Articles
2010 Top 10s and 20s
Will Long (Celer)

Albums
Bilxaboy
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
Celer & Yui Onodera
Cepia
Dead Leaf Echo
Ferraris & Uggeri
Ernesto Ferreyra
Flying Horseman
The Foreign Exchange
Les Fragments de la Nuit
Ghost and Tape
Andrew Hargreaves
Head Of Wantastiquet
i8u
Anders Ilar
Quintana Jacobsma
Kaiserdisco
Leafcutter John
Clem Leek
The Lickets
The Machine
Magda
My Fun
Ostendorf, Zoubek, Lauzier
Part Timer
Phillips + Hara
RV Paintings
Set In Sand
Shackleton
Shigeto
Matt Shoemaker
Sun City Girls
Supersilent
Swartz
Ben Swire
Collin Thomas
Tomo
Upward Arrows

Compilations / Mixes
Exp. Dance Breaks 36
Fünf
Lee Jones
The Moon Comes Closer
Note of Seconds
Tensnake

EPs
8Bitch
Celer
Jasper TX
Jozif
Lerosa
Machinefabriek
Patscan
Pleq
Simon Scott
SHEMALE
Thorsten Soltau / Weiss
Jace Syntax & BlackJack
Weiss

Shigeto: Full Circle
Ghostly International / Moodgadget

Zach Shigeto Saginaw spent four years preparing Full Circle, his first full-length Shigeto album and follow-up to two Ghostly International EPs, Semi-Circle and What We Held On To. What did the preparation involve? For starters, four years spent collecting field recordings using a Tascam mini-recorder to capture sounds of glasses, chains, singing monks, friends' musical efforts, and the like, with the finished product a blinding mind-melt and beat-based take on instrumental hip-hop. Saginaw brings a rich background to the project: leading up to it, he studied jazz for three years at the New School in NYC and then three more in London where he dedicated himself to learning electronic production. Relocating to Brooklyn, Saginaw became involved in the Shigeto and A Setting Sun projects and produced remixes for Praveen & Benoit, Tycho, Mux Mool, Beautiful Bells, and Shlohmo, among others.

The album's beat-centric tone is set from its first moments when “Ann Arbor Part 1” (an homage to Saginaw's hometown) locks into place with a slinky boom-bap swagger and dazed synth attack. Buckshot snares, crisp hi-hats, and pumping kick drums power a tune that's equal parts amorphous and clangorous (the later “Ann Arbor Part 2” gets a boost from a sample cameo of Detroit MC SelfSays). The video arcade-strafed “Escape From the Incubator” writhes and squiggles like a lost relic from the early-IDM era mangled by found sounds and bleep-hop squelch. “So So Lovely” transmutes sampled noises into downtempo funk-hop and sprinkles the results with synthesizer spice. Time slows down for “Relentless Drag,” whose druggy, slow-mo shudder and drag Saginaw spikes with a wiry guitar(?) motif. The album exits on what starts out as a somewhat languorous tip in “Look at All the Smiling Faces”  with a dreamy tenor sax helping to pull the blinds down low before rambunction kicks in to take us out. While the album has peak moments, such as “Sky of the Revolution,” a gloriously radiant sampling of bleep-hop, it ain't all perfect. At the center of the whirlwind that is “Brown Eyed Girl” lies a bumping drum attack that at times threatens to splinter into shards, and “Children at Midnight,” a mash-up of acoustic jazz and hip-hop, is less fluid than the other tracks and ultimately less convincing. What recommends Full Circle most of all is the fecundity of Saginaw's imagination. Though the material does at times sound as if it's about to burst at its seams, the album nevertheless impresses as a marvel of found sound resourcefulness and creativity.

December 2010