Sam Tiba | th

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. .