(House, Techno) [CD] VA - Mixmag Presents: Tiga - Dance Action - 2014, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

Constant reinvention, innovation and collaboration have kept Tiga one of dance music's biggest and best loved stars. But his real secret? He's never lost his sense of wonder – or fun
Words Chris Cottingham
Photos Perou
In 1993, when Tiga James Sontag was 17, he sold his most treasured possession: a Roland TR-909 drum machine. The reason? To fund a trip to Love Parade in Berlin. Tiga’s mentor, Montreal house DJ Robert de la Gautier, put him in touch with a friend in Germany. “I arranged that this guy would give me 800DM for my 909,” remembers Tiga. “I got off the train from the airport and handed it to him. He also let me stay with him for a week, so I was instantly plugged into the Berlin scene.” Was it worth it? “Of course. It was incredible.” Tiga ended up partying for 24 hours at legendary Berlin club Tresor and hanging out with early 90s icons such as Westbam and Mixmaster Morris. His 909 was replaceable, but a week spent with techno’s big names: well, that was priceless. Twenty years later the reason Tiga is one of dance music’s most enduring DJs is that he’s never lost that wide-eyed, do-anything enthusiasm. You can hear it on ‘Bugatti’, released last year on his own Turbo label and recently signed to Universal. The clipped, banging kicks, white noise engine drones and Tiga deadpanning, “Girl comes up to me and says, ‘What you driving. I say, Bugatti’” are exciting, weird and entertainingly dumb. Same with ‘Givin In’, the latest from his long-term ZZT collaboration with Florian ‘Zombie Nation’ Senfter. Released in March, it’s a rave-era homage built around a Lisa Stansfield sample. Both are records made by someone still in thrall to the magical possibilities located somewhere on the far side of 4AM out there on the dancefloor. Tonight, Tiga is playing at the Bob Beaman club in Munich. Back in 2007, he spent a couple of months living here, just round the corner from the hotel he’s staying in. He looks happy to be back, all smiles and jokes. He’s was 40 in July, but looks at least ten years younger in a casual yet carefully considered outfit of baseball cap, powder-blue Ralph Lauren shirt and combat trousers. Back in 2009, around the release of his second album ‘Ciao’, he posted a spoof interview online featuring lines such as, “I see it as my job to descend from above and sprinkle the crowd with unimaginable spices.” It was followed by another last year. Both are hilarious, well aimed yet friendly send-ups. You can never tell if he’s taking the piss. For example, his favourite thing in Munich is, he says: “My doctor.” Apparently, he broke his toe playing football. His doctors in Canada couldn’t cure it, so he went to Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt, Bayern Munich’s physician, who treated it with “radiation”. “He has a clinic here,” Tiga explains. “Last time I was there I bumped into Usain Bolt.” True? Could well be – but sometimes it’s hard to tell. He definitely doesn’t take himself too seriously. ‘Bugatti’, for example, was the result of “a couple of hours in the studio being a little bit stupid. The times I take myself the least seriously are the best. I’ve fought hard with myself to keep that childlike attitude. That’s how it felt with ‘Sunglasses At Night’, too.” Is he surprised that ‘Bugatti’ has been signed to a major and playlisted at Radio 1? “Yeah, but I love it because it’s such a weird record,” he replies. “It’s my favourite thing in the world when you make something weird with absolutely no calculation and people love it anyway.” He’s had to make a couple of concessions, however. “To be one hundred per cent clear, I have had no problems working with a major label,” he explains. “But I’m used to ripping off what ever I want. On the Turbo release I stole the Ferrari logo and changed it to ‘Tiga: Bugatti’. They were like, ‘We can’t use Ferrari’s logo!’ – I’m not used to that.” Just for or the record, Tiga doesn’t own a Bugatti. He drives a BMW 750i: swish, but not flash.

