Still Here: Tiga on Why He Never Left Montreal

Introducing Still Here: Montreal has spent decades exporting talent. Toronto has the money, New York has the industry, LA has the weather and the deals to sign.

The people who stayed made a choice, and that choice is usually the most interesting thing about them. Still Here is a new series about the Montrealers who could have left, but didn't, told in their own words.

We spoke with the Canadian musician, DJ, record producer, and music programmer Tiga ahead of their 2026 îLESONIQ performance on August 8, where he goes back-to-back with Boys Noize at Parc Jean-Drapeau. There, the two producers who helped build the sound new generations are currently rediscovering will play a park twenty minutes from the neighbourhood Tiga’s lived in most of his life.

Behind him is most of the architecture of dance music in this city. Solstice, the 1993 party widely credited as Montreal's first proper rave. DNA Records, the shop he took over in 1994 and ran through the decade, where you went to find out where the party was because there was nowhere else to find out. Sona, the after-hours club he opened with two partners, which put Montreal on the international DJ circuit alongside Toronto's Industry and Ottawa's Atomic. Turbo Recordings, the label he founded in 1998 and still runs, now past twenty-five years. And HOTLIFE, his first album in ten years, released in April 2026.

These are his words, lightly edited.

I've had numerous temporary love affairs with different cities. It still happens. I've toured everywhere, and almost every time I'm like, whoa, maybe I should move to Barcelona. Or, I could live in Japan. I go through those exercises constantly.

I could have lived anywhere and it would have been infinitely more practical, especially Europe. And I do love Europe. I kind of hate Canada, honestly. I like Montreal. It's a strange relationship where you keep coming back.

I’ve travelled my whole life. I spent a lot of time in India when I was a kid, so that thing about comparing different places has just been in my head since I was little. Even as a kid I'd be thinking, I'd like to stay in India, it's more fun. The idea of comparing places and weighing options has always been running in the background.

In the early days it was family. That was a real pull, the familiar comfort of being where you grew up, that thing you can't put your finger on. That was a big one.

Now that I think about it, the real number one reason, and I've never actually articulated it, is that I hate being like everyone else. It's almost a compulsion. I'm deeply disinterested in the music business and the scene. If there are decisions being made in London or LA or New York, I want to be as far away from that as possible. I don't like that vibration. It's a giant turnoff.

I just find it boring. I never wanted to be in the music business.

The cost is real. For about fifteen years I flew to Europe every weekend. I still do it twice a month. It's unbelievably expensive and ridiculous and insane, and obviously you could break that down and say, well, you could have spent that money on property or whatever.

But there are two upsides. One is scarcity. It's always been a bit more special for me to go somewhere, and it's a little harder to book me—it's not like I live in London. That ended up working in my favour.

The bigger one is psychological. I've set up my life so that I cross an ocean, I go to work, and then I come home. That separation probably hurts me on a career ambition level, but for me it's been incredible. It lets me shut off completely. It lets me be outside of things, and creatively that's important. I don't want to be in the scene. I want to be outside it, dipping a foot in.

Here's the simplest way to put it about Montreal: it's a nightmare on almost every level. The roads, the taxes, all of it. If you're rational, there are a lot of reasons not to live here. Certainly not for business.

And all of those things add up to one reason that's actually really cool, which is that this place is kind of anti-progress. There are so many places now that feel the same, where things work so much better. This place perversely doesn't work very well. I like that. There's some comfort in it.

It's also less of a money place. Everywhere has gotten more and more money, money, money, and for whatever reason that's still not quite in the foreground here.

Take the speed at which a city can rebuild its airport as a metric. Dubai will do an airport in a year and it'll be incredible. China will do one in three weeks. We are last in the world. We're behind India, we're behind Africa—we're probably the worst on earth. But you can make an argument that the speed at which you can build infrastructure is inversely related to how chill you are. So if hyper-development is one extreme, maybe it's kind of cool to be on the other one.

It's shit when you have to get to the airport. But in a world obsessed with efficiency and bottom line and progress and all this bullshit, being so blatantly, in-your-face inefficient and backwards is something to celebrate.

On a gut level? When someone asks where you're from and you say Montreal, it just rings good. It's always been a good calling card. Pride is a strong word, but I've always felt very comfortable with it. You're not from the middle of nowhere, and you're also not from New York City.

A lot of my heroes are from offbeat places. Prince is from Minneapolis. William Burroughs is from St. Louis. That's why I love the Midwest—a lot of really interesting, weird people come from there, places where you get to define your own world instead of having it defined for you. I put Montreal a bit in that category.

There's also loyalty, or something like it. Montreal gave me a lot. In the rave years your home city mattered more. You'd organize parties that travelled, so it was very much I'm Tiga from Montreal, and we're building this little scene. That was all through the early and mid-nineties. I built a great life for myself based here, and that seeped into my subconscious somewhere.

The record store was a real clubhouse. Everybody was there every day, talking, sharing records, buying tickets. It's much, much harder to have that now. That was pre-internet, and there were no alternatives. If you wanted to find out where the party was, you had to come to the store. You couldn't stay in bed on your phone. When people set up IRL attempts now it's a little contrived, because it has to be.

What I didn't fully appreciate at the time was how far outside the mainstream all of it was. Just dumb things; when I opened the record store, we didn't take credit cards. Think about that as a concept now. The parties were a separate cash economy that nobody even knew about. That's cool. I laugh a bit now when people throw the word underground around.

I learned something opening Sona that I still believe. Once you're aiming to get more than a certain number of people through the door on a regular basis, or once the ticket price passes a certain number, things stop being about culture. It's business. Same with records; once you want to sell past a certain amount, that's not really about the music anymore. It's about ambition. That doesn't make it bad. It's just a different thing.