EP Review: Shigeto – ‘Intermission’

It’s night. You don’t know whether you’re awake or dreaming. Half blank. Half anxious. You seem to be simultaneously aware of pacing your small bedsit apartment and being sat as a passenger in an unknown vehicle; head against the window, watching the sleek neon, glass, and steel of the city slide by in a blur of varying speeds. Skywards is either never ending skyscrapers piercing the heavens or the same ceiling you fall asleep and wake up to every night and day. Intermittently.

Somehow you are in both places. Somehow you are in neither.

That is the sound of Zachary Saginaw, otherwise known by his stage name, Shigeto. A nocturnal, lost, ethereal, and ambient electronica.

I mean, I could’ve started the review just by telling you the whats and whos, but I really felt more like setting the mood of the EP first. Called Intermission. Appropriately so too, because Saginaw has very much stated that this EP is less a concrete statement or strong message, as his previous albums have been, “but more of a taste, like a halftime show of sorts.” It’s not just a release that lies in between others though, it’s also in between being anything solid or grounded in itself, like that stylish opening scene what I painted for y’all. It’s uncertain, misplaced. It’s lost, and looking.

“I haven’t found the next step for me yet. I’ve been making loads of music as always, but I’m still looking for that concrete new path.”

Saginaw doesn’t know where to go, not because he doesn’t know where he can go, but because he knows everywhere he can go. He’s just got too many places to choose from. Knowing which one is the right  one is his dilemma. If Intermission is the sound of Saginaw’s indecisiveness, though, he may not need to make a choice.

The EP’s six tracks manage to collate a variety of sounds and styles into its runtime, taking in elements of instrumental hip hop, jazz, ambient electronica, and minimalism, all expressed through processed beats and sound collages. Songs often veer into spacious, hazy clouds of synthesized sounds, weaved with soft, smooth melodies, and punctured by the intrusive repetition of technology malfunctioning.

Opening track ‘Pulse’ is one of the EP’s more tense tracks, with rhythms and sound snippets layering upon one another, initially more anxious than hypnotic, before the track bleeds out. Then you’ve got the track ‘City Dweller’ which aside from obviously being about the person portrayed in my little film scene for the beginning there, is a transformative track that shifts gears from almost naturalistic atmospherics into a beat riding groove adorned with a Close Encounters of the Third Kind melodic riff, and synthetic jazz flourished. Our city dweller here is definitely giving off a not-of-this-world vibe.

‘Gently’ does just that and lulls you into a still-surface-of-an-unused-pool calm, acting as Intermission‘s own intermission. Well, its first intermission anyway, because a track later we arrive at ‘Deep Breathing’ which meditates on similar themes and tones, but is more unsettled. There’s a rising unease to the calm. ‘Do My Thing’ is kind of the EP’s centrepiece, sandwiched between both those mellow interludes, and it weaves a woozy recollection of the day at its end, with little numerous motifs coming in and out like snapshot memories playing over and over while you’re trying to wind down and forgot them all. Which, by the tracks end, you have as they all fade away.

However, centrepiece or no, for me the EP’s strongest and best track is its closing number, ‘Need Nobody’. It’s kind of exemplary of not just Saginaw’s compositional style, but his skill too. There’s a cohesive thread that runs right through the track that almost sews a more traditional song structure, but Saginaw plays around with melodies he uses, adds to them, takes from them, mixes them together, almost making the track internally reference itself. Which, I guess is the track proving that it needs nobody, and its right because the track is haunting and a little disorientating in how it feel familiar and alien all at once. A kind of uncanny.