Crucially, Tiga can take a joke as well as make them. Getting off the flight to Munich, he tweeted, “Just spent 90min in a British Airways seat designed by a sadist with an exceptional mastery of geometry.” He got called out for it by satirical Twitter profile DJs Complaining. “Yeah…” he grins, shrugging as if to say it’s a fair cop. “DJing is a ridiculously good job,” he adds. “It was an insane job back when I was getting paid a hundred dollars a night. If you can make money out of making music, you’ve won the lottery. I always joke that they keep adding zeros to things, but if they took them away people would still do it.” D’you know what? He probably would.
Tiga seems to know everyone. Before he released ‘Sunglasses At Night’ in 2001 and became the poster boy for the electroclash scene, he had a decade-long career as a nightclub owner and party promoter in his home town of Montreal. “I know so many people from all these different eras,” he says. He seems to have a story about everyone, too – including Kanye West, who interrupted a dinner in Paris to speak to someone else and ended up delivering a 20-minute monologue to the whole table that included the line “I’m all about Warhol.”
To say Tiga is well-connected is a huge understatement.His career is built out of these connections. He is a serial collaborator. “I don’t need someone else for ideas,” he says, “but I do need a babysitter to lock the door.” His first partner was Jori Hulkkonen, who co-produced ‘Sunglasses At Night’ as Zyntherius. Hulkkonen also co-produced ‘Bugatti’. ZZT is his long-running project with Zombie Nation. James Murphy, Soulwax/2ManyDJs and Jesper Dahlbäck featured heavily in the credits for Tiga’s two albums, ‘Sexor’ (2006) and ‘Ciao’ (2009).
Tiga’s most important collaborator in recent years is Matthew Dear. The first track they worked on was ‘Plush’ in 2012. At the time, Tiga admits, he was in a bit of a rut. “There’s a cycle to things,” he says. “I started to have trouble finding things I liked. I started to bitch. I started to go back to older records. Then there was a dry period. Then I started to ask questions.
As a DJ that’s when you have to admit that it’s you: you’re not finding the great records. They’re out there, but you have to find new ways of finding things. You have to make new friends.” Enter Matthew Dear. Since ‘Plush’ the pair have made two killer club tracks billed as Tiga vs Audion: ‘Let’s Go Dancing’ (2013) and ‘Fever’ (2014). Dear has also co-produced much of Tiga’s third album (almost finished, but no release date yet). Dear was the shot in the arm Tiga needed.
The important thing about the Matthew Dear hook-up is that Tiga made it happen. He cold-called him. Tiga is a big believer in powering through the lows. His favourite book at the moment is Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration And Get To Work by Mason Currey. “It’s about the daily habits of writers and musicians,” Tiga explains. “Almost everyone who’s serious doesn’t wait for the muse, they just keep going. That’s what you have to do.” But he describes himself as a procrastinator, doesn’t he? “Yes, in the studio – but overall I’m still doing what I was doing when I was 18. Every day of my life for twenty years has been about designing record covers, coming up with ideas, looking for records, doing mixtapes. There’s room for improvement. I’m not done yet.”
He believes it’s very important to be into new stuff. He “gets bored of records really fast” and says the key to being a great DJ is to have 80 amazing records in your box – but they should never stay the same for too long. “People get very conservative in their ideas. They start to get rigid. They think what they know is the way. There’s a lot of fear. I guess I just have enough energy to keep going with things. I’m never satisfied.”
Don’t close off your mind, in other words. He recently changed his outlook on Ibiza. For the best part of 10 years, he “never wanted to play there” because he pictured it as “British tourists in San Antonio”, and he hates anything cheesy. For example, the most embarrassing thing he ever did was hire a stretch Hummer in Barcelona when he was playing Sónar. Trapped in a ludicrous vehicle looking like a fool was, he says, like “an out of body experience. In his defence, he was “under the influence of Australians”. Ibiza fell into a similar category: a bit vulgar. A few years ago he started playing there, but “there was no love affair”. This year he spent six weeks based in the north of the island, and is now sold. “People told me about the North. I tried it and absolutely loved it,” he says. “I’m researching buying somewhere there. It’s beautiful. I’d like to spend a whole summer there. I’m a hundred per cent aware that I’m extremely late to the party: twenty years late!”

