Zack Saginaw, whose middle name and producer alias is Shigeto, releases his Lineage Mini-LP today via Ghostly International. As the family tree title suggests, Lineage is a personal and reflective album—its front cover shows Saginaw’s great-grandfather’s house in Hiroshima and its back features a portrait of the same man taken while he was detained in the ’40s at the Amache Internment Camp in Grenada, Colorado. Often more spare and certainly less experimentally electronic than his previous works, Saginaw’s Lineage gestures back to his six years studying jazz in New York and London. On top of that jazz core, with its standup bass and heavenly electric piano throughout, go the digital flourishes, with glitches like jingling apartment keys, and gestures to deep relaxation hip-hop sounding at times like a somnambulist Dilla. While the internment camp artwork suggests Saginaw is unpacking some deep darkness, the album’s perfectly serene. In the best, motivational way, listening to Lineage lets you be super on-task doing something else, focused so you loop the album back two or three cycles through. For an intimate, half-hour “mini-LP,” that’s a great way to be. (via The FADER)
