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.
