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Music

We Spoke to Tiga About His New Album and Tested His Impeccable Knowledge of the English Premier League

The death of concentration and Hull City midfielder Robert Snodgrass.

We first became aware of Tiga way back when in the early 00s. Electroclash was all the rave and his gloriously tacky cover of "Sunglasses at Night" sounded like the most impossibly glamorous record we'd ever herd. It was silly and sleazy, and it's creator, Tiga James Sontag, a Canadian producer and DJ, was up there with Fischerspooner and WIT in the pantheon of the pansexual gods.

Since those heady days of yore, he's gone on to become a fixture of the club and festival circuit, playing the kind of house, techno, and electro that's invariably labelled 'playful'. For good reason too. His own recorded output is an object lesson in how club music and self-seriousness don't always have to go hand in hand. 2006's electropop masterpiece Sexor was followed up by the slightly steelier Ciao! a few years on. Next month sees the arrival of his third album, the "Bugatti" featuring No Fantasy Required.

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We met with Tiga at Sonos Studios in east London on a dull and dreary Monday morning, to talk about where albums are heading as an artform, and Hull City's utility midfielder Robert Snodgrass.

THUMP: First things first, for you, is releasing an album a statement of intent or a snapshot in time?
Tiga: For me, it's somewhere in the middle. Musically it ends up being a little bit of a snapshot. In that sense it's a collection, so even if it's not a statement of intent musically, just doing an album in 2016 is a statement in itself. The statement being that a there's something romantic about making and releasing an album. For me at least, its a throwback to the idea of the album. Even the word 'album' is old fashioned now. Things don't mean what they used to mean. The word mixtape now doesn't mean what mixtape used to mean. For a lot of people, 'album' is just a term which means project.

Given that dance music is predominantly a singles based medium, do you think the kind of 'dispensability' inherent to that adds to the romanticism you mentioned?
I live in that world now, but you grow up with albums. With my first record I very clearly thought, "I am going to make an album!" It came with a sense of personal achievement, feeling like I'd joined the ranks of, I don't want to say 'real' artists, but the people I'd grown up listening to. It symbolised some kind of achievement. It's a departure from the world of the track. It marks time. The album is a cycle, and it's not necessarily a modern or relevant one, but on a personal level it's like "Oh, I've got to start working on my album," and then you make the album and you release the album and you promote the album. And then you do it again.

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Is the album, as an artform, still relevant?
They don't even matter to me anymore. As a listener and as a music buyer, that is. I remember when it was dead for me personally was when even in the privacy of my own home, with bands I loved I started to care less. Now, I loved the xx, and I was a huge fan of the first album, I even had a poster on my wall. I became a teenager again over them. Then the second record came out and I was all excited, so I downloaded a leak. That's the first step: you're not even really playing ball with the artist by doing that, but that's what we do. You have a busy day, you shoot through it, you pick a few songs you like, and you play them and the rest vanishes. Even when you love the band and you feel strongly about them and all the ducks are in a row, it usually ends up chopped up. That's one of the reasons why vinyl hasn't died yet. You're more likely to listen to a whole record from beginning to end if you've got it on vinyl. That feels the best. That's closer to the experience everyone wants but we're all lazy these days.

Is the death of the album linked to the idea that concentration is a lost art?
That's part of it. There are a few problems with the album as a totality. One is that we now have tools which mean it's impossible to resist skipping through things, randomizing things. Think about the cassette days: it was a real bitch to fast forward so you'd listen to it all. I think another problem is the law of diminishing returns. Making an album involves a lot of work and a lot of stress, and the simple truth is that it doesn't really pay off. People don't concentrate but also everyone is more businesslike. We think in terms of speed and efficiency. The album isn't an 'efficient' use of your time. Singles help you keep things moving. Albums involve angst and heartache and you put an album out and people pick their favourite single from it anyway. For whatever reason one thing that still is the same is that the implication is this: I am somehow doing something more that just putting singles out.

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Do you see yourself working on more albums in the future?
I think so. An album lets you release different styles of music. It's a nice platform for experimentation. It's by no means necessary, but I do still think in those terms: there's singles and albums. Even now, when I'm a bit fed up of albums, I'm still thinking about doing another one.

Now, albums are all well and good, but what we were really here to talk about was football. It turns out that Tiga is a massive, massive football fan. Rather than the usual red Wine Gums and Mini Cheddars that make up the usual musican's rider, Tiga requests the city's local team's shirt, and as such he's amassed a vast collection of them. A Barcelona supporting fantasy football with a young, soccer-mad son, it turned out that the quiz we'd devised for him was, well, embarrassingly and slightly insultingly easy. Tiga romped home with an incredible impressive 20/20. If we'd actually made the tinfoil and cardboard replica of the Champion's League trophy that we spent at least two seconds deliberating over making, we would have handed it over to him and doused the chap in champagne. Instead, we congratulated him heartily, shook his hand and left.

No Fantasy Required is out on March 4th via Counter Records. Pre-order it here.

Tiga is on Facebook // SoundCloud // Twitter