One Step Back, Two Steps Forward: Shigeto in interview

It takes conviction to step back into your past so that you might move forwards again; it also takes a great deal of self-discipline to convince yourself that it’s right to risk returning to a place where you run the risk of walking in your own shadows. That Ghostly International’s Shigeto would return to his native Michigan earlier this year, having spent a decade or so in between New York and London after growing up in Ann Arbour, isn’t perhaps so surprising when hearing his previous records and listening to him speak.

The producer – whose stage name is both his middle name and grandfather’s first name – holds strong family values and his family still live locally. “Michigan is home and having a sense of that is what makes me comfortable,” he explains from Paris, where he’s out on tour with fellow Ghostly label mate Com Truise. “It’s like what religion must be for some people I guess, having that something you can always go back to."

Yet this homing trait sits at odds with Shigeto’s latest record No Better Time Than Now. His previous material grew to be inflected with sonic clippings denoting his past, paeans for home evident in staple Detroit sounds of motown and blues, jazz and disco; they zigzagged through the jarred electronics of his EPs, 2010 LP Full Circle and last year’s Lineage like lightning forking black skies. Now that he’s home, however, No Better Time Than Now sounds like it’s travelling back out the other way.

The album cuts loose from previous home-doting homage and instead glimmers in a whole new light, with the likes of Ringleader and Ritual Howl informed by the sort of chiming techno and soft elemental edges found on influential European labels like Border Community and Kompakt. The LP title itself, meanwhile, suggests an artist whose creative direction is very much on a progressive trajectory, even as his physical one has reverted back. 

“I think going back into my history ultimately made this progression easier on me,” he reflects. “I wanted to go home so that I could build something bigger for many reasons: personal life, wanting to save money – I need to start getting health insurance and all that sort of stuff.” He was careful, though, not to succumb fully to comfort and return to his boyhood Ann Arbour, instead opting for its bigger neighbour, Detroit city. “It didn’t feel like backtracking, it still felt new because I’ve never lived in the city itself; and because it’s affordable I suddenly had all this space for the first time. I’ve got a separate studio now and so the record was recorded more like a band because I could just leave everything set up.” 

“I wanted to go home so that I could build something bigger" – Shigeto

Shigeto had actually moved back to Michigan with his fiancée – who he’d met before he’d even started exploring electronic production – with an intention to settle down, buy a house and start a small business. “Long story short? We split up,” he says curtly. However, although admitting he was “heartbroken,” the break allowed him to see his familiar surroundings through new eyes, free of the shared perception of life that one can take on when involved in such a deep relationship. “I don’t want to speak for her out of respect, but for me, when we broke up my mother said ‘you look so much happier.’ It was like I had this glow and I think what it is, is you spend all these years loving someone and you seek approval all the time from them because you want them to love you; but when that was gone I could stand back and really see what I’d actually achieved, and what I was doing in life. It was like a new mirror after that, every time I looked I saw a different me.”          

Shigeto is used to forging fresh creative paths against the backdrop of love dashed. Smitten with jazz music as a 10 year-old, the young son of a deli owner set being a jazz drummer as his ultimate goal. “Drumming remains what I feel I can express myself best with,” he says, and it still plays a major part in his live set. However, upon closing in on his jazz aspirations, with a University place at New School in New York to study jazz playing, he found the terrain of his promised land to be somewhat beige. “It was this thing that I considered to be this most free expression and had the least amount of rules,” he recalls dolefully, “and then this University environment put it in black and white, right and wrong terms. I just found it really saddening.” Disillusioned, he dropped out and found himself drifting, his confidence in picking a new direction to take shattered, given the disappointment his previous choice had caused. 

Gladly accepting an exit route of a job in a London café, offered to him by a family friend, Shigeto found internal solace, embracing the sense of being hidden among the inattentive millions. “I’d come out of this jazz scene where everyone knew each other and competed for the same slots,” he says. “Before that I’d lived in Ann Arbour all my life with my closest friends and family. But in London no one knew me! But when no one’s paying attention you get the space and time to really work out who you are and what you’re doing with your life. And I really dug those little feelings you get when you’re living somewhere else, which tell you that this isn’t home. They gave me a sense of independence I’d never had previously.” 

It was in London that he started to furtively explore electronic production as a new creative release; his first EP under his moniker came out on Ann Arbour label Moodgadget in 2008, (around the same time, he also released an EP on the same label uner the name Frank Omura.) Moodgadget is closely linked with Ghostly International, and was founded in 2004 by Jakub Marek Alexander and Adam E. Hunt out of a desire to promote electronic music driven by narrative and process, as opposed to being created for the club scene. Shigeto’s union with them and ultimately Ghostly makes sense, given that he winds his own personal narrative intrinsically around the music he makes, which sets him apart from many peers, who are more reticent in admitting any intended thematic dialogue in their work. “I’d say that without making a personal narrative I wouldn’t be able to make music, he says. “I couldn’t be a persona with an aesthetic, it’s just easier for me to be me; and although it can hurt being more open, it’s not enough to not want to do it. I mean, this album’s about me! I guess it’s a diary of the last year of my life, the move and the break-up.” 

“I’m not a techy guy,” he continues, “and to be honest for the past couple of years I’ve really struggled with how I want to convey my identity through my music. But I feel that I use these electronics only as a vessel, so if someone says it sounds like there’s a human behind it then that’s fucking perfect for me!” Shigeto describes the autobiographical No Better Than Time Than Now as the third in a trilogy, with 2010’s Full Circle referencing his teenage life, in releasing it on Moodgadget whom he’d looked up to since High School, and Lineage a tribute to the Japanese side of his family. “But then,” he points out “this is also the first from this new space, so it really could be the start of something too." Such is the on-going evolution of an artist whose ultimate direction always remains forward.