Sigha is a producer without a hook: both his story and his music are so familiar you'll long for a Twitter-sized morsel of discontent or a trendily vapid remix. First, the story. Sigha, London native James Shaw, began making vaguely tech-y dubstep for Hotflush and other labels around the turn of the decade; he has since moved to Berlin and proceeded to make a more traditional form of techno. He runs the nascent Our Circula Sound label. Though he rarely sits down for interviews or offers podcasts, he is not reclusive or secretive, just busy and thoughtful. If you wanted an avatar for the Modern European Underground Dance Artist, you could do a lot worse.
Sigha's music, especially what he offers on his debut album Living With Ghosts, is also hookless in a musical sense. He favors the unforgiving, all-rhythm-everything approach of certain second wave Detroit artists as well as the more modern crop of German enthusiasts. Sigha once professed that he finds big melodies distracting, so you can be sure what you're getting throughout Ghosts: linear, mainline drum machines riding roughshod over hissy electronic ephemera. Softness arrives in pill-sized doses, small squiggles of color repeatedly snuffed out by the drums and the haze. Beatless passages tar the beginning, middle, and end of Ghosts, because full-lengths require Art. Sigha's ties to bass music shine through in the tempos, which sit in the 120s. It's big music, meant for big spaces: Ghosts doesn't sound bad on headphones, but it's not any fun, either. Small, personal environments trivialize tracks this rigid. When played loudly, Ghosts commandeers its space. Its synths groan, its drums bulldoze, the whole album intrudes and menaces.
Ghosts is industrial in the most literal sense: the tracks show up, perform, and then exit. There are no hissing valves, no rusty scrapes, no brokedown palaces full of empty assembly lines. Ghosts is too put together for that; it is the modern factory, steam-cleaned every evening, proper safety equipment. Sterility is implied, and when Ghosts errs it errs on the side of order and caution. It is dense and noisy, but it's also conservative, especially because, even for gritty techno, Ghosts is not funky or sexy (don't let the cover fool you). It is pummeling introspection, "peak time" interpreted as the point in the evening during which you have most forgotten where you are.
If this were philosophy you would accuse Sigha of asceticism; it's techno, so we just say "bleak," and "uncompromising." There's nothing easy about making music this relentless and impersonal. It is masochism dressed up as genre. (An early Sigha single was named "I Am Apathy, I Am Submission".) In open air, Sigha's systems are chaotic and threatening, but they have a habit of choking one another off over the course of an album. Ghosts still proves, though, over and over, that Sigha has a single, awesome skill-- tunneling, perverse techno.
