The Sounding Room: Shigeto

The Sounding Room is a rotating residency and experimental platform for artists working across sound, music, and performance.
About this Event

The Sounding Room

July–December 2026

Launching this summer as part of MOCAD’s 20th anniversary celebrations, The Sounding Room is a rotating residency and experimental platform for artists working across sound, music, and performance. Hosted in the garage of the Mike Kelley Mobile Homestead and grounded in Detroit’s histories of cultural innovation and resistance, the program invites artists to use the Homestead as a site for experimentation, collaboration, and new forms of public engagement.

Throughout each residency, artists are supported in developing and sharing new work through open rehearsals, performances, listening sessions, and workshops. Each cycle culminates in a free public performance. In partnership with Third Man Records, each live performance will contribute to a limited-edition vinyl compilation documenting the project over time.

RESIDENTS

• July - Shigeto 
• August - Zekkereya El-magharbel
• September - Battle Elf
• October - Na Bonsai
• November - Dave Hurley

Open rehearsals are tentatively scheduled for selected Thursdays and Saturdays throughout each residency cycle. Please check our Instagram for more information.

Please note that performance times are tentative and subject to change.

July Resident: Shigeto
Saturday, August 1, 3-5pm

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, his middle name and grandfather’s name, a tribute to the Japanese branch of Zach’s family tree. Shigeto stands for vividly beautiful electronic music. Beat-driven yet richly textured, rhythmically fractured yet melodically sumptuous, Shigeto’s music is a bridge between the past and present, bringing the artist face to face with a creative legacy spanning decades.

Shigeto’s releases are nominally indebted to instrumental hip-hop while also 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. He continues to be prolific with a complex constellation of sounds and ideas that we have come to expect from the producer/drummer/DJ. His compositional focus and restraint ground songs that are otherwise cosmically inclined.

Photo courtesy of the artist.