All night dancing with Tiga: “I wanted to make a record that someone like Loco Dice or Sasha could play”

It’s crazy to think that an artist as current as Tiga has been involved in dance music as far back as the early 90s, rising through the ranks of his hometown in Montreal, Canada, with his seminal Turbo Records this year celebrating its 15th anniversary of releasing music. When Data Transmission mentioned this to him this week, it was as if he could hardly believe it himself.

“Wow. Time flies, thanks for pointing that out”, he laughed.

Famous for blending his natural inclinations as a pop vocalist with an underground dance edge, Tiga cemented his high profile in the previous decade with crossover smashes like Sunglasses at Night and Pleasure From The Bass, somewhat a quirky leader of the new electro movement. He’s held his presence as one of the most funny and irreverent DJs using Twitter, and this was showcased in fine form at the Amsterdam Dance Event last week, when he hosted a “World according to... Tiga” alongside Seth Troxler and Matthew Dear. Discussing the increasing ‘industrialisation’ of the dance music industry, a sense of humour was never far away.

In recent years though, fans of Tiga will have noticed a distinct change in his sets, with a growing tendency towards the deeper sounds of house and techno. While you’d think it would make a stark change to the bigroom electro records that characterised his sets throughout the noughties, it’s a credit to how smoothly he’s pulled off the transition that it all still feels consistent with the Tiga that we know and love; a sense of humour and a “light touch”, as he puts it.

This approach has been showcased in a big way this summer with his single Let’s Go Dancing, a collaboration with Matthew Dear under his Audion alias. And it’s a righteous track indeed; Tiga’s simple refrain of “Let’s go dancing, I wanna go dancing with you, all night dancing,” is worked with effortless pop panache. Around it though the pair have built a rock-solid tech house track with hypnotic dancefloor pull, and it’s proved an irresistible crossover hit over the summer.

“I wanted to actually make a record that can be played in a regular environment,” Tiga told Data Transmission. “Something that could live in the real clubs, not just in my own weird imaginary world. That was the goal, and it feels very nice to reach that goal”.

How was your ADE experience?

It was my first time at the conference, and I actually really enjoyed it. The parties I played I really liked, I played a warehouse party with Matthew Dear and Dubfire, and a Watergate party at Studio80 on Saturday night and that was fantastic. I was in and out a little too much, I would have enjoyed to have had a night off and a bit more time, but it was still fun.

Your panel was one of the more irreverent and funny panels I saw at ADE. Seth Troxler talked at one point about how the industry takes itself a little too seriously at times.

Well, that panel was quite serious by my standards [laughs]. There were some serious themes to be discussed, but how we engage those issues and how we think about them, there’s a light touch there. There’s humour to be found in almost anything, and that’s usually a good way to go about it. Like we said there, the dance music world can be a little serious at times, and sometimes it can get a little bit stale. I think the biggest change in the past four or five years has been on the business level, and the popularity level, and the infrastructure has gone kind of more corporate and much bigger. But the overall attention given to dance music, it’s a positive thing. It won’t last forever, but there are a lot of positives to be taken from it.

I realised this morning that this year will be the 15th anniversary of Turbo Records.

Wow. Time flies, thanks for pointing that out! [laughs]. That’s crazy, because it seems like it wasn’t very long ago that it was the 10th anniversary. I’m quite proud of Turbo, and what we’ve managed to do. It’s very, very difficult being an independent record label, especially over the past ten years or so. It’s a very difficult business, and a lot of forces are aligned against you, especially if you adopt a no compromise take on it. We really just release music we like. It’s a strange business, and we joke in the office that in many ways it’s a perverse business, because it’s one where you can put so much into something with potentially so little reward. Whereas managers have grown, and agents have reaped the benefits – everyone knows the record label itself hasn’t exactly gotten the fairest shake in the past ten years. But I made the decision to keep going and to do it for the same reasons, and I’m happy with the results.

That’s interesting to hear, because I’d definitely think of Turbo as one of the stronger independent dance labels out there.

We definitely feel that we get a lot of love, and particularly in terms of access, we get great demos now, and equally we get some really great remixes, we have that ‘pull’ that we didn’t always have, and that’s how you can measure the regard in which you’re held in. It’s not like it’s a sob story, t’s just a business with some built-in limitations, while elsewhere there’s other parts of the industry with a big, unknown, glorious potential future. it’s a boring topic now and everybody knows now it’s ancient history, but if you’re a record label now you need to diversify and find other ways to add to your revenue. If you’re just selling music, you’re basically doing the PR work for the artists, the managers and the agents.

You’ve had a very interesting evolution as an artist in recent years. There’s had been a very definite shift in the type of records you were playing, but the best thing there’s a very strong consistency to your identity as a DJ.

