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Event
GENIASS PRESENTS: Ghostly Int'l Tour w/Shigeto + Beacon + Heathered Pearls
Genre: Electronic
Cover: $10 adv/$12 dos
Ages: 21+
Event Listing: http://ashevillemusichall.com/music-schedule/event/ghostly-intl-tour-wshigeto-beacon-heathered-pearls
SHIGETO:
Artists take on pseudonyms for a multitude of reasons, but in Zach Saginaw's case, those reasons run deeper than most. Zach records under the name Shigeto. It's his middle name; it's also his grandfather's name, a tribute to the Japanese branch of Zach's family tree. Shigeto also means "to grow bigger"appropriate, given Zach's premature birth-weight of less than a pound. Today, Shigeto stands for Zach's vividly beautiful electronic music. Beat-driven but given to richly textured sound design, rhythmically fractured but melodically sumptuous, Shigeto's music is a bridge between the past and present, bringing the artist face to face with a creative legacy that spans decades.
Zach was brought up on a steady diet of Michigan-bred music, as his father spoon-fed him old Motown and jazz records by the crateload. Zach picked up the drums at an early age, spending much of his childhood playing in the Detroit/Ann Arbor music scene. After nearly flunking out of high schoolsave for his music studiesZach spent three years studying jazz at the New School in NYC and three more in London, where he began woodshedding, obsessed with learning electronic production. Soon enough, beats materialized, Zach moved to Brooklyn and took up the name Shigeto, and Zach's peers began to take notice.
Zach's body of work has grown over the last few years to the tune of several EPs on Moodgadget as Shigeto and with A Setting Sun,
a pair of EPs under the alias Frank Omura (another family-name reference), and remixes for Worst Friends, Praveen & Benoit, Tycho, Mux Mool, Charles Trees, A Setting Sun, Beautiful Bells, Shlohmo, and more. The Semi-Circle EP and What We Held Onto EP were his first releases with Ghostly International in the spring of 2010. These were followed quickly by the well-received full-length Full Circle and Full Circle Remixes in late 2010 and early 2011 respectively. These releases are nominally indebted to instrumental hip-hop but, like Zach, straddling many worlds at once. Cool shades of ambient music, stuttering early IDM, dubstep sub-bass, and jazz melodicism color Shigeto's palette, which he wields with a painterly attention to detail.
Zach continues to be prolific with the upcoming 2012 release, Lineagea mini-LP of sorts that has a complex constellation of sounds and ideas that we have come to expect from the producer/drummer. However, his compositional focus and restraint grounds songs that are otherwise cosmically inclined. Never has he demonstrated such complete command of his material.
Shigeto was one of the first of a wave of young artists who grew up influenced by the label's early output. And again, names come into play. "Putting out these records on Ghostly isn't just 'getting signed,' for me," says Zach, "it's becoming part of a family, an influence that I've respected forever." Let's just say the feeling's mutual.
BEACON:
The best music is music that can make you think as well as feel, sounds that are as visceral as they are cerebral. And the best love songs are those that acknowledge that the power of human sexuality can be just as terrifying as it is thrilling, that the passion that leads us to love can also lead us into dark, dark places.
Welcome to the world of Brooklyn duo Beacon, who explore the dark side of the sweet melody with a sound that's as seductive as it is subtly discomfiting. The duo Thomas Mullarney III and Jacob Gossett met at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute, where they were studying sculpture and painting respectively. As with many other great musical partnerships, this one involves two disparate sets of influences coming together to form a sound that's both fresh and exciting. They fuse the deceptively sweet melodies of R&B with an intoxicating undercurrent of darkness, drawing on influence as disparate as Warp's back catalogue and Underworld.
The fusion of these two sounds R&B's melody and sexuality, electronic music's complexity and, especially, the bass -
heavy sound design of Mullarney's influences ("Bass is key to our music," he enthuses, "big, thunderous rap bass") would provide a blueprint for Beacon's own sound: there's a duality at play here, an idea of something dark lurking beneath a sleek veneer, a sense of latent conflict and uncertain resolution. "I think the balance of inhibitions is at the core of my own songwriting," says Mullarney. "The love songs we write are ones that have an inherent guilt implied. Inside love lives a more sinister, carnal element that is constantly being subdued or released."
The duo's first release is the No Body EP, four songs that deftly walk the line between seductive and sinister. The production takes as much from the world of non-vocal electronic music as it does from R&B and hip hop, setting Mullarney's vocals against backdrops that define as much of the song's atmosphere as do the words themselves. As Mullarney says, "We're channeling some parts of R&B's aesthetic, and updating them with today's ambient, electronic instrumentation." The result? "A kind of displaced, atmospheric pop." Music for the 21st century, indeed.
HEATHERED PEARLS:
Heathered Pearls is the alias of Polish-born Jakub Alexander, music curator of the IS050 Blog, and founder of Moodgadget Records. Jakub has been DJing over a decade sharing residencies early on with globally recognized DJs Matthew Dear and Ryan Elliott in Ann Arbor, MI then moved on to Brooklyn to play along side slow motion disco duo Worst Friends.
Jakub is known to share that crowd-pleasing hypnotic end of rhythmic day time disco, synth induced melodic electronic and swell filled post rock but always comes back to disco.
The Heathered Pearls project isn't only a DJ alias; in 2011, Ghostly International's Ghostly Music Service released Jakub's debut LP Polite Isle, which included 3 EP's done in 2011 along with a couple of singles combined into one release.
In recent years he's played at the MoMA in Manhattan, held an exciting weekly at Brooklyn Bowl called "Soon To Be Innocent Fun" and has shared the bill with many musicians at The Glasslands and Cameo Gallery.
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LocationAsheville Music Hall (View)
31 Patton Avenue
Asheville , NC 28801
United States
Categories
| Minimum Age: 21 |
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
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