Lineage
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012
This is one of the best albums I have heard in awhile. It takes a second for you to realize how serious Zach Saginaw is about his art. After listening to this masterpiece 3-4 times I have read his Ghostly bio and understood where this extremely rich output comes from. ..”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. Zach’s 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. His upcoming 2012 release, Lineage—a mini-LP of sorts that has a complex constellation of sounds and ideas that we have come to expect from the producer/drummer. Shigeto was one of the first of a wave of young artists who grew up influenced by the label’s early output. And again, names come into play. “Putting out these records on Ghostly isn’t just ‘getting signed,’ for me,” says Zach, “it’s becoming part of a family, an influence that I’ve respected forever”…. Purchase the album HERE
