It’s his middle name; it’s also his grandfather’s name,
a tribute to the Japanese branch of Zach’s family tree. Shigeto also
means “to grow bigger”—appropriate, given Zach’s premature
birth-weight of less than a pound. Today, Shigeto stands for Zach’s
vividly beautiful electronic music. Beat-driven but given to richly
textured sound design, rhythmically fractured but melodically
sumptuous, Shigeto’s music is a bridge between the past and present,
bringing the artist face to face with a creative legacy that spans
decades. Zach was brought up on a steady diet of Michigan-bred music,
as his father spoon-fed him old Motown and jazz records by the
crateload. Zach picked up the drums at an early age, spending much of
his childhood playing in the Detroit/Ann Arbor music scene. After
nearly flunking out of high school—save for his music studies—Zach
spent three years studying jazz at the New School in NYC and three
more in London, where he began woodshedding, obsessed with learning
electronic production. Soon enough, beats materialized, Zach moved to
Brooklyn and took up the name Shigeto, and his peers began to take
notice. His releases are nominally indebted to instrumental hip-hop
but, like Zach, straddling many worlds at once. Cool shades of ambient
music, stuttering early IDM, dubstep sub-bass, and jazz melodicism
color Shigeto’s palette, which he wields with a painterly attention
to detail. He continues to be prolific with a complex constellation of
sounds and ideas that we have come to expect from the
producer/drummer. His compositional focus and restraint grounds songs
that are otherwise cosmically inclined.
music
2326
Views
06/03/2020 Last update