Beatport Presents Sigha at Womb, Tokyo

Beatport Presents Sigha at Womb, Tokyo

5 October, 2011 | 7.07AM

• Written by: Beatportal
• Filed under: Music News: beatport presents, hotflush, sigha, tokyo, womb

After last month’s successful party with Objekt at Tokyo’s Eleven club, Beatport proudly presents another rising star of the European/U.K. club scene, playing for the first time in Japan: Sigha. Recording for labels like Scuba’s Hotflush, James Ruskin’s Blueprint and his own Our Circula Sound, the London-based musician has created his signature sound by combining techno’s linear motion and dubstep’s suggestive low end. Dark, sensual and intense, his music is at the forefront of a new wave of bass music. Experience the full force of Sigha on the acclaimed Funktion One system when he performs at Womb on October 15.

We spoke to Sigha, aka London’s James Shaw, about his music, his background, and his love of all things dark and all-consuming. Read on for the interview.

Sigha, “HF029A1” [Hotflush Recordings]

BEATPORTAL: We’ll start with a very basic question—how do you pronounce “Sigha,” and where does the name come from?

SIGHA: The name was lifted from a book, I changed the spelling around a bit and I liked the way it looked and sounded. The “g” is actually silent, so it’s supposed to be pronounced “si-ah,” but I’ve pretty much got used to all the variations on it I hear now. It really didn’t occur to me that people would have trouble with pronunciation when I settled on it, I just really liked the way it looked with the “g” in there.

Since you began releasing in 2008, you’ve moved from more broken, swung rhythms into more straight-ahead techno grooves. What accounted for the shift?

My first few releases certainly leaned more towards the bass-music side of things than what I’m doing now. Around this time I was listening to a lot older techno stuff again, lots of Basic Channel and Chain Reaction records, and some of the newer things that were coming out of Berlin at the time, Dettmann, Klock, Shed and the Ostgut crew, what guys like Pole were doing, but the majority of my friends were predominantly making and listening to dubstep. The first few records were a byproduct of this combination, I suspect. I remember wanting to write music that I felt I was missing in my sets, tracks that translated the vibe and hypnotism that I love in techno to a more traditionally dubstep place, but without resorting to things like big dub chords. It’s the long, tacky tooliness that I wanted to get across, I think.

The transition from the early releases into the more purist techno I’ve been putting out recently has been pretty natural. I started sending Paul (Scuba) more 4/4 stuff, and his reaction was very positive. I’m incredibly fortunate that he’s got such an open-minded take on music and his policy for Hotflush really reflects that. He was very supportive of the direction I wanted to move in and that really gave me the opportunity to develop as an artist. 

Did you grow up on techno? Your recent “Sigha” EP for Hotflush has a really classic feel to it, almost reminiscent of old Kanzleramt records.

Thank you! That’s a great compliment. I’d love to say yes, but I’d be lying unfortunately. If we’re talking in broad brushstrokes, my background is in rock really. I’ve played guitar since I was 14 and spent my teens playing in bands and listening to groups like Sonic Youth, Pixies, Joy Division, My Bloody Valentine, and the Smashing Pumpkins. Even up until my late teens the only experience I’d had of any real dance music was being forced to listen to my mates’ garage and jungle tapes occasionally. By the time I was 18, I had this idea that club music was basically unintelligent loopy crap by people who couldn’t play an instrument, if I’m totally honest. I was into some electronic music like Aphex Twin, LFO, and Squarepusher but had totally written off the rest of it.

When I went to music college I’d still never set foot in a club, but was somehow coerced one night into keeping a friend company while he drove out of town to pick up someone from a techno party in a warehouse squat. I can’t even begin to describe the feeling I got once I stepped inside, other than that it was one of those lightbulb moments. Suddenly this music that I’d fully written off as pointless rubbish made complete sense. After that I put down my guitar and decided to learn to produce and DJ basically.

There’s a gorgeous dark-ambient track that closes out your last Hotflush single. Do you do a lot of music in that vein?

Yeah is the short answer, a lot more. I really enjoy making ambient stuff, I’m very into textures and spaces created by the sound rather than hooks or big synths in general, so writing soundscapes is something that definitely scratches that itch. There’ll be plenty more of that coming for sure.

Sigha, “I Am Apathy, I Am Submission” [Blueprint Records]

How did you hook up with James Ruskin’s Blueprint label?

I’m a massive fan of both James and Blueprint, so towards the end of last year I sent him some tracks just on the off chance he might like them enough to play. The Blueprint family is pretty tight-knit and only a handful of artists have released on there over the years, so I really wasn’t hoping for more than that, to be honest. He was really enthusiastic about the music from the off and pretty quickly asked me if I’d be interested in doing a 12. Blueprint is such an institution for great UK techno and has been a huge influence on me, so to get support to that extent from an artist like James has been amazing and an absolute honour.

At the risk of pigeonholing you, your work tends to be pretty dark. Do you ever have the urge to bust out with a sunny, summery love song?

I think I just like a certain emotional response, and when listening to and writing music, and that’s definitely what comes out in my Sigha stuff. For me, good techno is quite a cathartic experience—in the right environment everything gets stripped away and you’re left with just yourself and the sound. It’s very meditative. It’s not about whether a track is light or dark, or soft or hard, but what I’m generally looking for is this hypnotic quality. When you make something like you mentioned, a big sunny tune or whatever, you’re telling people how to feel. Music is very powerful, and its ability to dictate people’s emotions is in itself is very interesting, but when things are more abstract and subtle, people can lose themselves completely. On the dancefloor it’s maybe the difference between being lost in the moment, and there being no moment at all. It’s very hard to describe. 

Can you tell us a little about how you make your music? Are you using mostly software, hardware, a mixture of both? Whatever you’re using, the sound of it is amazingly rich and full. Do you spend a lot of time on the EQing and mix down?

I’m totally software-based at the moment, which has recently come with a whole host of problems, but over the years it has worked well for me in general. In the future I’d like to invest in some hardware and do some live stuff with it, but right now I like the ease that comes with writing when everything’s “in the box” so to speak. The software-versus-hardware argument is something that is easy to get caught up in, but it’s important to remember that you can still produce terrible sounding music using amazing hardware.

It really varies from track to track mix-wise, I’ll keep going until I’m finally happy with how it sounds. I like to keep the writing process quite fast generally. Good ideas happen in a second, the longer you spend working on something the more the original idea will become watered down. But maybe that’s just my excuse for a short attention span.

Is your label Our Circula Sound vinyl-only? What’s the thinking behind that—and do you have any plans to take it digital?

Right now OCS is vinyl only, yeah. I’m a bit obsessive about records and work in a record shop, so when I came round to setting the label up it made sense to me to work with what I knew, if that makes sense. It’s a diminished market compared to even five years ago, but we’ve been very lucky with support, and so far, sales for OCS have been very good. There have been more and more people asking about digital, though, so we-re going to start doing it around OCS005—that’s the plan, anyway. 

Finally… what’s next for Sigha?

Over the next month you can find me playing at Sonotown in Paris on October 8th, Tokyo at Womb on the 15th, the On ADE special in Amsterdam on the 20th, Warsaw on the 21st, and I’m playing the Beatport stage at the Fly Bermuda Festival in Berlin on 5th November.

Release-wise there’s another Hotflush 12 coming soon as well as a whole host of projects that I’ve been working on for a while, but which have been put on hold due to a broken studio computer. The next Our Circula Sound will be out late October or early November and features three killer tracks from Shifted. 

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