Above all else, Zach Saginaw respects heritage. Shigeto, his primary alias for recording homespun electronic music, is not only his middle name but also that of his grandfather; another of his aliases, Frank Omura, is a reference to his familial bloodline. Running through his past two releases, 2010's full-length Full Circle and his latest mini-LP, Lineage, is a series of songs titled "Ann Arbor", after the Michigan town that he grew up performing music in (another track off the latter, "Huron River Drive", takes its name from a stretch of road in Ann Arbor). Like so many recent albums by young, electronic-fixated musicians, Lineage's cover is adorned with a faded photograph, but this one's far from an Instagram: It's a picture of Saginaw's great-grandfather's house in Hiroshima, circa 1916. On the back cover of Lineage's vinyl release, you'll find a picture of said grandfather, taken at Grenada, Colorado's Amache Internment Camp during the period of Japanese-American internment that took place in the U.S. in 1942.
Lineage's musical contents look to the past for inspiration as well, and given the history that Saginaw's lined the walls of this release with, it would be understandable to anticipate a sort of dusty, archival crate-digging revisionism à la French-Vietnamese producer Onra's Chinoiseries. However, Lineage's sonic nostalgia is reaching to a different, chronologically closer point in time-- specifically, 2003, when fellow knob-twiddler Kieran Hebden dropped the influential Rounds under his Four Tet alias. Rounds (and a lot of proceeding music that sounded like Rounds) was affixed with the unfortunate-in-hindsight "folktronica" tag, primarily due to its expert meshing of glitchy-yet-pastoral textures and traditional instrumentation that took a left turn from the blippy ones and zeroes that marked IDM.
You could tag a fair amount of what Saginaw's done here as "pastoral", too. The quaint melodies and twinkling mechanisms of Lineage suggest a patient, natural beauty, one that fits his production capabilities far better than Full Circle's stutter-and-swell instrumental hip-hop leanings. There's very little here that would stand out when removed from the release's context, the buzzed thrum of "Field Trip" being Lineage's most out-and-out melodically bold moment. Don't mistake subtlety for a lack of playfulness, though: "A Child's Mind", easily the mini-LP's highlight, takes a tumbling drum set and transforms it into a coffee-house-clubby shake. In addition to being a producer, Saginaw is a drummer, and "A Child's Mind" excellently plays to his rhythmic strengths. No one's going to mistake a track like this for an actual band performing, rather than a glasses-wearing young person playing the role of digital alchemist-- but if you close your eyes and expand your imagination just a little, the whole thing almost sounds human.
That man-machine perfectionism is what makes Lineage's concise neatness a step up from the charmingly ramshackle boom-bap of Full Circle, but Saginaw's natural competency is also his downfall. Lineage's clean style and easily admirable sound might seem refreshing when taken into context with the teeming pot of acid-stained, bunk-bed J Dilla imitators that continue to clog up RSS feeds with poorly-tagged MP3s and 1980s-sitcom-referencing artwork, but the fact of the matter is that Lineage isn't the first record to sound like Lineage. Understand that I'm not knocking Saginaw for being unoriginal, necessarily, especially since the results are quite enjoyable-- but the fact remains that, both within the Ghostly label's roster and when taking into account the bedroom electronic scene as a whole, listening to capable replicas of yesteryear is starting to lose its luster. Clearly, Saginaw has plenty of reverence for the past, and that's fine-- but something that sounds like the future, well, wouldn't that be nice?
