shigeto

Zach 从小便浸染在密歇根的音乐里，他父亲给他听古早时期的魔城灵歌和爵士唱片。他自幼习鼓，由于热爱音乐，几近从高中退学。此后，他先后在纽约、伦敦两地各学习了三年爵士乐。在伦敦他开始沉迷学习各种电子乐设备，随后，他移居布鲁克林，以 Shigeto 之名开始崭露头角。 
《Semi-Circle》是他在 Ghostly International 下发行的第一张 EP，2010年11月他又在该厂牌下发行了全长专辑“Full Circle”。Semi-Circle 是一张完全独立的艺术创作，名义上是为了向器乐嘻哈致敬，但其实Zach在这一张专辑中就跨越了多种风格——氛围音乐的阴暗、早期IDM舞曲、Dubstep 的沉闷低音、爵士的旋律，这些元素如同调色盘上的不同色彩，被 Shigeto 信手拈来，铺陈出丰富而又明快的细节。 
不少中国乐迷曾因《智利速降》这部山地自行车短片，而有幸听到 Shigeto 的音乐。
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 Zach’s peers began to take notice.
Zach’s body of work has grown over the last few years to the tune of several EPs on Moodgadget as Shigeto and with A Setting Sun, a pair of EPs under the alias Frank Omura (another family-name reference), and remixes for Worst Friends, Praveen & Benoit, Tycho, Mux Mool, Charles Trees, A Setting Sun, Beautiful Bells, Shlohmo, and more. The Semi-Circle EP will be his first release with Ghostly International; the full-length Full Circle was released in November of 2010. Semi-Circle is a fiercely independent work of art, 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.
As Ghostly International hits its 10th anniversary, Shigeto is 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 this record 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. That’s Full Circle.” Let’s just say the feeling’s mutual.