Shigeto, Beacon, Xeno & Oaklander

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 and What We Held Onto EP were his first releases with Ghostly International in the spring of 2010. These were followed quickly by the well-received full-length Full Circle and Full Circle Remixes in late 2010 and early 2011 respectively. These releases are 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.

Zach continues to be prolific with the 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. However, his compositional focus and restraint grounds songs that are otherwise cosmically inclined. Never has he demonstrated such complete command of his material.

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." Let's just say the feeling's mutual.


"Thomas Mullarney III and Jacob Gossett are Beacon, a Greenpoint-based duo steeped in '90s and contemporary R&B, IDM, and bass music. Moodgadget is set to release Beacon's No Body EP, the project's second collection of songs to triangulate those worlds into a sensual, downtempo electronic mesh of lush synths and lusty falsetto. It's How To Dress Well with slightly less BMG CD club R&B, slightly more Warp Records infusion. No Body is lights-down music, ambient-pop for the unrequited, the logical result of years absorbing Boards Of Canada and Postal Service, Matthew Dear and Karin Dreijer Andersson, The-Dream and Ginuwine." - Stereogum


Xeno and Oaklander are a minimal electronics girl/boy duo, and they are based in Brooklyn, NY. They began writing music and soundtracks in 2004. Miss Liz Wendelbo is French / Norwegian and Sean McBride is from Maryland. They record their songs live in their studio and play analogue synthesizers and instruments exclusively. They have toured Europe and the West Coast extensively, and they have played on the East Coast in music venues, lofts and festivals. They have also performed at SF Moma, PS1 Warm Up, Miami Art Basel, the Zürich Kunsthalle and the New Museum in New York. Sean McBride has created original music for artists Annika Larsson, Jonah Freeman, Annee Olofsson and Dara Birnbaum. Xeno & Oaklander have recently scored a soundtrack for artist Fabian Marti. Their latest Remix is for John Foxx and the Maths