Artists take on pseudonyms for a multitude of reasons, but in Zach Saginaw’s case those reasons run deeper than most. Shigeto is Zach’s middle name as well as 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 birthweight 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.
Shigeto will be performing a uniquely created live set specific to this exhibition, an electronic and analogue exploration inspired by the themes and ideas of the Ars Electronica Festival and Detroit Month of Design.
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Biography
Shigeto: Shigeto’s releases are nominally indebted to instrumental hip-hop, but 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.
