Building a sonic bridge between the Semi-Circle EP and the upcoming Full Circle full-length, Shigeto’s What We Held On To EP is the next installment in the artist’s ongoing treatise on his family’s troubled history, as well as a free taste of what’s to come from the prolific Brooklyn producer.
What We Held On To is both simpler and heavier than its predecessor, with Shigeto paring his tracks down to their essentials and adding a dollop of blown-speaker low end; it’s also a bit more melancholy, owing to the addition of a few elegantly disheveled vocal samples and liberal use of piano. After She Smokes matches a sinister metallic “shhhing!” (Swords colliding? Knives sharpening?) to an elegiac singing voice and a series of swelling synths—certainly one of Shigeto’s prettiest moments—while Bitter Sweet’s stuttering boom-clap and machine-like hums alternate with more doe-eyed vocals and a touch of understated bossa-nova cool. The EP’s second half is darker than the first, as the overdriven digital menace of What We Held On To leads into Grandma’s Words / Rise Out of the Stone, a two-part invocation of Saginaw’s grandmother’s experience as a Japanese-American during the horrors of WWII. Download the EP HERE
[audio:http://bamalovesoul.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/03-Bitter-Sweet.mp3|titles=03 Bitter Sweet]
Shigeto – Bitter Sweet
