Sam Tiba

Born and raised in Roubaix, Northern France, 24 year-old Sam Tiba has been producing cubist grooves just for a couple of years, but got deep into music of all kinds more than a decade ago. Well before the early days of his Club Cheval crew, Sam was pretty much unaware of club sounds : his first loves, both as a DJ and as a listener, were French classic rap, roots and dancehall reggae, and then dubstep a little later. He had a very strict lifestyle, drug- and alcohol-free, and now describes his then-self as « kind of boring and self-righteous ». Anyway, he eventually switched on collective dancing and altered states of consciousness while on an Erasmus year in Stockholm. His DJ-ing too suddenly switched on some other shit, as he discovered the whole US ghetto music spectrum – Miami bass, juke and footwork, ghettotech, B-More Club, you name it –, making his mixes way more hectic than before, and more carnival-styled too – ie, unpredictable drops and breaks galore, eerie overlaps and sound crashes all over the place. Sam started working on tracks in 2009 as he and his mates Myd, Panteros666 and Canblaster were launching their Club Cheval unit. Barbie Weed was his first proper tune, then followed by quite a few remixes in 2010 ; since then Tiba’s been playing in clubs pretty much all over Europe, and has just released the mind-warping Black Eyed Weed EP on Marble, a French label set up by former Institubes artists Surkin, Bobmo and Para One. As a former ancient history student, Sam Tiba has always been fascinated by forgotten languages, by those defunct ways of expression that seem so far away now they just exhale otherworldliness, like alien speeches. And that’s in some ways an aural equivalent of these old languages he is searching for through his music-making and DJ-ing. Like a Congolese kid hearing the sound of a 303 for the first time, he craves for enchantment, exhilaration, for the sheer newness in music, could it be awkward, hyper emotional or just plain disorienting. And that’s precisely why Tiba can get into white, fascistoid techno as much as wobbley, spliffed-out dusbtep, Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier or MTV pop hits. The attitude basically being : let’s accumulate all this data, let’s just stockpile all this shit and then let it melt together and degenerate – the sicker the better. Currently working in Paris on Club Cheval’s debut album and his own second EP, Sam Tiba also plays almost everywhere and almost everytime – like, expect him in Tokyo and Seoul next month –, since he’s a wild, versatile, crowd-rocking DJ. Just book him if you want your club hotter. Text by Etienne Menu