.
.
Tiga wins Juno, steals scene
On April 1 he joined the ranks of the Canadian musical mainstream when his latest CD, Sexor, won a Juno for Dance Recording of the Year.
On the other side of the pond, Italian fashion magazine L’Uomo Vogue recently named him to their list of 40 “People Who Steal the International Scene,” a list that also includes The Rolling Stones, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Adrien Brody, P. Diddy and Penelope Cruz.
Which honour means more to him? Tiga confessed to Veritas that the Vogue recognition beats out the Juno. And why not? He says he feels more like a Euro artist these days.
“Europe has always been the place I wanted to be,” Tiga wrote on his Web site, tiga.ca. “As a kid I thought James Bond would never come to Canada. I thought of Europe as classy; a place for a guy like me—a slight boy whose best battles were found with his mind and not his fists.”
Still based in Montreal, Tiga now spends half his professional time in Europe, where he is an established star of the dance club scene. A year ago he was on DJ Magazine’s list of the top DJs in the world, in a poll that claimed to have responses from 229 countries.
But he does not forsake his Canadian musical roots entirely. He has expressed a fondness for the music of fellow Juno winner Nelly Furtado and nominee Sarah McLachlan. And he acknowledges the global cachet of the Montreal music scene.
Not an easy man to categorize, Tiga says genre labels such as “electro” or “dance” don’t, in themselves, mean much to him. All the same, he points out, “When you go record shopping you need to know which section to look in.”
He says his musical and style choices are spontaneous, guided solely by what appeals to him at any given moment.
The video for “Far From Home,” from Sexor, shows Tiga labouring over a written musical score, temporarily beset by writer’s block. How close is this to the artist’s real creative process?
“In reality,” he confesses, “I can't write music. Or play. I steal what I need, and then I run it through my own brain until, hopefully, it comes out as my own.”
The method seems to be working for Tiga. Where does his career path go from here?
“For me, its one long smooth highway,” he says.
