"LA native Henry Laufer may be a young fella, but the 19-year-old producer, better known as Shlohmo, has rocketed on to our radar screen in recent months with his lo-fi, psychedelic mix of abstract hip-hop, dubstep-flavored wonk, bouncy synth-funk, breezy trip-hop, and what sounds like lost gems from the mid-'90s Mo' Wax catalog. Now splitting time between San Francisco and LA, in January Shlohmo will be releasing the Shlohmoshun Deluxe mini-album, so we decided to enlist him for the XLR8R podcast series now, before dude seriously blows up." --XLR8R

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'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 is on the horizon. 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.