If he does have a regret, it dates back to ‘Sunglasses At Night’. Together with Ed DMX, Tiga and Jori Hulkkonen appeared on a German Top Of The Pops-style chart show. Tiga wore a fringed white leather jacket and a lot of make-up. “I was nervous about getting on stage and singing live, but I also wanted it,” he remembers. Afterwards, he felt he had “a long way to go” as a live performer. “DJing was so successful that it allowed me to not face that fear,” he says. “I did have a long way to go, but when I look back at it now I think, ‘Actually, you’re pretty good’. Had me and Jori and Ed kept doing that for a year, we would have been awesome. I wish we’d done that.” A full-on Tiga live show would be quite something. “I don’t think it’s too late,” he says. Watch this space...
Bob Beaman, conceived by local Munich DJ/producer David Muallem, is a shrine to audio perfection. A single room encased in two feet of sound insulation, with 60,000 holes drilled in the walls, none of which are parallel, it is designed to be the perfect acoustic space. It holds just 300 people – way fewer than Tiga normally plays to – but he’s nonetheless a regular. It’s not hard to see why he keeps coming back: ‘Bugatti’ sounds immense in here. Even though it’s a Thursday night, the place is packed for his set, which starts at 2.30am and finishes past five in the morning. Handsome Bavarians jack into the next day, while Tiga switches from leading-edge techno such as Randomer to acid house classics including ‘Lack Of Love’ by Adonis & Charles B. The scene is one of impeccable Mitteleuropean cool.
Tiga may be a byword word for all that’s hip and trendy, but it didn’t start out that way. He talks about how Altern 8 changed his life, specifically ‘Evapor 8’. When he heard ‘Strings Of Life’ by Derrick May he thought May had sampled Alter 8, not the other way round. Tiga grew up on the dayglo sounds of rave, not the cooler techno influences and Kraftwerk. “I was the guy who wore a gas mask at parties,” he says. “That is the shit that made an impression on me.” And that’s why he has a soft spot for EDM. It is, he says, the logical extension of Boys Noize and 2ManyDJs: “high octane, maximum, go to ten music”. He sees similarities between the music he loved as a teenager, Altern 8 or Acen, which was “crazy, full of ideas and irreverence, speeding vocals up, sampling James Morrison”, and a record by Bauer, who’s “a crazy kid who has weird ideas doing it in a weird way”. He doesn’t agree with someone like Seth Troxler (a friend, by the way) who thinks EDM is the worst thing ever. Earlier in the summer, Tiga played at Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas. The bill was full of big EDM names. He was blown away by the energy. “It was properly awesome,” he says. “It reminded me of seeing The Prodigy. It was the same thing for the ten thousand kids watching. Most of my friends are quite snobby techno and house guys with lots of credibility. I remember thinking – and maybe I’m just a raver at heart – that this destroys most of the parties at which most of those people play. If I’m honest, if I was 17 now I’d be down the front at Skrillex.”
All this comes with the caveat that he’s not really into most of the music that gets tagged as EDM; that EDM and underground dance music are so different as to be incomparable. “Steve Aoki and Marcel Dettmann are totally different in every way. You can’t really compare them.” Not really, no. But at the same time he doesn’t have time for people who rewrite their personal history to cast themselves in a better light. “The people who champion deep house or a twenty-hour François Kevorkian set, I think they conveniently forget they weren’t hatched that way.” He pauses for a moment, thinking, then adds: “D’you know what? I’ve tried really hard to retain that naivety you have when you first start going clubbing. I’m not into being more old-skool than someone else. I don’t like that. I’d rather be new school.” Tiga: the artist who never grew up. There’s a lesson in that.
Source: Mixmag

James Sontag (Tiga)