I’ve been pushing Shigeto a lot since I first heard him a month ago. His album, Lineage, has quickly become one of those easy listens that you turn to when you can’t think of what else to listen to, like an old friend who’s always there to do nothing in particular. Since then, I feel like I’m seeing him all over, with everyone acting like he’s been a known name around the scene for years. Thankfully, I’m not the only one as Phillip over at Beats Per Minute, where I was turned onto this remix, feels the same way.
Age of Adz was a dividing record and its weird electronic bent inevitably meant it wouldn’t attain the classic status of his previous works. Still, though, every review I read made mention of the mostly-acoustic opener “Futile Devices” as a statement that Sufjan still, in fact, has “it.” He just didn’t really want to use “it” on Age of Adz. For Shigeto, though, it seems that it may have been the other way around. For him, “Futile Devices” may have been the easy-road option. So, of course, he decided to imbue with a little electronic flavor.
Shigeto doesn’t go as far out as Sufjan did later on in the record. His remix’s spaciness makes it feel like a cloud-thick hallucination, a translucent memory distorted by time and illness. The basic core is there, but there’s something different. It’s distracted and confused, lost in a daze. A word is a futile device–but then so is memory.