Tiga: Live
Words by Matt Risley
In the gig-going vernacular, the term ‘warehouse party’ can provoke a reaction akin to ‘Barbara Streisand/Enrique Iglesias 3D IMAX duet’, and for those yet to pop their ‘rave in a cave’ cherry, they can seem a scary, mysterious and decidedly dodgy proposition. Yet Tiga’s decision to let mega-night Bugged Out house the launch of his sophomore album Ciao! was all the incentive needed to venture into the dark and dingy corners of London’s underground.
Everyone’s favourite diminutive dance DJ exploded onto the scene back in 2006 with his funk-inflected electro-house debut Sexor. Whilst it capitalised on the Scissor Sisters’ kitsch de-then jour, it’s not unfair to suggest that despite its 14 sex-o-matic, grind-alicious bass-thumpers, he probably garnered more fans for his notorious and highly amusing reworkings of Nelly’s ‘Hot in Herre’ and Corey Hart’s ‘Sunglasses at Night’. So it was intriguing to see whether he would go down the greatly feared ‘sell-out’ route of diluting his inarguable genius to appease the commercial crowd.
Nestled far away from the bright lights and modern tech of the big city, Bugged Out’s ‘Secret Warehouse Location’ (Google maps begs to differ) provided the perfect location for Tiga’s album inauguration. The cavernous industrial site looked, felt and tasted (we presume) dirty, with a thunderous sound system pulsating from its meagre origins at the front of the room and a palpable curtain of sweaty condensation challenging the collective excitable buzz to see which could get the fans wetter.
Unsurprisingly focusing almost entirely on his new material, the Canadian pumped out the album-leads of simple-yet-brilliant Mr Oizo-bass heavy Mind Dimension and sexy, dirty, retifism-sparking single Shoes to get the crowd rocking. If you don’t know what retifism is, let’s just say you will after a Tiga gig. Oh – best make sure to Google rather than YouTube it.
Joyously, Ciao! appears to be, if anything, even less commercial and noticeably darker than Sexor. Sure, the crowd were still more than sated by Tiga’s over-arching campy, vocal-lead electro, but tracks like Overtime slipped in a deep and dirty bassline low enough to throw the disco-poppers off their groove for a second.
While the set-list was impressive, the structuring of it wasn’t. There were noticeable lulls either side of the uplifting hit-heavy mid-set, and while you couldn’t accuse it of complacency, it was more a case of head-bopping for 30 minutes, dancing frantically like a loon whilst the big choons arrived, and then another sedate half hour of pogo-ing on the spot.
Part of the problem could’ve been that Tiga was hidden away somewhere beyond sight (but then again could’ve just been that they didn’t have a booster seat high enough to bump him up in the DJ box), but luckily the warehouse-vibe alone helped sustain the mood.
As de-virginating warehouse raves go, it was surprisingly tender and restrained, and only spoilt by its highly discomforting sweat-wave and mild anti-climatic disappointment.
Pretty much like everyone’s first time then.
Posted Tue, May 12, 2009
Comments on Tiga: Live
I LOVE TIGA!!!!!!! His latest single is bomb
Posted by: Tom Hanks | 12/05/2009 at 20:05