Closing out the Together Festival kickoff at the Sinclair, Tiga emerged from backstage 25 minutes late, rolling up his sleeves as he approached his setup. The eccentric Canadian began building his loops and layers under his trademark baseball cap, largely ignorant of the audience. Likewise, the audience danced in circles and talked, some with their backs to the stage. Veterans of Boston’s D&B/jungle scene, an esoteric moving target if there ever was one, knew what to expect. This was not a stage spectacle. In fact, Tiga’s presence was pretty boring. He went about his business like a factory machinist, mindlessly crafting his beats.

Tiga is better known as a cover artist and a businessman. His career notes include the purchase of venues in the Montreal area, as well as DNA Recordings in the early 90’s. He later founded Turbo Records, now a household name for most electronic fans. His first decade in the music industry yielded zero actual music, until he stepped into the studio in the early 2000’s to make mixes. Eventually, he forged two original studio albums, and got attention for covering everything from Nelly to Scissor Sisters to LCD Soundsystem. Tiga hits the road sparingly to play to the more “experienced” ravers, ones that probably have to pay a sitter to get to the show.

While Tiga weaved some of his original material into the set, he played the role of a regular DJ. Keeping the beat mostly at 4:4, and the subwoofers busy, he borrowed loops to create songs of the jungle or house. The higher octave bleeps and bloops often became bastardized and warped in breakdowns, emerging sometimes as constant sounds that resembled the passive hum of a refrigerator compressor. Tiga employed clever transitions as songs cascaded into chaos in one measure, only to be resurrected as a heavier, more jungle-esque musical Frankenstein.

While he was mostly aloof towards the audience, he understood what they wanted from his set and provided it seamlessly. His style of music is on the fringe of most of his fans’ taste. Yes, he appreciates the finer points of 90s electronic, but his music is quirky. He developed his own recognizable, haunting sound, but it could be inferred that the trailblazers of his genre directly caused the sterile jock-jam era. Sometimes he errs a little too much in that direction. It’s also easy to criticize him for lacking diversity of sound. The bass was pounding, and the vocal loops he used became washed and garbled by the time it reached the audience. But Tiga’s calling card is that he makes the listener say, “Wow, this is some weird shit, and I actually like it. I can’t believe he thought of this.” The moral of the story is that Tiga’s music raises a lot of questions about his origin and execution, but it is hard not to respect his talent, and even harder not to like the music.