The Sounding Room: 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, his middle name and grandfather’s name, a tribute to the Japanese branch of Zach’s family tree. Shigeto stands for vividly beautiful electronic music. Beat-driven yet richly textured, rhythmically fractured yet melodically sumptuous, Shigeto’s music is a bridge between the past and present, bringing the artist face to face with a creative legacy spanning decades.

Shigeto’s releases are nominally indebted to instrumental hip-hop while also 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/DJ. His compositional focus and restraint ground songs that are otherwise cosmically inclined.