The basic shift for me is that I started to have trouble finding big, mainroom, high-impact records that I still liked, it’s that simple. For myself personally, I wasn’t finding the records that I liked. And the flipside is I was finding a lot of techno records I liked, and a lot of deeper, weirder records, and as a DJ personally, you gravitate towards the records that you love, as that’s what you have to work with. This year especially, most of the sets I’ve played have been a little deeper and a little slower. You also try to get away from so much of your own material. And it’s tricky, because there’s always a percentage of the crowd that wants to hear your classics, there’s a percentage that wants to hear banging shit that tears the roof off.

If I don’t play Mind Dimension, there might be a group of people who go home and say “what the fuck is his problem”. And that’s tricky, because Mind Dimension isn’t just a meek record that can just be mixed into a set, it’s a statement. It doesn’t go well with a deep house record. There’s a little bit of a challenge there, so you move around, and you hope that the people go with you. For me that’s the downside to the freedom of the movement, but in the end I’ll take it.

I guess you get around that sneakily with accapellas and remixes.

Exactly, there are ways around it.

It was perhaps Turbo’s New Jack Techno compilation that signaled a bit of a change?

For the label it was. We had been doing a lot of different things, on the one hand we had Proxy records that were quite ravey, and we were doing some other things that were quite big room. And that compilation was a bit of a statement of intent… I think the most important thing was that sometimes it’s nice to be very focused. It’s great to be eclectic and do lots of different things, but sometimes it’s nice to say okay, we found this one particular sound and now we’re gonna go deep into it without deviating from it. And for Turbo that was new territory. Because for us, that wasn’t just a bunch of great records we liked, that was a particular sound that we’ve gone and explored over ten tracks. Which is what a lot of labels do all the time, but for Turbo and me that was a little bit different. We’d had a bit of a gold rush of new artists who were coming to us, like Clouds and Gingy & Bordello, we had this new generation of guys and they were all into techno. So for me it was nice to go back to my roots with little bit and focus.

It’s interesting that techno is the sound that makes more sense to you as an artist at the moment, rather than big-room electro records.

The truth is, I’m already kind of over techno [laughs]. Really it just comes down to finding records you love. It’s just that simple. I got a new Ame record a few weeks ago, and it’s like straight-up trance. When you find a record you like, you want to play it and support it, so you have to kind of build around it. And sometimes that can be the beginning… before you know it, after a few gigs you’re playing a trance set, whereas a month earlier you were playing a deep house set. That’s kind of how it works. Trust me, if somebody right now gave me ten giant, monster electro tracks, giant stadium electro house records that really I loved, then I would play them. I would love to. Because that’s the best shit to play, because everyone goes crazy, it works in a giant environment and it’s fun. But I haven’t found those records.

Your single with Audio Let’s Go Dancing has had a big impact this summer.

Yeah, it’s been nice, for both me and Matt. I’m not gonna say it was a ‘cynical’ record, but it was definitely made deliberately. Some records you make very naively, and you couldn’t care less, you’re not thinking of the final outcome, you’re not thinking of ‘where’ or ‘who’. Let’s Go Dancing though was a little bit more self-conscious. I wanted to make a record that someone Loco Dice, Sasha or maybe Adam Beyer could actually play. Not a record that people just think is cool, or a record that’s weird. I wanted to actually make a record that can be played in a regular environment, something simple that doesn’t need explanation. Something that could live in the real clubs, not just in my own weird imaginary world. That was the goal, and it feels very nice to reach that goal. No matter what style of music it is, even the stuff that people like to make fun of, I don’t think it’s so easy to do. It’s not so easy to sit down and say, okay I’m gonna make a tech house record. It’s not automatic; it still takes thought and ideas.

And there’s no real formula to a successful track.

I don’t think so, and certainly not if you want to make it different. If you’re happy for it to be a cookie-cutter version, and a lot of people are, then okay. But to make something that still has a little bit of personal flair, it’s not easy. And Let’s Go Dancing is exactly what it’s supposed to be, and that’s a good feeling. When you set out to do something, and it comes out exactly how you intended – I’m very happy with the reaction. When you hear someone like Sasha is closing his set in Ibiza with it, you know that from one DJ to another, that carries weight.

How’s the album coming along, is that an idea of what we can expect from it?

No, it’s not gonna be like that at all. The basic idea of merging dance with a pop edge will still be there, but otherwise Let’s Go Dancing soundwise isn’t really representative. The album’s coming along really well, but I must say I need to speed it up a little [laughs]. It’s hard with the touring and so many things, I need to hunker down and finish it. I’m trying more for the three months, that’s my objective. But the next six months, 100 per cent.

Can you give us an idea of what it’s going be like?

Whatever attempt I make to put it into words it just comes out clumsy, it’s better just to wait. There’s no magic description.

Those of you in London can catch the Turbo records boss live this weekend October 26th at The Hydra: Turbo Halloween Special with Tiga, Untold, Clouds, Sei A. at Village Underground. More information and tickets can be found by clicking here