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WELCOME TO NOW Perhaps the reason Tiga isn’t always mentioned in the same breath as Daft Punk is because costumery isn’t part of his schtick. Still, the parallels are there. Both are veritable legends in the dance pantheon – their long-cemented legacies testify to the best of dance music’s capabilities: that it’s infectiously and always dependably uplifting. Then, there’s the fundamental fact of how much Tiga and the helmeted twosome have, in their own ways, updated and galvanised disco, the precursor of electronic dance music.
“Club culture should start and end with a party. You’re going out to dance – that’s it. The trappings, clothes, VIP status – all of that is secondary”, he offers. Coming from one of the more gifted shapers of a culture that hundreds of millions the world over are actively involved in, these words carry an empowering freight. As he sees it, the essence of dance music isn’t its club-defined manifestations, nor its chin-stroking underground compulsions, but its fundamental power of making people dance. When we ask him about the notion of credibility in the DJ world, he scoffs at us: “Though, on the inside, I don’t consider myself an insider and I don’t take it seriously”. He affirms that self-seriousness inspires within him a reflexive drive to tease. That’s why No Fantasy Required is suffused with a Pucklike sense of humour. The songs, two of which are titled “Blondes Have More Fun” and “Bugatti”, unspool like amazing non-sequiturs; in-jokes whose punchlines can be felt and not thought of logically. Over these 11 club-crushing tracks, Tiga flirts with the bacchanal in a mock-sinister deadpan halfway between singing and speaking, and makes proclamations like, “I never want to be apart from you my dear / I guess it must be true / My lucky number’s two”.
Disco is a signifier of fun and it’s how a DJ operates within that rubric that dictates how they’ll be judged by the people that look to them to make them dance. And in this climate of impending EDM fatigue, people are more selective than ever about whom they give their bodies too. In that respect, No Fantasy Required is positively irresistible. Making good on pop’s urge to surge, Tiga moulds techno, house and electro into a heaving, disco-inflected, floor-shaking singularity. “My starting point has always been to write songs in slightly different ways”, he says of the album’s premise, affirming that in its stark-yet-propulsive bent, he is seeking to transcend even his own catalogue.
His rationale for the album’s cosmic but bizarre sense of humour is illuminating: “Music should be fun and exciting. It should hit you in a very instinctual way. That’s why childlike energy – that more naive, more automatic side of things – is so important to me, especially in dance music”. Like the music that results from it, this too, justifies why Tiga’s aesthetic is an established language. He doesn’t want to numb the brain, but to turbocharge its synapses.
No Fantasy Required is the sound of now, done transfixingly right. Two of our hyperdigital present’s biggest fixations are the idea of an absence of boundaries, and the eradication of taste as an aesthetic marker. Throughout the album, and particularly on highlights such as “Having So Much Fun” and “Always”, Tiga clashes together the populist appeal of disco with the au courant bass-first ethos of deep house. This is symptomatic of his finding a “new voice, a new way of singing and a new sound that felt more honest”. He chalks this up to experience – now, he’s less interested in the technical side of things and more concerned with what the sum total of a song can mean to his listener-dancers. And as you know, meaning is everything.
LICENSED TO ILL It’s clear that Tiga is not averse to complexity but to the pretences of complexity. No conversation about the state of dance music in 2016 is worth its words if EDM is absent from it. And with a winning wit and uncanny clear-headedness, he puts the interminable for-andagainst debate to rest. “EDM is such a massive term that everything gets thrown in there. Steve Aoki is a completely different artiste from Marcel Dettmann. Yes, they’re both making ‘dance’ music, but the comparison is as valid as saying that Avril Lavigne and David Bowie make ‘rock’ music” – he doesn’t even pause for a symbolic mic drop.
Text Indran P Image Femme de $arkozy Interview courtesy of Zouk Singapore
NO FILTER How does a serial genre rule-breaker become known as an upperechelon techno maverick? Via Tiga’s example, the answer is by being amazingly self-aware. Dance music is unreservedly the most popular musical form right now. As such, it’s also the most polarising, and discourse about it mostly orbits around the dichotomy between EDM and its advertised antithesis of ‘real’ dance music. Tiga, however, isn’t having any of it.
As much as purists might resent tank-topped, salon-tanned bros fist-pumping to infinity, the simple mathematics of supply and demand, and, undercutting that, the instinctual response large sections of humanity have towards gloriously multi-hued and propulsive aural stimuli, the present form of mass dance music is just as credible as its lesser-known variants, and its fans are legion. But as Tiga stresses, “what matters is that within this big group, there are those who do love or are falling in love with the music”.
TIGA
So, as you get your rave on at ZoukOut 2016, as panoramic a view of dance music as it gets, keep in mind Tiga’s words and dance like you mean and love it.
Catch Tiga at ZoukOut 2016, happening from December 9 to 10 at Siloso Beach, Sentosa. For tickets and more information, visit zoukout.com. tiga.ca
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